A Dissident Outlives Soviet Communism His book documenting Western complicity didn’t find a U.S. publisher for almost 25 years. By Juliana Geran Pilon
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-dissident-outlives-soviet-communism-11572302952
Only death could silence Vladimir Bukovsky. His crusade against the Communist system in Russia and beyond, before and after the Berlin Wall’s fall, was unequaled. He died Sunday at age 76 at his home in Cambridge, England, where he’d lived since the Soviet Union expelled him in 1976.
He didn’t seem to know fear. He was kicked out of high school for creating a satirical magazine. He took night classes and managed to enter Moscow University, where he held unofficial poetry readings and disseminated underground literature. He was expelled from university after denouncing the Young Communist League as useless and later arrested for possessing anti-Soviet literature. In prison he met other dissidents, was “diagnosed” as schizophrenic, read Dickens in English and studied Soviet law. After his release, he protested and was detained again. Altogether he spent 12 years in psychiatric hospitals, prisons or labor camps.
He realized that to make a difference, he had to get his message out to the West. He succeeded, but at the price of additional torture, which he described in his best-selling autobiography, “To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter.” He staged hunger strikes aimed at improving medical treatment in prison and encouraged others to do the same. The authorities force-fed the prisoners through the nose.
The book was published in 1978. By then Bukovsky had been in the West for two years, studying biology at Cambridge University and continuing to defend freedom. In 1983 Bukovsky and Armando Valladares, a Cuban dissident, co-founded the anticommunist Resistance International. His influence grew as he informally advised Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan.
In 1992, the year after the Soviet Union collapsed, Bukovsky was asked to return to Russia as an expert witness at a trial against President Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin had banned the Communist Party and seized its property. Bukovsky’s argument, which he had always believed, was that the party had been unconstitutional. To demonstrate it, Bukovsky requested access to the Central Committee archives. Using a laptop and hand-held scanner, he surreptitiously copied and smuggled out thousands of pages before being discovered.
His findings were captured in “Judgment in Moscow,” first published in 1995 in French, then in Russian and other European languages. It didn’t come out in English until this year. Its subtitle, “Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity,” gives a clue as to why. When Bukovsky first attempted to publish the book in English, in the 1990s, the American publisher had asked him to rewrite “the entire book from the point of view of a leftist liberal,” he wrote. Specifically, he was told to omit all mention of media companies that had entered agreements to publish articles and cover media events “under the direct editorial control of the Soviets.” He rejected the offer, and the publisher canceled the contract.
The documents cited in the book demonstrate, he wrote, the “treacherous role of the American left”—its complicity with Moscow during the 1930s and ’40s, infiltration of the U.S. government and assistance to the Soviets during the Cold War. They demonstrate also the Kremlin’s support for Middle Eastern terrorists, Mikhail Gorbachev’s sabotage of the European Community, and the pseudoliberalism of Mr. Gorbachev’s “perestroika.”
It took a quarter-century for this book to reach America, but it is here, thanks to a small California publisher, Ninth of November Press. Vladimir Bukovsky can rest in peace.
Ms. Pilon is a senior fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and author of “The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom.”
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