The history of Soviet “rights defenders” is seemingly well known. Emerging in the 1960s in response to fears of a creeping re-Stalinization, the rights movement was part of the broader dissident milieu that coalesced in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. Drawing on new documents from the Ukrainian KGB, this article broadens the canon of what we consider “Soviet rights talk” by focusing on a group completely ignored in the existing history of Soviet rights defenders: African students. As the article demonstrates, Soviet citizens were not the only people to draw on a discursive repertoire of civil and universal rights to articulate their demands against the Soviet state. By closely examining the letters and petitions activists produced, it becomes clear that African students’ language of rights grew alongside and, in many respects, pre-empted the Soviet rights movement. The article concludes by considering why, despite sharing the same discursive and physical spaces, neither African nor Soviet rights defenders succeeded in building bridges between their respective islands of protest. Examining this failure to build meaningful solidarities demonstrates the value of pursuing the social history of internationalism; it is only in the banality of the everyday that the capacity for Soviet internationalism to create unanticipated frictions and conflicts reveals itself.

苏联“维权人士”的历史似乎众所周知。人权运动于 20 世纪 60 年代兴起，是为了应对重新斯大林化的担忧，它是赫鲁晓夫和勃列日涅夫时代凝聚的更广泛的持不同政见者环境的一部分。本文借鉴乌克兰克格勃的新文件，通过关注苏联维权人士现有历史中完全被忽视的一个群体：非洲学生，扩大了我们所认为的“苏联权利谈话”的范围。正如文章所表明的，苏联公民并不是唯一利用公民和普遍权利的话语体系来表达他们对苏联国家的要求的人。通过仔细研究活动人士提出的信件和请愿书，我们可以清楚地看到，非洲学生的权利语言与苏联权利运动一起发展，并且在许多方面先于苏联权利运动。文章最后思考了为什么尽管非洲和苏联的维权人士都拥有相同的话语和物理空间，但他们都未能在各自的抗议岛屿之间架起桥梁。审视这种建立有意义的团结的失败表明了追求国际主义社会历史的价值；只有在日常生活的平庸中，苏联国际主义才能够制造出意想不到的摩擦和冲突。