Russian-British human rights activist (1942–2019)

In this name that follows Eastern Slavic naming conventions, the patronymic is Konstantinovich and the family name is Bukovsky.

Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky (boo-KOV-ski; Russian: Влади́мир Константи́нович Буко́вский; 30 December 1942 – 27 October 2019) was a Russian-born British human rights activist and writer. From the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, he was a prominent figure in the Soviet dissident movement, well known at home and abroad. He spent a total of twelve years in the psychiatric prison-hospitals, labour camps, and prisons of the Soviet Union.

After being expelled from the Soviet Union in late 1976, Bukovsky remained in vocal opposition to the Soviet system and the shortcomings of its successor regimes in Russia. An activist, a writer, and a neurophysiologist, he is celebrated for his part in the campaign to expose and halt the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union.

A member of the international advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a director of the Gra*ude Fund (set up in 1998 to commemorate and support former dissidents), and a member of the International Council of the New York City-based Human Rights Foundation, Bukovsky was a Senior Fellow of the Cato Ins*ute in Washington, D.C.

In 2001, Vladimir Bukovsky received the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom, awarded annually since 1993 by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Contents

• 1 Early life
• 2 Soviet-era activism
  • 2.1 Rallies
    • 2.1.1 Mayakovsky Square
    • 2.1.2 The Glasnost rally, 5 December 1965
    • 2.1.3 The Right to Demonstrate, 1967
    • 2.1.4 The Campaign against the Abuse of Psychiatry
  • 2.2 Final arrest (1971) and imprisonment
  • 2.3 Deportation from the USSR (1976)
    • 2.3.1 Life in the West
  • 2.4 Return to the Soviet Union (1991)
• 3 Post-Soviet Union activities
  • 3.1 Judgment in Moscow (1995–2019)
  • 3.2 Potential 1992 mayoral candidacy
  • 3.3 Potential 1996 presidential candidacy
  • 3.4 Memento Gulag
  • 3.5 Contacts with Boris Nemtsov and the Russian Opposition
  • 3.6 Criticism of torture in Abu Ghraib prison (Iraq)
  • 3.7 Criticism of the European Union
  • 3.8 2008 presidential candidacy
  • 3.9 Crimea, Ukraine, Litvinenko Inquiry (2012–2015)
  • 3.10 "Prohibited images" prosecution
  • 3.11 Death
• 4 Bibliography
• 5 Do*entaries
• 6 References
  • 6.1 A Chronicle of Current Events (1968–1982)
  • 6.2 Other
• 7 Further reading
  • 7.1 In the Soviet Union
  • 7.2 After his expulsion to the West
  • 7.3 Two years on
  • 7.4 To Build a Castle (1978)
  • 7.5 Judgement in Moscow (1995)
  • 7.6 In the 21st century
• 8 External links
  • 8.1 In English
  • 8.2 In Russian

Early life

Vladimir Bukovsky was born to Russian parents in the town of Belebey in the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (today the Republic of Bashkortostan in the Russian Federation), to which his family was evacuated during World War II. After the war he and his parents returned to Moscow where his father Konstantin (1908–1976) was a well-known Soviet journalist. During his last year at school Vladimir was expelled for creating and editing an unauthorised magazine. To meet the requirements to apply for a university place he completed his secondary education at evening cl*es. Bukovsky was enrolled at Moscow State University for biology but was kicked out at age 19, having criticised the Komsomol, i.e., the Young Communist League.

Soviet-era activism

Rallies

Mayakovsky Square

In September 1960, Bukovsky entered Moscow University to study biology. There he and some friends decided to revive the informal Mayakovsky Square poetry readings which began after a statue to the poet was unveiled in central Moscow in 1958. They made contact with earlier participants of the readings such as Vladimir Osipov, the editor of Boomerang (1960), and Yuri Galanskov who issued the Phoenix (1961), two examples of literary samizdat.: 17–19 

It was then that the 19-year-old Bukovsky wrote his critical notes on the Communist Youth League or Komsomol. Later, this text was given the *le "Theses on the Collapse of the Komsomol" by the KGB. Bukovsky portrayed the USSR as an "illegal society" facing an acute ideological crisis. The Komsomol was "moribund", he *erted, having lost both moral and spiritual authority, and he called for its democratisation. This text, and his other activities, brought Bukovsky to the attention of the authorities. He was interrogated twice before being thrown out of the university in autumn 1961.

Bukovsky was arrested on 1 June 1963. He was later convicted, in absentia, by reason of his "insanity", under Article 70.1 ("Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda") of the RSFSR Criminal Code. The official charge was the making and possession of photocopies of anti-Soviet literature, namely two copies of the banned work The New Cl* by Milovan Djilas. Bukovsky was examined by Soviet psychiatrists, declared to be mentally ill ("schizophrenia"), and sent for treatment at the Special Psychiatric Hospital in Leningrad where he remained for almost two years, until February 1965. It was there he became acquainted with General Petro Grigorenko, a fellow inmate.

