Vladimir Bukovsky, the most famous surviving anti-communist Soviet dissident, has passed away. The sad news broke almost simultaneously early Sunday evening E.T. in a tweet from journalist Diana West and a news release emailed by Elizabeth Childs of the Bukovsky Center. In poor health in recent years, Bukovsky, age 76, according to Childs, had died of cardiac arrest at Addenbrookes Hospital near his home in Cambridge, England on Sunday evening at 9:30 P.M. local time.
Bukovsky had lived in the West since he was traded for a Chilean communist in a swap in Zurich in 1976. Before his release to freedom, he had spent a dozen years locked up in the old Soviet Union in prisons, gulags, and mental institutions.
In 2019, Bukovsky’s most substantive work, Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity, was finally published in English in the United States for the first time by Ninth of November Press. The book is based on internal Soviet-era documents that Bukovsky got his hands on and managed to copy when he visited Russia under Boris Yelstsin’s post-communist regime in the early 1990s. Judgment in Moscow brought renewed attention on Bukovsky, and he was interviewed at length this year by several leading journalists, including Celia Farber, who wrote two extensive articles for the Epoch Times, one of them a Q&A she had on the phone with Bukovsky.
Farber’s articles (here [link repaired] and here), and three lengthy interviews with Bukovsky by Jay Nordlinger published in the National Review (here, here, and here), really need to be read in their entirety to get a full appreciation of the richness in experience and analysis of this man who never sold out his principles.
Asked about the Left’s ongoing charges of collusion between the Russians and Donald Trump, Bukovsky told Farber:
Mind you, the idea that he was initially somehow in cahoots with Moscow, ridiculous. I mean he is doing his thing, with some limitations in his understanding of Russia. But calling him a Moscow agent is ridiculous. You might like or dislike him. He has strong character, not very critical of himself, and so forth, but to suggest that he is Moscow’s agent is absolutely ridiculous. … The president is limited by legislation, by Congress, by whatever. It’s not in his power to change the course of the country as much as they suggest. The president is only an executive officer and that’s it.