Vladimir Bukovsky

Vladimir Bukovsky      (activist, writer, neurophysiologist)
Born	30 December 1942 Soviet Union
Residence	Cambridge,  UK
Nationality	Bashkir
Citizenship	Soviet Union (1942–1976),   Great Britain (1976–present),   Russian Federation (1992–2014)
Alma mater	University of Cambridge, Stanford University
Exposed	Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union
Founder of	Resistance International
Member of	Freedom House, PRODEMCA, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
Interests	• human rights • psychiatry
Russian dissident who spoke at the 1979 JCIT.

Vladimir Bukovsky began in the 1950s campaigning and demonstrating 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. He was charged in 2014 by UK police with possession of child pornography.

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. During the same years he voiced concern about the activities and policies of the Western peace movements.

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 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.

Child pornography charges

In 2014 UK police charged him with child pornography, and he reportedly admitted download movies, but elected to fight the charges. On 12 February 2018, the CPS indefinitely suspended the prosecution, due to his "failing health".

 

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".

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