The Glasnost rally, 5 December 1965

In December 1965, Bukovsky helped prepare a demonstration on Pushkin Square in central Moscow to protest against the trial of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. He circulated the "Civic Appeal" by mathematician and poet Alexander Esenin-Volpin, which called on the authorities to obey the Soviet laws requiring glasnost in the judicial process, e.g. the admission of the public and the media to any trial. The demonstration on 5 December 1965 (Cons*ution Day) became known as the Glasnost Meeting or rally, and marked the beginning of the openly active Soviet civil rights movement.

Bukovsky himself was unable to attend. Three days earlier he was arrested, charged with distributing the appeal, and kept in various psikhushkas, among them Hospital No 13 at Lublino, Stolbovaya and the Serbsky Ins*ute, until July 1966.

The Right to Demonstrate, 1967

On 22 January 1967, Bukovsky, Vadim Delaunay, Yevgeny Kushev and Victor Khaustov held another demonstration on Pushkin Square. They were protesting against the recent arrests of Alexander Ginzburg, Yuri Galanskov, Alexei Dobrovolsky and Vera Lashkova (finally prosecuted in January 1968 in the Trial of the Four) and *erting their own right to protest: on 16 September 1966 a new law, Article 190.3, had been introduced which cl*ified any public gatherings or demonstrations as a crime.

On 1 September 1967, at his own trial, Bukovsky used his final words to attack the regime's failure to respect the law or follow legal procedures. He invoked Article 125 of the (still current) 1936 Soviet Cons*ution to defend the right to organise demonstrations and other public protests. He further suggested that the prosecution had repeatedly failed to observe the revised 1961 Code of Criminal Procedure in its conduct of the case.: 74–75  Bukovsky's final words in court circulated widely in a samizdat collection of such addresses and as part of a collection of materials about the demonstration and subsequent trials compiled by Pavel Litvinov.: 87–95 : 37–43 

Fellow protestors Vadim Delaunay and Yevgeny Kushev admitted regret for their actions but not their guilt; they received suspended sentences and were released. Bukovsky was defiant and, like fellow demonstrator Victor Khaustov (convicted in February 1967), was given three years in an "ordinary regime" corrective-labour camp. Bukovsky was sent to Bor in the Voronezh Region to serve his sentence. He was released in January 1970.

The Campaign against the Abuse of Psychiatry

Main articles: Campaign Against Psychiatric Abuse and Struggle against political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviet authorities began the widespread use of psychiatric treatment as a form of punishment and deterrence for the independent-minded. This involved unlimited detention in a psikhushka, as such places were popularly known, which might be conventional psychiatric hospitals or psychiatric prison-hospitals set up (e.g. the Leningrad Special Psychiatric Hospital) as part of an existing penal ins*ution. Healthy individuals were held among mentally ill and often dangerous patients; they were forced to take various psychotropic drugs; they might also be incarcerated in prison-type ins*utions under overall control of the KGB.

During a clandestine interview filmed by CBS News correspondent Bill Cole in a forest near Moscow, Bukovsky described how the Soviet government was committing political dissidents to mental ins*utions and subjecting them to drug treatments.

This was a major operation. About twenty of us, Russians and correspondents, went off to the woods outside Moscow, together with wives and children, for a picnic. The KGB kept in the background and watched us from a distance—their main worry was not to miss the moment of our departure. Therefore it was fairly easy for Bill and me to arrange it so that the agents couldn’t see him filming the interview. In fact, that was no problem—but smuggling itout was. Bill did two more interviews—with Andrei Amalrik and Pyotr Yakir—and I gave him a taped statement by Ginzburg that had been smuggled out of the Mordovian camps. This considerable package took three months to reach America.

That interview along with interviews with Andrei Amalrik and Pyotr Yakir were smuggled out of the country by Canadian diplomats and aired in 1970 in the CBS News special report "Voices from the Soviet Underground."In 1971, Bukovsky managed to smuggle to the West over 150 pages further do*enting the political abuse of psychiatric ins*utions in the Soviet Union. In a letter addressed to "Western psychiatrists" and written in a deliberately restrained tone, Bukovsky asked them to consider if the evidence justified the isolation of several dissidents, and urged them to discuss the matter at the next International Congress of Psychiatrists.: 138–141 : 29–30 

In recent years in our country a number of court orders have been made involving the placing in psychiatric hospitals ("of special type" and otherwise) of people who in the opinion of their relatives and close friends are mentally healthy. These people are: Grigorenko, Rips, Gorbanevskaya, Novodvorskaya, Ivan Yakhimovich, Vladimir Gershuni, Victor Fainberg, Victor Kuznetsov, Olga Ioffe, Vladimir E. Borisov and others – people well known for their initiative in defence of civil rights in the USSR.

This phenomenon arouses justified anxiety, especially in view of the widely publicized placing of the biologist Z*s Medvedev in a psychiatric hospital by extrajudicial means.

The diagnoses of the psychiatrists who have served as expert witnesses in court, and on whose diagnoses the court orders are based, provoke many doubts as regards their content. However, only specialists in psychiatry can express authoritative opinions about the degree of legitimacy of these diagnoses.

