Freedom's Ordeal
Subtitle: The Struggle for Human Rights and Democracy in Post-Soviet States (Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights)
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: November 1997
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 283
ISBN-13: 9780812234183
Subjects: Political structures: democracy; Political And Civil Rights; Political Science; History - General History; Sociology; Former Soviet Union, USSR (Europe); Russia; Eastern Europe - General; Europe - Former Soviet Republics; Political Freedom & Security - Civil Rights; Former Soviet republics; History; Human rights; Politics and government
Description: Fifteen countries have emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Freedom's Ordeal recounts the struggles of these newly independent nations to achieve freedom and to establish support for fundamental human rights. Although history has shown that states emerging from collapsed empires rarely achieve full democracy in their first try, Peter Juviler analyzes these successor states as crucial and not always unpromising tests of democracy's viability in post-communist countries.

Taking into account the particularly difficult legacies of Soviet communism, Freedom's Ordeal is distinguished by its careful tracing of the historical background, with special attention to human rights before, during, and after communism. Juviler suggests that the culture and practices of despotism may wither wherever modernization conflicts with tyranny and with the curtailment or denial of democratic rights and freedoms.