The theme of civil society and human rights was one of the main topics in émigré political journalism in the 1970s and 1980s. Particular attention was paid to this problem after the adoption of the 1977 constitution. Articles not only by well-known dissidents - A. D. Sakharov, A. I. Solzhenitsyn and other prominent figures were published on the pages of “Novy Zhurnal”, “Syntaxis”, “Continent” and other journals, but also by less well-known, but very competent authors. Articles critical of the Soviet regime were in demand in the West, when, in the conditions of the Cold War, ideological confrontation required information directly from Soviet sources. Acquaintance with the articles of famous Western sovietologists in the periodicals of the 1970s-1980s shows that the main sources for characterizing the Soviet system, along with official party documents, were the speeches of dissidents, whose publications were abundantly cited.