Taking advantage of the fact that I have managed to obtain exact copies of the diagnostic reports made by the forensic-psychiatric groups who examined Grigorenko, Fainberg, Gorbanevskaya, Borisov and Yakhimovich, and also extracts from the diagnosis on V. Kuznetsov, I am sending you these do*ents, and also various letters and other material which reveal the character of these people. I will be very grateful to you if you can study this material and express your opinion on it.

I realise that at a distance and without the essential clinical information it is very difficult to determine the mental condition of a person and either to diagnose an illness or *ert the absence of any illness. Therefore I ask you to express your opinion on only this point: do the above-mentioned diagnoses contain enough scientifically-based evidence not only to indicate the mental illnesses described in the diagnoses, but also to indicate the necessity of isolating these people completely from society?

I will be very happy if you can interest your colleagues in this matter and if you consider it possible to place it on the agenda for discussion at the next International Congress of Psychiatrists.

For a healthy person there is no fate more terrible than indefinite internment in a mental hospital. I believe that you will not remain indifferent to this problem and will devote a portion of your time to it – just as physicists find time to combat the use of the achievements of their science in ways harmful to mankind.

Thanking you in advance,

V. Bukovsky

— Bukovsky's 1971 letter addressed to Western Psychiatrists: 80–81 

The do*ents were released to the press in March 1971 by a small French group called the International Committee for the Defence of Human Rights. Bukovsky's letter appeared on 12 March in The Times (London) and later in the British Journal of Psychiatry: 79, 82  Bukovsky was arrested on 29 March and held in custody for nine months before being put on trial in January 1972.

The information Bukovsky had gathered and sent to the West galvanised human rights activists worldwide and those within the Soviet Union. It also struck a chord among psychiatrists. In September that year 44 European psychiatrists wrote to The Times (London) expressing grave doubts about the diagnoses of the six people concerned. At a meeting in November 1971, the World Federation for Mental Health called on its members to investigate the charges and defend the right to free opinion where it was threatened.: 85  These responses were carefully do*ented by the dissident human rights periodical Chronicle of Current Events, which also recorded the many statements made by Bukovsky's friends and fellow rights activists in his defence. As the person at the centre of this unprecedented international row, Bukovsky waited in almost total isolation, without access to a lawyer, to be tried and sent to the camps or a special psychiatric hospital.

Responding to public pressure, the World Psychiatric *ociation finally condemned Soviet practices at its Sixth World Congress in 1977 and set up a review committee to monitor misuse.: 111  In 1983, the Soviet representatives withdrew from the World Psychiatric *ociation rather than face expulsion.: 42–44  Bukovsky later characterised this reaction as "the most important victory for the dissident form of glasnost".: 144 

Final arrest (1971) and imprisonment

Following the release of the do*ents, Bukovsky was denounced in Pravda as a "malicious hooligan, engaged in anti-Soviet activities" and arrested on 29 March 1971. At first held in Lefortovo Prison, in August, Bukovsky spent approximately three months in the Serbsky Ins*ute, which this time pronounced him mentally sound and able to stand trial.

During the trial in January 1972 Bukovsky was accused of slandering Soviet psychiatry, contacts with foreign journalists, and the possession and distribution of samizdat. On this occasion he again used his final words to the court to reach a much wider audience when the text circulated in samizdat. He was sentenced to two years in prison, five in a labour camp, and five more in internal exile.: 31–32 

While in prison Bukovsky and his fellow inmate, the psychiatrist Semyon Gluzman, wrote a brief 20-page Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents, which was widely published abroad, in Russian (1975) and in many other languages: English, French, Italian, German, Danish. It instructed potential victims of political psychiatry how to behave during interrogation to avoid being diagnosed as mentally ill.

Deportation from the USSR (1976)

Protest demonstration of January 1975 in Amsterdam for Vladimir Bukovsky's release from prison

The fate of Bukovsky and other political prisoners in the Soviet Union had been repeatedly brought to world attention by Western diplomats and human rights groups such as the relatively new Amnesty International formed in 1961.: 175 

In December 1976, Bukovsky was deported from the USSR and exchanged at Zürich airport by the Soviet government for the imprisoned general secretary of the Communist Party of Chile, Luis Corvalán. In his 1978 autobiography Bukovsky describes how he was brought to Switzerland in handcuffs.: 432  The widely publicised exchange increased public awareness in the West about Soviet dissidents.: 175  A fellow dissident, Vadim Delaunay wrote an epigram on the occasion:

They exchanged a hooligan
For one Luis Corvalan.
Now we need to find a *
To exchange her for Ilyich

In March 1977, US President Jimmy Carter met with Bukovsky at the White House. In the USSR the meeting was seen by dissidents and rights activists as a sign of the newly elected president's willingness to stress human rights in his foreign policy; the event provoked harsh criticism by Soviet leaders.

Bukovsky moved to Great Britain where he settled in Cambridge and resumed his studies in biology, disrupted fifteen years earlier (see above) by his expulsion from Moscow University.: 7 

Life in the West

Bukovsky gained a master's degree in Biology at Cambridge University. He also wrote and published To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter (1978). (The *le in Russian, And the Wind Returns:..., is a Biblical allusion.) The book was translated into English, French and German. It was published in Russian the following year by Chalidze publishers in New York. Today the Russian original is available online via a number of websites.

