Cold War Hero
The dissident who exposed USSR psych abuse
IF we ever raise a memorial to heroes of the Cold War, one who will deserve a place near the center of this pantheon is Vladimir Bukovsky who died this week, at age 76.
Along with Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and a few others, Bukovsky stood at the center of the movement of Soviet dissidents. This was a small group of men and women who braved imprisonment, torture, slave labor and death to speak the truth against a monstrous Communist tyranny.
Their miraculous courage thwarted the totalitarian project, preventing it from normalizing itself. In Stalin’s time, a bullet to the back of the brain would have made quick work of their like. But after Stalin, Khrushchev brought a halt to the manic bloodletting that had terrorized dutiful Communists along with everyone else.
The goal of Stalin’s successors was to maintain absolute control over their subjects and to spread their empire far and wide, while inducing the rest of the world to treat their regime as legitimate and eternal.
But the dissidents spoiled the party, alerting Westerners, many with little wish to know of the terrible toll exacted by an allpowerful state in crushing the human soul even when it was not piling up mountains of corpses.
Bukovsky’s part in this blossomed with a 1970 interview broadcast on CBS, exposing the use of Soviet psychiatric hospitals to confine and punish dissidents. His knowledge was firsthand — having spent about two years in such institutions in addition to terms in prison and labor camps, altogether making 12 years of incarceration out of his 15 years between the ages of 21 and 36.
This abuse of psychiatry epitomized the strategy of totalitarian normalization. Those who challenged the system might not be shot or jailed; rather, they were pronounced sick and consigned to institutions where the administration of psychotropic drugs might restore their “sanity.”
The dissident former Gen. Petro Grigorenko “requires compulsory treatment in a special psychiatric hospital as [his] reformist ideas . . . are of obstinate character,” said the official pronouncement. Likewise, Soviet “medical” officials found that the dissident mathematician Leonid Plyushch suffered from “sluggish schizophrenia characterized by ideas of abstract political philosophy.”
In 1971, Bukovsky somehow smuggled 150 pages of purloined psychiatric records to sympathizers in France. Western psychiatrists who examined the records of six such “patients” smuggled out by Bukovsky found no evidence of actual mental illness.
This “use of medicine against man,” as Bukovsky’s called it, was brought before the 1971 congress of the World Psychiatric Association, which took no action. Little wonder that Bukovsky, who was sent back to the gulag for having exposed the abuse, often vented anger at Western flaccidity.
His suffering was not for naught, however. At its next congress, the WPA voted to condemn Soviet actions — by the hair’s breadth of 90 to 88 — and a few years later an embarrassed USSR tendered its resignation.
By then, Bukovsky had been released to the West in a prisoner exchange. There, he published his stirring memoir, “To Build a Castle.” The “castle” was an imaginary construction project to pass prison time and a refuge impregnable to the depredations of Soviet jailers and torturers.
While recounting his experiences, he expounded the ideas that guided him. They boiled down to two.
One was the belief in “absolute moral norms of behavior” regardless of consequences. But this did not imply mere martyrdom, in view of his second core belief: the supreme importance of the individual.
“The implacable force of one man’s refusal to submit” could, Bukovsky wrote, weaken the force of the leviathan, which rested “not [on] rifles . . . tanks, [nor] atom bombs [but] on public obedience.”
With such a thought, maybe he was crazy, you might say. But, having won his freedom, he outlived the Soviet Union by 30 years — not nearly enough for those of us privileged to know him or the millions of others forever in his debt.
Joshua Muravchik, a former aide to Sens. Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, is the author of “Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall and Afterlife of Socialism.”