Vladimir Bukovsky
 Vladimir Bukovsky    | |
|---|---|
| Born | 30 December 1942 Soviet Union |
| Exposed | Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union |
| Founder of | Resistance International |
| Member of | Freedom House, PRODEMCA, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation |
Since the 1950s, Vladimir Bukovsky campaigned and demonstrated against the Soviet government. He exposed the Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union.
Bukovsky was sentenced in 1972 to 9 years, but in December 1976, he was deported from the USSR and exchanged at Zürich airport by the Soviet government for Luis Corvalán, the imprisoned Chilean Communist leader. Bukovsky moved to Great Britain and settled in Cambridge in order to resume his studies in biology.
Anti-Communism
He gave the last presentation of the seminal 1979 Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism, speaking on "The Curse of Complicity".
Since he has lived in the West Bukovsky has written many essays and polemical articles. These not only criticized the Soviet regime and, later, that of Vladimir Putin, but also exposed "Western gullibility" in the face of Soviet abuses and, in some cases, what he believed to be Western complicity in such crimes (see American Betrayal sub-section below). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Bukovsky campaigned successfully for an official UK and US boycott of the summer 1980 Olympics in Moscow.[1] During the same years he voiced concern about the activities and policies of the Western peace movements.[2]
In 1983, together with Cuban dissident Armando Valladares, Bukovsky co-founded and was later elected president of Resistance International. The anti-Communist organization was run from a small office in Paris by Soviet dissidents and emigres, notably Vladimir Maximov and Eduard Kuznetsov. In 1985 it expanded into the American Foundation for Resistance International[3] Among the prominent members of the board were Albert Jolis and Jeane Kirkpatrick while Midge Decter, Yuri Yarim-Agaev, Richard Perle, Saul Bellow, Robert Conquest and Martin Colman were on the body's advisory committee. The Foundation aimed to be a coordinating centre for dissident and democratic movements seeking to overturn communism in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. It organized protests in the communist countries and in the West, and opposed western financial assistance to communist governments. The Foundation also created the National Council to Support Democratic Movements (National Council for Democracy) with the goal of aiding the emergence of democratic rule-of-law governments, and providing assistance with the writing of constitutions and the formation of civil institutions.
In March 1987 Bukovsky and nine other émigré authors (Ernst Neizvestny, Yury Lyubimov, Vasily Aksyonov and Leonid Plyushch among them) caused a furore in the West and then in the Soviet Union itself when they raised doubts about the substance and sincerity of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms.[4]
Event Participated in
| Event | Start | End | Location(s) | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism | 2 July 1979 | 5 July 1979 | Israel Jerusalem | The birthplace of the "War on Terror" doctrine, "a major international forum for the movement against détente". |
References
- ↑ Vladimir Bukovsky, "How Russia breaks the rules of the Games", letter to The Daily Telegraph, 2 October 1979; "Do athletes want the KGB to win the Olympics?" News of the World, 20 January 1980
- ↑ "The Soviet Union and the Peace Movement". Commentary. 5 January 1982.Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css must have content model "Sanitized CSS" for TemplateStyles (current model is "Scribunto").
- ↑ "American Foundation for Resistance International". Powerbase. Retrieved 17 May 2015.Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css must have content model "Sanitized CSS" for TemplateStyles (current model is "Scribunto").
- ↑ "Is Glasnost a Game of Mirrors?". The New York Times. 22 March 1987.Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css must have content model "Sanitized CSS" for TemplateStyles (current model is "Scribunto").. Unexpectedly this op-ed was translated into Russian and quickly published in Moscow as well (Moskovskie novosti, 29 March 1987).