Since he has lived in the West, Bukovsky has written many essays and polemical articles. These not only criticised the Soviet regime and, later, that of Vladimir Putin, but also exposed "Western gullibility" in the face of Soviet abuses and, in some cases, what he believed to be Western complicity in such crimes. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Bukovsky campaigned successfully for an official UK and US boycott of the summer 1980 Olympics in Moscow. During the same years he voiced concern about the activities and policies of the Western peace movements.

Bukovsky at 5th Sakharov Conference, May 1987, Netherlands: (l. to r.) Prime Minister Lubbers, Vladimir Bukovsky, Professor Bezemer, Professor Robert Conquest

In 1983, together with Cuban dissident Armando Valladares, Bukovsky co-founded and was later elected president of Resistance International. The anti-Communist organisation was run from a small office in Paris by Soviet dissidents and emigres, notably Vladimir Maximov and Eduard Kuznetsov. In 1985 it expanded into the American Foundation for Resistance International. Among the prominent members of the board were Albert Jolis and Jeane Kirkpatrick while Midge Decter, Yuri Yarim-Agaev, Richard Perle, Saul Bellow, Robert Conquest and Martin Colman were on the body's advisory committee. The Foundation aimed to be a co-ordinating centre for dissident and democratic movements seeking to overturn communism in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. It organised protests in the communist countries and in the West, and opposed western financial *istance to communist governments. The Foundation also created the National Council to Support Democratic Movements (National Council for Democracy) with the goal of aiding the emergence of democratic rule-of-law governments, and providing *istance with the writing of cons*utions and the formation of civil ins*utions.

In March 1987, Bukovsky and nine other émigré authors (Ernst Neizvestny, Yury Lyubimov, Vasily Aksyonov and Leonid Plyushch among them) caused a furore in the West and then in the Soviet Union itself when they raised doubts about the substance and sincerity of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms.

Return to the Soviet Union (1991)

In April 1991, Vladimir Bukovsky visited Moscow for the first time since his deportation fifteen years before.

In the run-up to the 1991 presidential election, Boris Yeltsin's campaign team included Bukovsky on their list of potential vice-presidential running-mates. In the end, army officer Alexander Rutskoy, a veteran of the 1979–1989 war in Afghanistan and Hero of the Soviet Union was selected. On 5 December 1991, both of Bukovsky's Soviet-era convictions were annulled by a decree of the RSFSR Supreme Court. The following year President Yeltsin formally restored Bukovsky's Russian citizenship: he had never been deprived of his Soviet citizenship, despite deportation from the country.

Post-Soviet Union activities

British and European psychiatrists *essing the do*ents on psychiatric abuse released by Bukovsky characterised him in 1971: "The information we have about suggests that he is the sort of person who might be embarr*ing to authorities in any country because he seems unwilling to compromise for convenience and personal comfort, and believes in saying what he thinks in situations which he clearly knows could endanger him. But such people often have much to contribute, and deserve considerable respect."

Soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union Vladimir Bukovsky was again out of favour with the Russian authorities. He supported Yeltsin against the Supreme Soviet in the 1993 Russian cons*utional crisis in October that year but criticised the new Cons*ution of Russia approved two months later, as being designed to ensure a continuation of Yeltsin's power. According to Bukovsky, Yeltsin became a hostage of the security agencies from 1994 onwards, and a restoration of KGB rule was inevitable.

Judgment in Moscow (1995–2019)

See also: Decommunization of Russia

In 1992, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, President Yeltsin's government invited Bukovsky to serve as an expert witness at the trial before the Cons*utional Court where Russia's communists were suing Yeltsin for banning their Party and taking its property. The respondent's case was that the CPSU itself had been an uncons*utional organisation. To prepare his testimony, Bukovsky requested and was granted access to a large number of do*ents from the CPSU Central Committee archives (then reorganised into the Central Depository for Contemporary Do*entation or TsKhSD). With the help of a small hand-held scanner and a laptop computer, he managed secretly to make photocopies of many of the do*ents (some with high security clearance), including KGB reports to the Central Committee. The copies were then smuggled to the West.

Bukovsky hoped that an international tribunal in Moscow might play a similar role to the first Nuremberg Trial (1945–1946) in post-National Socialist German Workers' Party Germany and help the country begin to overcome the legacy of Communism.

It took several years and a team of *istants to piece together the scanned fragments (many only half a page in width) of the hundreds of do*ents photocopied by Bukovsky and then, in 1999, to make them available online. Many of the same do*ents were extensively quoted and cited in Bukovsky's Judgment in Moscow (1995), where he described and *ysed what he had uncovered about recent Soviet history and about the relations of the USSR and the CPSU with the West.

The book was soon translated into several languages but did not appear in English for over twenty years. Random House bought the rights to the m*cript, but the publisher, in Bukovsky's words, tried to make the author "rewrite the whole book from the liberal left political perspective." Bukovsky resisted, explaining to the Random House editor that he was "allergic to political censorship" because of "certain peculiarities of my biography". (The contract was subsequently cancelled.).

