The Black Panthers and the Soviets: A Comparative History of Human Rights Movements

The contemporaneous movements for human rights that Soviet rights defenders and the Black Panthers waged during the 1960s are analysed in a comparative fashion here for the very first time.The book also examines the extra-legal measures that both the KGB and FBI employed to destroy them. The Black Panthers and the Soviets innovatively compares Soviet human rights activists’ exposure of the workings of the Soviet police state with the miniature, city-level surveillance police states that the Black Panthers exposed as operating across the United States.It illuminates the legal tactics of counter-surveillance that Soviet rights defenders and the Black Panthers employed as a means of restraining acts of state-sanctioned violence.The book also highlights how the U.S. production of knowledge about Soviet ‘dissidents’ reified white supremacist, anti-communist notions of dissent, human rights, and state violence that facilitated the repression of the Black Panthers and the mass incarceration o