Vladimir Konstantinowitsch Bukowski

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wladimir Konstantinowitsch Bukowski, 1987

Wladimir Konstantinowitsch Bukowski ( Russian Владимир Константинович Буковский ; born December 30, 1942 in Belebei ; † October 27, 2019 in Cambridge , United Kingdom ) was a Soviet dissident and Russian publicist. He made the placement of political prisoners in psychiatric institutions of the USSR known internationally. He unsuccessfully sought a candidacy for the Russian presidential elections in 2008 .

Life

As a pupil and student, Bukowski came into conflict with Soviet power because of his dissenting political opinions and was expelled from both school and university. In 1963 he was classified as incorrigible for an attempt to reproduce the book The New Class of the Yugoslav dissident Milovan Đilas and was sent to a psychiatric institution in Leningrad . Released in February 1965, he continued his opposition activities and was again admitted to psychiatric treatment from late 1965 to July 1966. He was brought to justice for organizing a protest demonstration in January 1967; his speech in court was soon circulating in samizdat . The judges classified this as taking part in group acts that disrupt public order and sentenced him to three years in a camp.

After returning to Moscow from the camp, Bukowski became one of the spokesmen for the emerging Soviet dissident movement. As a result, he gave interviews to foreign correspondents and ensured that in the West in particular the use of psychiatry against dissenters , which the KGB chairman Yuri Andropov promoted as a tried and tested means in the domestic political struggle, became known.

In March 1971, Bukovsky was arrested again after an article in the Pravda newspaper accusing him of anti-Soviet activity spread across the USSR. In a trial on January 5, 1972 in Moscow, he was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment (two years in prison and five years in camp) and five years in exile, mainly because of the publication of a collection of documents proving the abuse of psychiatry for political purposes in the USSR sentenced. After ongoing protests in the West, the Soviet government exchanged Bukowski on December 18, 1976 at Zurich Airport, together with his mother, for the Chilean communist Luis Corvalán, who was imprisoned in Chile .

In his book Pacifists Against Peace , Bukowski claimed in the early 1980s that the term “ useful idiot ” came from Lenin . But as early as 1987, the New York Times pointed out that there was no evidence to date for the correctness of this ascription.

After his forcible relocation, he settled in Great Britain and continued his critical research and analysis. In 1985 he founded u. a. together with Jeane Kirkpatrick and Richard Perle , the American Foundation for Resistance International , an organization that was supposed to help organize and finance protests in states of the Eastern Bloc.

In 1992, the government under Boris Yeltsin invited Bukowski to Moscow as experts in the process of lifting the ban on the CPSU that Yeltsin had decreed after the August 1991 coup . He was allowed to work with other historians for the first time in the Kremlin's special archive, where numerous secret documents were kept. Without the knowledge of the archive management, he scanned around 15,000 pages, including many documents from the Politburo . Based on his archive materials, he wrote a non-fiction book on the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, which has been translated into many languages. In it he reproduced the original documents in large excerpts.

In 2002 Boris Nemtsov from the democratically and pro-Western oriented Union of Right Forces visited Bukowski to discuss the strategy of a new party in Russia. In 2004 Bukowski founded the Liberal Committee in 2008 together with politicians such as Nemtsov and Garry Kasparov .

Bukowski was a sponsor of the United Kingdom Independence Party and Vice President of the Freedom Association , which campaigns for an increase in military spending and for economic liberalism (less state intervention in the economic system).

Bukowski's main theme was the naivety (gullibility) of the West towards the Soviet Union or, in his opinion, its ideology, which was by no means lost. In the EU he saw a new Soviet state emerging. Their ideology is political correctness , which would be introduced in a targeted manner in order to be able to enforce it with repressive methods. He predicted that this EU Soviet state would also have gulags . Bukovsky claimed that documents in the Moscow Archives, which he was able to consult during his visit in 1992, indicate that the EU was a Soviet conspiracy to politically re-educate Europeans (just as the Soviet Union wanted to create "Soviet people"). Bukowski had no understanding for the peace movement that he u. a. attacked because of their activities against the NATO double resolution and against the Iraq war . According to Bukowski, the peace movement activities are the result of Soviet and Russian propaganda. In 2005, Bukowski criticized the US government after the Abu Ghuraib torture scandal became known . The impression should not be created that torture is allowed in the USA , as otherwise the Russian government could see this as a justification for its own torture.