Meanwhile, the book was published in French as Jugement à Moscou (1995), in Russian (1996) and in certain other Slavic languages: for a time the Polish edition became a best-seller. In 2016, it was published in Italian, by Spirali, with the *le Gli archivi segreti di Mosca. An English language translation did not appear in book form until May 2019, five months before the author died.

Potential 1992 mayoral candidacy

In 1992, a group of liberal deputies of the Moscow City Council proposed Bukovsky's candidacy for elections of the new Mayor of Moscow, following the resignation of the previous Mayor, Gavriil Popov.: 478  Bukovsky refused the offer, stating that to fulfil the mayor's duties he would need a large team of intellectuals committed to radical reform, and there was a lack of such people in the country. Deputy mayor Yury Luzhkov took over, and ran the city from 1992 to 2010.

Potential 1996 presidential candidacy

See also: 1996 Russian presidential election

In early 1996, a group of Moscow academics, journalists and intellectuals suggested that Vladimir Bukovsky should run for President of Russia as an alternative candidate to both in*bent President Boris Yeltsin and his main challenger Gennady Zyuganov of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. However, no formal nomination process was initiated.

Memento Gulag

In 2001, Bukovsky was elected President of the Comitatus pro Libertatibus – Comitati per le Libertà – Freedom Committees in Florence, an Italian libertarian organisation which promoted an annual Memento Gulag, or Memorial Day devoted to the Victims of Communism, on 7 November (the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution). The Memento Gulag has since been held in Rome, Bucharest, Berlin, La Roche sur Yon and Paris.

Contacts with Boris Nemtsov and the Russian Opposition

In 2002, Boris Nemtsov, former Deputy Prime Minister of Russia who was then an elected member of the State Duma and leader of the Union of Rightist Forces, paid a visit to Bukovsky in Cambridge. He wanted to discuss the strategy of the Russian opposition. It was imperative, Bukovsky told Nemtsov, that Russian liberals adopt an uncompromising stand toward what he saw as the authoritarian government of President Vladimir Putin.

On one of journalist Anna Politkovskaya's frequent visits to Britain she interviewed Vladimir Bukovsky and Boris Berezovsky to provide a "comparative *ysis of different waves of political emigration". With Bukovsky, "The Patriarch" as he was called in the published version of her article, she discussed the position of those who had gained political asylum in Britain (Ahmed Zakayev, Alexander Litvinenko), and the at*udes of the UK government of Tony Blair and of the European Parliament to the situation in Chechnya. During their talk Bukovsky expressed disapproval of the way in which Slobodan Milosevic was brought before the Hague tribunal.

In January 2004, with Garry Kasparov, Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir V. Kara-Murza and others, Bukovsky was a co-founder of Committee 2008. This umbrella organisation of the Russian democratic opposition was formed to ensure free and fair elections in 2008 when a successor to Vladimir Putin was elected.

In 2005, Bukovsky was among the prominent dissidents of the 1960s and 1970s (Gorbanevskaya, Sergei Kovalyov, Eduard Kuznetsov, Alexander Podrabinek, Yelena Bonner) who took part in a do*entary series by Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr. They Chose Freedom. In 2013 Bukovsky was featured in a do*entary series by Natella Boltyanskaya Parallels, Events, People.

In 2009, Bukovsky joined the council of the new Solidarnost coalition which brought together a wide range of extra-parliamentary opposition forces.

Criticism of torture in Abu Ghraib prison (Iraq)

As revelations mounted about the sanctioned torture of captives in the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, Abu Ghraib and the CIA secret prisons, Bukovsky entered the discussion with an uncompromising attack on the official if covert rationalisation of torture. In an 18 December 2005 op-ed in The Washington Post, Bukovsky recounted his experience under torture in Lefortovo prison in 1971. Once commenced, he warned, the inertia of torture was difficult to control, corrupting those who carried it out. "Torture", he wrote, "has historically been an instrument of oppression—not an instrument of investigation or of intelligence gathering." Bukovsky explained:

Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine *ytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one's sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for *s.

US President Barack Obama repudiated the Torture Memos on 20 January 2009, two days after taking office.

Criticism of the European Union

In EUSSR, a booklet written with Pavel Stroilov and published in 2004, Bukovsky exposed what he saw as the "Soviet roots of European Integration". As an expression of his Eurosceptic position Bukovsky was vice-president of The Freedom *ociation (TFA) in the United Kingdom and a patron of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).

Ten years earlier, Bukovsky sketched some of the ways in which cooperation was secured. Beyond those who were recruited as Soviet agents and consciously worked for the USSR, as he explained in Judgment in Moscow (1995), there were men and women whom the KGB and GRU cl*ified as "agents of influence" and "confidential contacts":

The majority of these "agents of influence", moreover, were not in a literal sense KGB agents. Some distributed Soviet disinformation for idealistic reasons; others were paying off an old "debt" to the KGB or, on the contrary, expected some new reward or service; others simply did not know what they were doing.:... The examples are endlessly varied.

This applied equally, Bukovsky cautioned, to post-Stalin generations of specialists on the USSR and Eastern Europe. They had been subjected to similar pressures and inducements in the 1970s and 1980s:

The majority of Sovietologists and Slavists, experts on Russia and the Soviet Union, were dependent on the regime for permission to visit the USSR from time to time. A specialist could not secure his place and reputation in the current academic world without that contact: anyone might accuse him of having lost touch and no longer retaining his expertise. The chance to travel to the USSR, however, was closely monitored in those years by the KGB.

