Vladimir Bukovsky
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Vladimir Bukovsky (Влади́мир Константи́нович Буко́вский) (b. December 30 1942) is a Soviet author. He is a former leading Soviet dissident and human rights activist and was one of the first to expose the use of psychiatry against political prisoners in the USSR. He spent a total of twelve years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and in psikhushkas, forced-treatment psychiatric psychiatric hospitals used by the regime as special prisons.
Bukovsky was convicted (Article 70-1) in June 1963 for organizing poetry meetings in the center of Moscow (next to the Vladimir Mayakovsky monument) and sent to a psikhushka; freed in February 1964. In January 1965 he was arrested for organizing a demonstration in defense of Alexander Ginzburg, Yuri Galanskov and other dissidents (190-1, 3 years of imprisonment); freed in January 1970.
In 1971, Bukovsky smuggled to the West over 150 pages documenting abuse of psychiatric institutions for political reasons in the USSR. The facts galvanized human rights activists worldwide (including inside the country), and was a pretext for his subsequent arrest in January 1972, for contacts with foreign journalists and possession and distribution of samizdat (70-1, 7 years of imprisonment plus 5 years in exile).
In December of 1976, while imprisoned, Bukovsky was exchanged for former Chilean Communist leader Luis Corvalan.
Since 1976 Mr. Bukovsky lives in Cambridge, England. He received a Ph.D. in Biology and has written several books and political essays. In addition to criticising the Soviet regime, he also picked apart what he calls "Western gullibility", a lack of a tough stand of Western liberalism against Communist abuses.
In 1992, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the new Russian government invited Bukovsky to serve as an expert to testify at the trial conducted by the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation to determine whether the CPSU had been a criminal institution. To prepare for his testimony, Bukovsky requested and was granted access to a large number of documents from Soviet archives. Using a small handheld scanner and a laptop computer, he managed to secretly scan many documents (some with high security clearance), including KGB reports to the Central Committee, and smuggle the files to the West. It took two years and a team of assistants to merge the pieces together. As this incident attracted international attention, Bukovsky was designated persona non grata in "new" Russia since 1996.
Publications
- "Soul of Man Under Socialism", 1979
- "To Build a Castle: My Life As a Dissenter", 1979
- "Soviet Hypocrisy and Western Gullibility", 1987
- "Judgement in Moscow" ("Московский процесс") based on his 1992 visit to Russia and the "Soviet Archives".
External links
- Faces of Resistance in the USSR (http://www.brandeis.edu/departments/sakharov/Exhibit/bukovsky.html). The Andrei Sakharov Archives and Human Rights Center at Brandeis University
- the "Soviet Archives" (http://psi.ece.jhu.edu/~kaplan/IRUSS/BUK/GBARC/buk.html) at INFO-RUSS
- An Open Letter to President G.W. Bush by Vladimir Bukovsky and Elena Bonner (http://www.rjews.net/maof/article.php3?id=2405&type=s&sid=37) (2003-03-27)ru:Буковский, Владимир Константинович