Vladimir BukovskyOne of the most widely-known prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union, whom The New York Times called a hero of almost legendary proportions, Vladimir Bukovsky was expelled from Moscow University at age 19 for publishing criticism of a stat youth program. By the time he was 35, he had spent a total of twelve years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and ersatz psychiatric hospitals for a series of protests and leaked documents.
After his expulsion to the West in 1976, he accepted an invitation to continue his interrupted studies at Cambridge University, where he earned a master's degree in biology. His status as a leading irritant to the Soviet government was ensured by the publication in 1978 of his powerful bestselling prison memoir To Build a Castle, recently re-released in digital format.
Bukovsky continued for decades to write and speak about the dangerous abuses of state power. Having experienced brutal forced feeding through the nose during hunger strike himself, he warned post-9/11 America in a Washington Post essay that torture also traumatizes its perpetrators: Our rich experience in Russia has shown that many will become alcoholics or drug addicts, violent criminals or, at the very least, despotic and abusive fathers and mothers.
Even into his seventies and despite failing health, he has continued to be a burr under the saddle of Russian leaders. In 2014 his testimony helped the British inquiry into the murder by radiation poisoning of his friend, Alexander Litvinenko, conclude that President Putin had likely sanctioned the killing.
Bukovsky sees Russian leadership not as a series of changing regimes, but as an unbroken chain of murderous meddling at home and abroad. After the 2018 radiation poisoning of military intelligence defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England, he quipped: If two cruise missiles were to be launched at the Lubyanka, the level of terrorism worldwide would drop by approximately 80 percent. Read More Read Less