2008 presidential candidacy

In May 2007, Bukovsky announced his plans to run as candidate for president in the May 2008 Russian presidential election. On 16 December 2007, Bukovsky was officially nominated to run against Dmitry Medvedev and other candidates.

Bukovsky's appeal against exclusion from the presidential race, decision of the Russian Supreme Court, 28 December 2007

The group that nominated Bukovsky as a candidate included Yuri Ryzhov, Vladimir V. Kara-Murza, Alexander Podrabinek, Andrei Piontkovsky, Vladimir Pribylovsky and others. Activists, authors and commentators such as Viktor Shenderovich, Valeriya Novodvorskaya and Lev Rubinstein also favoured Bukovsky.

Responding to pro-Kremlin politicians and commentators who expressed doubt about Bukovsky's electoral prospects, his nominators rejected a number of frequently repeated allegations. In Moscow more than 800 citizens of the Russian Federation nominated Bukovsky for president on 16 December 2007. Bukovsky secured the required number of signatures to register and submitted his application to the Central Election Commission on time, 18 December 2007.

Bukovsky's candidacy received the support of Grigory Yavlinsky, who announced on 14 December 2007 at the Yabloko party conference that he would forgo a campaign of his own and would instead support Bukovsky.

The Action Group in support of Bukovsky's candidacy denied claims by pro-government media that Bukovsky had failed in his campaign to become RF President and in appeals before the RF Cons*utional Court.

On 22 December 2007, the Central Electoral Commission turned down Bukovsky's application, on the grounds that (1) he had failed to give information about his activities as a writer when submitting his do*ents, (2) he was holding a British residence permit, and (3) he had not been living in Russia during the past ten years. Bukovsky appealed against the decision at the RF Supreme Court on 28 December 2007 and, subsequently, before its c*ation board on 15 January 2008.

On 30 March 2011, Bukovsky requested the arrest of Mikhail Gorbachev by the British authorities after submitting to Westminster Magistrates' Court materials on crimes against humanity that the former Soviet leader had allegedly committed in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Crimea, Ukraine, Litvinenko Inquiry (2012–2015)

Bukovsky was among the first 34 signatories of "Putin must go", an online anti-Putin manifesto published on 10 March 2010. In May 2012, Vladimir Putin began his third term as president of the Russian Federation after serving four years as the country's prime minister. The following year, Bukovsky published a collection of interviews in Russia which described Putin and his team as The heirs of Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's last and most notorious secret police chief.

In March 2014 Russia annexed Crimea after Ukraine had lost control of its government buildings, airports and military bases in Crimea to unmarked soldiers and local pro-Russian militias. The West responded with sanctions targeted at Putin's immediate entourage, and Bukovsky expressed the hope that this would prove the end of his regime.

In October 2014, the Russian authorities declined to issue Bukovsky with a new foreign-travel p*port. The Russian Foreign Ministry stated that it could not confirm Bukovsky's citizenship. The response was met with surprise from Presidential Human Rights Council and the Human Rights ombudsman of the Russian Federation.

On 17 March 2015, at the long-delayed inquiry into Alexander Litvinenko's fatal poisoning Bukovsky gave his views as to why the former FSB man had been murdered. Interviewed on BBC TV eight years before, Bukovsky expressed no doubt that the Russian authorities were responsible for the London death of Litvinenko on 23 November 2006.

"Prohibited images" prosecution

In 2015, the UK Crown Prosecution Service announced prosecution of Bukovsky for "prohibited images" of children allegedly found on his computer. Bukovsky's statements about the accusations were inconsistent. According to the prosecutor William Carter, Bukovsky told detectives that he himself had downloaded the images over the course of 15 years. On another occasion, Bukovsky described the accusations as absurd and said that the tip about the images – which he initially said were planted on his computer by a backdoor program – was p*ed through Europol from Russian security services. Bukovsky also noted that while the original announcement by the CPS accused him of "possession and making", the prosecution materials p*ed to the court only charged "possession".

In early May 2015, it was reported that Bukovsky had undergone a nine-hour heart operation in a private German clinic, during which he was given two artificial valves. Subsequently, Bukovsky was kept in a medically-induced coma for three days to improve his chances of recovery. After partial recovery from his lengthy heart surgery, Vladimir Bukovsky responded to charges brought against him by the UK Crown Prosecution Service earlier in the year. Issuing a High Court writ for libel, Vladimir Bukovsky said that the CPS had defamed him, and claimed damages of £100,000. Bukovsky was later ruled to be too ill to stand trial.

Death

Bukovsky died of a heart attack on 27 October 2019 at the age of 76 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, after a period of ill-health.

