Vladimir Bukovsky

Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky (Russian: Владимир Константинович Буковский; born December 30, 1942 in Belebei ) is a Russian journalist and former Soviet dissident. He made known internationally accommodation of political prisoners in psychiatric institutions in the USSR. The Russian presidential elections in 2008, he sought unsuccessfully to candidacy.

Life

As a student and student Bukowski fell by dissent in conflict with the Soviet power and was excluded from both the school and the university. In 1963, he was classified as incorrigible for attempting to reproduce the book The new class of Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas and sent to a psychiatric hospital in Leningrad. Released in February 1965, he continued his opposition activities and was hospitalized from late 1965 to July 1966 again for psychiatric treatment. For organizing a protest demonstration in January 1967, he was brought to justice; his speech in court soon circulated in samizdat. The judges rated this as participation in group actions which a disturbing public order and sentenced him to three years in a camp.

After returning from the camp to Moscow Bukowski was one of the leaders of the emergent Soviet dissident movement. As a result, he gave interviews to foreign correspondents and made sure that the use of psychiatry against dissidents became known in the West in particular.

In March 1971 Bukowski was arrested again after he had made known throughout the Soviet Union, an article in the newspaper Pravda, which accused him of anti -Soviet activity. Mainly because of the publication of a collection of documents that finished abuse of psychiatry for political purposes in the USSR, he was in a process on January 5, 1972 in Moscow to 7 years of imprisonment ( two years in prison and five years in the camps ) and five years of exile convicted. After persistent protests in the West, the Soviet government Bukowski exchanged with his mother against the prisoner held in Chile Chilean Communists Luis Corvalán on 18 December 1976.

After his forced resettlement, he settled in the UK and continued his critical research and analysis. 1985 Bukowski resigned from the International Society for Human Rights. Also in 1985, he founded, inter alia, along with Jeane Kirkpatrick and Richard Perle, to organize the " American Foundation for Resistance International," an organization that should help protests in countries of the Eastern bloc and finance. The government under Boris Yeltsin invited Bukowski in 1992 as experts in the trial of the CPSU to Moscow in order to achieve a ban on the Communist Party.

Boris Efimovich Nemtsov visited in 2002 by the Union of Right Forces Bukowski strategy meeting of a new party in Russia. In 2004, Bukowski together with politicians like Nemtsov and Garry Kasparov, the liberal economic committee in 2008.

Bukowski is patron of the United Kingdom Independence Party and Vice- President of the Freedom Association, which promotes an increase in military spending and economic liberalism (less government intervention in the economic system ).

Bukowski's main theme is the naivety ( gullibility ) of the West against the Soviet Union or its - in his opinion - not defunct ideology. In the EU, he sees a new Soviet state in the making. Their ideology is political correctness, which would be introduced deliberately, so that they can then enforce repressive methods. He predicts, even this EU Soviet state would have gulags. Bukowski claimed from the documents of the Moscow archive, which he has read during his visit in 1992, it is apparent that the EU was a Soviet conspiracy, which was to re-educate the Europeans politically ( wanted to create just as the Soviet Union, " Soviet people "). No understanding has Bukowski for the peace movement, which he founded attacked because of their activities against the NATO double-track decision and against the Iraq war. The peace movement activities were noisy Bukowski a result of Soviet or Russian propaganda. 2005 Bukowski criticized the U.S. government after the announcement of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. It should not give the impression that in the U.S. torture is allowed, otherwise the Russian government could consider this as a justification for their own torture.

On May 28, 2007 Bukowski declared his willingness to stand for election to the President of the Russian Federation in March 2008. On 16 December 2007, the first official meeting of voters Bukowski took place in Moscow; more than the required 500 participants were registered. On December 18, he submitted his documents for his candidacy at the Central Election Committee of the Russian Federation. His application was rejected because he lived in London for quite some time. According to the Russian legislation, a presidential candidate must live at least ten years before the election in the country.

On 10 March 2010, he signed a manifesto of the Russian opposition, under the title "Putin must go".

Works

In German translation appeared:

• Opposition: A new mental disease in the Soviet Union? Carl Hanser, Munich 1973. ISBN 3-446-11571-4
• Wind in front of the ice conditions. Ullsteinhaus continent, Berlin 1981. ISBN 3-548-38018-2
• Pacifists against peace - the peace movement and the Soviet Union. Publisher SOI, Bern 1983. ISBN 3-85913-120-6
• This stabbing pain of freedom. Russian and Western dream a reality. Ullsteinhaus, Berlin 1985. ISBN 3-548-20576-3
• Settlement with Moscow. The Soviet regime of injustice and blame the West. Luebbe Publishing Group, Bergisch Gladbach 1996. ISBN 3-7857-0829-7

In an English translation appeared:

• To Build a Castle - My Life As a Dissenter, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1988, ISBN 978-0-89633-131-0
• EUSSR. The Soviet Roots of European Integration, with Pavel Stroilov, Sovereignty Publications, 2004, ISBN 978-0-9540231-1-9
• Reckoning With Moscow: A Nuremberg Trial for Soviet Agents and Western Fellow Travelers, Regnery Publishing Inc., 1998, ISBN 978-0-89526-389-6