On May 28, 2007, Bukowski declared his readiness to run for the elections for President of the Russian Federation in March 2008 . On December 16, 2007, the first official election meeting of Bukowski took place in Moscow; more than the required 500 participants were registered. On December 18, he submitted his candidacy documents to the Central Election Committee of the Russian Federation . His application was rejected because he had been living in London for some time . According to Russian law, a presidential candidate must live in the country for at least ten years before the election. He described Putin's reign as the emergence of a new Cheka regime, i.e. compared it to a state controlled by the secret service.

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

Between 2016 and 2018, Bukowski was charged in the UK with possession and production of child pornography; he denied these allegations. The trial was interrupted several times because of Bukowski's poor health and was eventually terminated.

Works

Published in German translation:

  • Opposition: A New Mental Illness in the Soviet Union? Carl Hanser, Munich 1973, ISBN 3-446-11571-4 .
  • Wind before the ice. Ullstein Continent, Berlin 1981, ISBN 3-548-38018-2 .
  • Pacifists Against Peace - Peace Movement and Soviet Union. Verlag SOI, Bern 1983, ISBN 3-85913-120-6 .
  • That stabbing pain of freedom. Russian dream and western reality. Seewald, Stuttgart 1983. ISBN 3-512-00669-8 ; first published in 1981 in France.
  • Settlement with Moscow. The Soviet injustice regime and the guilt of the West. Lübbe Verlagsgruppe, Bergisch Gladbach 1996, ISBN 3-7857-0829-7 .

Published in English translation:

  • 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 .

literature

  • Andre Martin and Peter Falke: Wladimir Bukowski. From the Soviet dungeon to the White House. Pattloch-Verlag, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-557-91147-0 .
  • Dina Kaminskaja: As a criminal defense attorney in Moscow . Beltz-Verlag, Weinheim 1985 (“The Month” issue 295), ISBN 3-407-39152-8 , p. 50 ff.

Web links

Commons : Wladimir Konstantinowitsch Bukowski  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Obituary
  2. ↑ Exchange in Zurich: Bukowski against Corvalán , Der Spiegel, December 27, 1976.
  3. ↑ On page 71 of his book " Pacifisty protiv mira " (La Presse libre, 1982) it says: "В партийном жаргоне существует такое выражение, как" поление, как "полеерен, как" полеера, как "полеера, полеера, знакуен, зноееращ, зиокеен, но верен знакуен ино веивенивеивеивеновеновено.
  4. ^ "On Language" , by W. Safire; Useful Idiots Of the West, nytimes.com, April 12, 1987.
  5. ^ German title: Settlement with Moscow. The Soviet injustice regime and the guilt of the West. Bergisch Gladbach 1996.
  6. ↑ http://www.schweizerzeit.ch/0707/euverschwoerung.htm
  7. ↑ https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/17/AR2005121700018.html
  8. ^ The Tsars Opponent , New Yorker, October 1, 2007; "Vladimir Bukovsky, a former political prisoner, gave a calm, stirring speech denouncing Putin's“ new Chekist regime. ” "
  9. ↑ Vladimir Bukovsky: Dissident claiming he was framed by Putin's Russia sees child pornography trial abandoned. The Independent, February 12, 2018 (accessed February 26, 2018)
personal data
SURNAME Bukowski, Wladimir Konstantinowitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Буковский, Владимир Константинович (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Soviet dissident and Russian publicist
DATE OF BIRTH December 30, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Invigorating
DATE OF DEATH October 27, 2019
Place of death Cambridge , UK