Bibliography

Main article: Vladimir Bukovsky bibliographyIn translation

• 1978: To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter (PDF). London: André Deutsch (UK edn). 1978. ISBN:978-0-233-97023-3. 352 pp.
  • (in Russian) 1979: I vozvrashchaetsi͡a veter—. New York: Khronika izd-vo. 1979. 386 pp.
  • 1979: To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter. New York: Viking Press. 1979. ISBN:978-0-670-71640-1.
  • (in Russian) 2007: I vozvrashchaetsi͡a veter—. Svobodnyĭ chelovek. Moskva: Novoe izd-vo. 2007. ISBN:978-5-98379-090-2.
• 1987: To Choose Freedom. Hoover Press publication. Stanford, Calif: Hoover Ins*ution Press. 1987. ISBN:978-0-8179-8442-7.
• 1995: Jugement a Moscou: un dissident dans les archives du Kremlin (in French). Paris: Robert Laffont. 1995. ISBN:978-2-221-07460-2. 616 pp.
  • Moskovskiĭ prot͡sess (in Russian). Parizh; Moskva: "Russkaia mysl'"; Izd-vo "MIK". 1996. ISBN:978-5-87902-071-7.
  • (in German) (1996) Abrechnung mit Moskau. Das sowjetische Unrechtsregime und die Schuld des Westens, Bergisch Gladbach
  • Moskiewski proces (in Polish). Warsaw. 1999. ISBN:978-83-7227-190-7.
  • Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity (May 2019)
• 1999: Soviet Archives: Online archive compiled by Vladimir Bukovsky, prepared for publication by the late Julia Zaks (1938–2014) and Leonid Chernikhov
• 2016: The Bukovsky Archives upgraded version of 1999 archive.
• 2019: Judgment in Moscow: Soviet crimes and Western complicity

In Russian

• 1979: И возвращается ветер . New York: Изд. "Хроника" (Khronika Press). 1979. 382 pp. The first publication in Russian of Bukovsky's memoirs was given a Biblical *le (see Ecclesiastes, v. 6).
• 1989: "И возвращается ветер" . Teatr:: Literaturno-Chudožestvennyj Žurnal. М.: Teatr periodical. 1989. ISSN:0131-6885. The first publication of Bukovsky's memoirs in the USSR.
• 1996: Московский процесс . М.; Париж: МИК:: Рус. мысль. 1996. p.:525. ISBN:978-5-87902-071-7.
• 2001: Буковский В.; Геращенко И.; Ледин М.; Ратушинская И.; Суворов В. (2001). Золотой эшелон . Собрание. М.: Гудьял-Пресс. p.:256. ISBN:978-5-8026-0082-5.
• 2007: И возвращается ветер . Свободный человек. М.: Новое изд-во. 2007. p.:348. ISBN:978-5-98379-090-2. (First serialised in Teatr periodical, see above, 1989).
• 2008: Письма русского путешественника . Moscow & St Petersburg: Нестор-История . 2008.
• 2013: Наследники Лаврентия Берия. Путин и его команда . M.: Алгоритм. 2013. ISBN:978-5-4438-0337-1.
• 2014: Тайная империя Путина. Будет ли "дворцовый переворот"? . M.: Алгоритм. 2014. ISBN:978-5-4438-0880-2.
• 2015: На краю. Тяжелый выбор России . M.: Алгоритм. 2015. ISBN:978-5-906798-82-4.

Do*entaries

• Bukovsky (1977) – do*entary by Alan Clarke.
• They Chose Freedom (2005) (4 parts) – do*entary by Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr.
• Russia/Chechnya: Voices of Dissent (2005) – with Bukovsky, Yelena Bonner, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Anna Politkovskaya, Akhmed Zakayev and others.
• The Soviet Story (2008) – do*entary by Edvīns Šnore
• Parallels, Events, People (2014) (36 parts) – do*entary series by Natella Boltyanskaya

References

A Chronicle of Current Events (1968–1982)

Other

1. Bukovsky, Vladimir; Gluzman, Semyon (1975d). "A dissident's guide to psychiatry". A Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR (13): 31–57.

Further reading

In the Soviet Union

• Leddington, Roger (11 April 1971). "Interrogation of Russian revealing". Eugene Register-Guard. p.:9A.
• Jenner, F. A. (11 August 1972). "Bukovsky". Nature. 238 (5363): 361. Bibcode:1972Natur.238..361J. doi:10.1038/238361c0.
• Kovaly, Pavel (September–December 1973). "Der unbequeme Zeuge by Wladimir Bukowskij" . Studies in Soviet Thought. 13 (3/4): 339–342. doi:10.1007/BF01043882. JSTOR:20098579.
• Bernstein, Robert; Bessie, Simon; Carlisle, Henry; Hersey, John; Jovanovich, William; et:al. (27 June 1974). "Soviet inhumanity". The New York Review of Books.

