Dissident fought Soviet tyranny before and after his expulsion from the USSR
Vladimir Bukovsky, who has died aged 76, was a prominent Russian dissident who spent 12 years in Soviet prisons, forced-labour camps and psychiatric hospitals until 1976, when he was exchanged for the Chilean Communist party leader Luis Corvalan, who was being held in detention by the Pinochet regime.
Banished from his homeland, Bukovsky settled in England, where he rebuilt his life around the struggle to free his homeland and wrote books about his experiences, including a memoir, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter (1978). He continued to speak out against Soviet oppression and, after the end of communism, tried to galvanise opposition to president Vladimir
Putin, among other things accusing the
Putin regime of orchestrating the
2006 murder of
Alexander Litvinenko, the former Soviet spy who was poisoned by radioactive polonium210 in his tea.
In 2015, however, Bukovsky was arrested and charged with possessing and making indecent images of children, including some classed as ‘‘Category A’’ – the most extreme categorisation. He denied all charges, claiming Russian agents had planted the images on his computer, and sued the Crown Prosecution Service for libel.
In April 2016, when the libel case was postponed three times, Bukovsky, who had recently undergone complicated heart surgery in Germany, announced that he was going on hunger strike, complaining that he had been subjected to ‘‘a persistent and deliberate campaign of slander, vilification and persecution’’. But in July 2016 the High Court dismissed his claim.
When his trial opened the following December, a computer expert said he was confident the images had not been put there by anyone other than Bukovsky, and in an agreed summary of his police interview, Bukovsky claimed he had been researching the images and videos out of ‘‘social’’ curiosity and not for sexual gratification.
The trial was halted as Bukovsky was admitted to hospital after its second day, and a second trial did not go ahead as he was again taken to hospital. Last year his trial was indefinitely postponed because of his health.
It was a tragic coda to the career of a man regarded by many dissidents as a colossus of the campaign against Soviet tyranny.
Vladimir Bukovsky was born in the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, to which his family was evacuated during World War II. After the war ended his family returned to Moscow, where his father was a journalist.
Vladimir’s dissident activities began at school, from which he was expelled in 1959 for publishing an unauthorised magazine. He was later thrown out of Moscow University after taking part in public readings of banned poetry, attacking the USSR as an ‘‘illegal society’’ and demanding the democratisation of the ‘‘moribund’’ Communist Youth League.
He was jailed without trial in 1963 and spent the next 12 years in and out of a series of prisons, labour camps and psychiatric hospitals. During this period he went on hunger strike 20 times.
In 1971 he smuggled to the West 150 pages of documents detailing the abuse of psychiatry in the Communist state. Held at the KGB’s Lefortovo prison in Moscow, he was force-fed through the nose. When, in 1976, he finally secured his freedom he weighed only about 60 kilograms.
At a press conference in Switzerland, he was asked how many political prisoners there were in the Soviet Union. ‘‘Two hundred and eighty million,’’ he replied, and went on to explain that even the jailers and KGB officers could be considered political prisoners.
Bukovsky moved to Britain and, while completing a biology degree at King’s College, Cambridge, wrote To Build a Castle, in which he recalled how he had kept sane in jail by hiding a stump of charcoal under his tongue and using it to draw his ideal castle, complete in every detail, on the floor of his cell. The castle of his imagination, he wrote, saved him from ‘‘indifference to living’’.
He returned to Moscow in 1992 at the invitation of then Russian president Boris Yeltsin as an expert at the trial of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union by the Constitutional Court. The position gave him access to KGB archives, enabling him to publish about 7000 documents on the internet and in his 1995 book, Judgment in Moscow.
These included, by his account, documents indicating that politicians from the Italian Communist and the German Social Democrat parties had visited Moscow in 1986 and hatched a plan to hijack the European Union and turn it into a federal state. The book was published in English only this year by a small publishing house; it had been rejected by two major publishers, allegedly after Bukovsky refused to rewrite parts of the book that accused prominent figures in the West of behind-the-scenes dealings with the Soviets.
By this time Bukovsky found that his value to Western policy-makers had depreciated somewhat. When an interviewer visited him at his Cambridge home in 1996 he found a rather forlorn, corpulent figure, with only Kotya the cat for company, struggling to make ends meet and reminiscing about the days when he had been able to live off the money he had made in lecture tours of the US.
The arrival of Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin gave him a new cause, and in 2008 he tried to stand in Russia’s presidential election against Putin’s candidate, Dmitry Medvedev, only to be disqualified. ‘‘Putin has no other plan except ‘Back to the USSR’,’’ he claimed. ‘‘This is his programme.’’
In 2006 he had been one of the pallbearers at the funeral in London of Litvinenko, at which he told mourners: ‘‘Sasha died as a soldier, a warrior, fighting his enemies to the very end, looking straight into their eyes. He fought for his brothers.’’ Litvinenko’s death, he added, was a sign that ‘‘Russia has been given a licence to kill, an invitation to murder anyone it wishes’’.
In an interview in 2006, the strongly Eurosceptic Bukovsky described the EU as a ‘‘monster’’ that should be destroyed ‘‘before it develops into a full-fledged totalitarian state’’. Subsequently he served as a patron of the UK Independence Party. – Telegraph Group
‘‘Russia has been given a licence to kill, an invitation to murder anyone it wishes.’’
Vladimir Bukovsky at the funeral of poisoned spy Alexander Litvinenko