https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/vladimir-bukovsky-conversation-nazis-communists/
Editor’s Note: Jay Nordlinger recently interviewed Vladimir Bukovsky, the legendary Soviet-era dissident, at Bukovsky’s home in Cambridge, England. For the first two parts of this series, go here and here.
Talking with Bukovsky, I ask him to give me a comment or two on Yeltsin — Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the new Russia. He does.
“He was a tragic figure. He was kind of half born — I don’t know how to put it. He was part and parcel of the Communist regime, and he suddenly realized that the whole thing was wrong — and then he was on both sides at the same time. That was the trouble with Yeltsin. That’s what made him a tragic figure. He couldn’t decide what to do with his life. He couldn’t go all the way against the Communists. He went against them, but did not finish it. Yes, he was a tragic figure.”
• Bukovsky’s book Judgment in Moscow: Did he mean it to be a Nuremberg? A partial Nuremberg? A mini-Nuremberg? “Theoretically, that’s what I tried to achieve, but there is nothing like an actual trial, a real trial. We all know the difference: One is moral, the other actual.”
Along with many others, Bukovsky would have liked to see an actual trial, in any form. “Someone asked me — a member of Yeltsin’s entourage — ‘Well, who’s going to be the judges?’ A very tricky question. I said, ‘Look, I don’t care. Choose twelve people off the street, and that would be okay with me.’”
I think of the old phrase, about juries: “twelve good men and true.”