After his expulsion to the West

• "Bukovsky vows fight for rights". Beaver County Times. 20 December 1976. p.:B12.
• "Helsinki Pact didn't help: Bukovsky". Ocala Star-Banner. 20 December 1976. p.:2A.
• Neuerbourg, Hanns (20 December 1976). "Bukovsky says prisoners got worse treatment after Helsinki Accords". Lewiston Evening Journal. p.:28.
• Rich, Vera (13 January 1977). "The Bukovskii perspective". Nature. 265 (5590): 94. Bibcode:1977Natur.265...94R. doi:10.1038/265094a0.
• Gerstenzang, James (1 March 1977). "Carter to meet with dissident Vladimir Bukovsky". Lewiston Evening Journal. p.:17.
• "Carter meets Bukovsky, vows pursuit of freedom". The Spokesman-Review. 2 March 1977. p.:3.
• Thorne, Ludmilla (6 March 1977). "Rescuing Vladimir Bukovsky. Soviet dissident saved by mother". Lakeland Ledger. p.:7D.
• Nivat, Georges; Kravetz, Marc (1977). URSS: gli scrittori del dissenso: Bukowsky, Calamov, Daniel, Guinzburg, Pliusc, Solgeniztin (in Italian). Venezia: La Biennale di Venezia. OCLC:797904993.

Two years on

• "A dissident enjoys his freedom, admires democracy". The Gazette. 14 November 1978. p.:39.
• "Vladimir Bukovsky; 2 years later". The Daily Telegraph. 13 November 1978. p.:40.
• "Vladimir Bukovsky now has a new life before him". Herald-Journal. 13 November 1978. p.:A3.
• Peipert, James (13 November 1978). "Vladimir Bukovsky; 2 years later". Nashua Telegraph. p.:40.

To Build a Castle (1978)

• Serebryakova, Elena (2012). Мир глазами диссидента (по книге В. Буковского "И возвращается ветер…") (PDF). Управленческое консультирование (in Russian) (4): 132–138. Archived from the original (PDF) on 1 March 2016.

Judgement in Moscow (1995)

• Shlapentokh, Vladimir (Winter 1998). "Was the Soviet Union run by the KGB? Was the West duped by the Kremlin? (A critical review of Vladimir Bukovsky's Jugement à Moscou)". Russian History. 25 (1): 453–461. doi:10.1163/187633198X00211.

In the 21st century

• Boobbyer, Philip (July 2009). "Vladimir Bukovskii and Soviet Communism". The Slavonic and East European Review. 87 (3): 452–487. JSTOR:40650408.
• Zubov, Mikhail (28 April 2015). Как Владимир Буковский победил карательную психиатрию. Людмила Алексеева: "Вряд ли эта легендарная фигура занимается детским порно" . Moskovskij Komsomolets (in Russian).

External links

In English

• Appearances on C-SPAN: May 1989, "The Democratic Revolution in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union" (forum).
• Vladimir Bukovsky News archives, links, photos, video, public domain writings, official statements, contact info, maintained by US group Bukovsky Center
• Russia/Chechnya: Voices of Dissent (2005) – features Vladimir Bukovsky, Yelena Bonner, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Anna Politkovskaya, Akhmed Zakayev and others.
• A lecture by Bukovsky at the Cato Ins*ute, 69 min on YouTube Uploaded on 7 January 2012.
• The Bukovsky Archives: Communism on Trial. Contains over seven hundred cl*ified Soviet do*ents (1937–1994), an abridged translation of Judgement in Moscow, and many of the author's key articles since 1976 ("Books, Articles & Letters").
• "The suppression of dissent, 1970–1979" in the Bukovsky Archives (above) includes do*ents concerning Bukovsky: his activities as a Soviet dissident; his periods of imprisonment in the USSR; his exchange in 1976 for Luis Corvalan; and his ongoing campaign in the West against the Soviet regime.
• "Vladimir Bukovsky: Obituary" The Guardian, 28 October 2019.

In Russian

• An Alphabet of Dissent: Bukovsky (2011) "Алфавит инакомыслия. Буковский". Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. 29 November 2011.
• Bukovsky on Voice of America (2014) Владимир Буковский на "Голосе Америки" 19 February 2014, 40 min on YouTube
• Natella Boltyanskaya (16 February 2015). "Двадцать девятая серия. Построить замок". Voice of America. Episode 29: "To Build a Castle", part 1.
• Natella Boltyanskaya (2 March 2015). "Тридцатая серия. Построить замок (часть 2)". Voice of America. Episode 30: "To Build a Castle", part 2.
• Official 2008 Presidential campaign site

Individual
events

• Jeltoqsan
• 1987–1989 Tibetan unrest
• 1988 Polish strikes
• Polish Round Table Agreement
• April 9 tragedy
• Removal of Hungary's border fence with Austria
• Hungarian Round Table Talks
• Pan-European Picnic
• Baltic Way
• Monday Demonstrations
• Alexanderplatz demonstration
• Fall of the Berlin Wall
• Fall of the inner German border
• Malta Summit
• Black January
• 1990s post-Soviet aliyah
• Helsinki Summit
• Reunification of Germany
• January Events in Lithuania
• January Events in Latvia
• Transnistria War
• 1991 protests in Belgrade
• Dissolution of the Warsaw Pact
• August Coup
• Tajikistani Civil War
• Dissolution of the Soviet Union
  • August Coup
• Dissolution of Czechoslovakia

Later events

• Colour revolution
• Decommunization
• Lustration
• Democratization
• Economic liberalization
• Post-Soviet conflicts
• Neo-Sovietism
• Neo-Stalinism
• Post-communism
• Yugoslav Wars
• Pink tide

Related

• Human rights in the Soviet Union