Vladimir Bukovsky’s Heroic Legacy
The dissident author is gone but won’t be forgotten.
Vladimir Bukovsky, who died at 76 last month in Cambridge, England, leaves a legacy and example for anyone who feels they can’t go along with the party line. As a young man in Moscow, he persisted in publishing and reading forbidden works in the face of certain incarceration. He racked up 12 years in labor camps, prisons and phony psychiatric wards before an exasperated Kremlin traded him to the West in a prisoner exchange in 1976.
Bukovsky’s final book Judgment in Moscow, belatedly published in English a few months before his death, lays out a paper trail of Kremlin documents he stole in 1992. They illustrate both Moscow’s covert reach around the world and its leaders’ petulant intolerance to criticism. After reading their meeting minutes, it’s too bad the Central Committee wasn’t on Twitter to keep us entertained.
Judgment, whose English edition I prepared for publication as a volunteer after 24 years of it being dodged by wary publishing houses, is built around thousands of pages of top secret Communist Party of the Soviet Union documents that the ex-pat Bukovsky scanned when then-President Yeltsin brought the exiled writer back to Moscow to assist in a court trial brought by deposed Communist Party officers.
Poring through decades of classified papers in a guarded archive, Bukovsky used a newly developed Japanese scanner — unrecognized by those watching him — to make copies of classified records. His takeaway ranges from an early scribble by Stalin, glibly raising the quota for executions, to Gorbachev’s fin de siecle response when told in a meeting about the Tiananmen Square massacre of three thousand unarmed protesters: “Three thousand … so what.”
In between are decades of recorded meetings and communications between Soviet officials and leaders in Western Europe. At best, the USSR’s neighbors are trying to keep peace with the superpower next door. But too often they’re secretly courting Moscow’s mafia in hopes of a seat at the table.
The book’s record of secret dealing goes back to 1969, when West German minister Egon Bahr seeks “a series of unofficial negotiations” out of sight from his official negotiators in Bonn. His goal is to keep political opponents from having anything to use against him. Two decades later, French President Mitterand proposes to the struggling Gorbachev “a new Union” that would prevent the collapse of the USSR through an alliance between Paris and Moscow. More comically, the head of Sweden’s leading socialist party is so covertly helpful to the Central Committee’s agenda that in one meeting, they agree to send him a birthday present.
All along, the Kremlin approves covert funding and aid to Western activist movements that keep their opponents off balance. They ship Russian-made paper to South American propaganda publishers. They quietly aid advocates of nuclear disarmament in the UK — you go first, England! They propose to fund and advise the Black Panthers in the U.S., in a formal request that begins by invoking capitalist oppression of African-Americans in America but devolves into what a great idea this is to keep Nixon’s attention off foreign policy.
Judgment, which Bukovsky wrote in his native Russian in 1995, was translated into several other languages in the mid-90’s. The French translation sold well. But U.S. and UK publishers balked at putting their imprint on an English translation. British publishers were bluntly threatened under that country’s tort-friendly libel laws of the time.
In America, Judgment faced a different roadblock. The new edition includes correspondence from a long back-and-forth with a senior editor at Random House. He wants Bukovsky to rewrite the book to be less accusatory of the few Americans named in the documents — Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola — whom Bukovsky felt shouldn’t have negotiated with the Communists at all, whether on terms of disarmament or to propose a documentary on it. The editor seems less worried about lawsuits than about being criticized for an insufficiently left-leaning book.
A quarter century later, in an era of hectoring TV hosts and Internet mobs, that fear seems both antiquated and evergreen. But Judgment’ s central theme from 1995 is no longer controversial: If we don’t prosecute Soviet crimes against humanity as we did the defeated Nazis (the book’s title is a reference to the film Judgment at Nuremberg) , the abuses and subterfuge will never end. The same criminal gangs will rebrand and return to power, Bukovsky warned after seeing old nemeses from the 70’s still in office in Moscow. Their heirs, he warned, will continue to use people as raw materials, grinding them underfoot and extracting the joy from their lives.
Bukovsky didn’t get his trial, but he did leave a dual legacy. First, Judgment is a lengthy tour behind the curtains at the Kremlin. It illuminates the behavior of today’s occupants, many of whom are the KGB-era veterans including Vladimir Putin.
If you’re looking for a clockwork game of chess being orchestrated from Moscow in today’s news out of D.C., Judgment reveals Russian influence to be more like a mean game of darts. They fund one incompetent venture after another. They occupy Afghanistan and believe reports that everything’s under control there. They hang onto separatist Poland but also carry tens of billions of dollars in Polish debt, even as President Reagan is driving them into military-budget bankruptcy with his dubious Strategic Defense Initiative. Notably absent is any sense of crisis around Chernobyl, which Gorbachev himself now claims scuttled the regime’s remaining credibility with its citizens. Even Gorbachev proves a different man behind closed doors. His take on the gunning down of protesters in Soviet Georgia: “You have to put people in their place.”
As Bukovsky’s editor, I asked him to write an epilogue for Judgment, tying his early-90’s book to current events. “If you read the book,” he dismissed me, “you don’t need me to explain anything.” True, the Soviet modus operandi — scattershot and self-serving — can be spotted in modern Russian attempts to sway American politics. They’re not grooming Manchurian candidates, they’re simply boosting disruptors. Their operative who sought a deal with Trump’s campaign wasn’t looking to get the U.S. out of Syria, or help Russia’s enormous oil and gas industry by scaling back American fracking. No, Natalia Veselnitskaya’s target was the Magnitsky Act, which authorizes the Senate to freeze billions of dollars in personal assets of Russian officials in response to human rights abuses. Magnitsky is the closest thing to a trial and sentence that Bukovsky lived to see.
The Putin regime’s focus on their personal bank accounts leads to the more universal legacy that Vladimir Bukovsky leaves us: As a man who spent his twenties and thirties repeatedly incarcerated for his words (and for smuggling phony diagnoses of “schizophrenic” dissidents into the hands of doctors worldwide), he had a short fuse for would-be dissidents whose utmost priority was their own comfort.
As a young man, he had refused the chance to avoid prison via a public apology. He instead gave a courtroom oration that novelist Vladimir Nabokov called “a heroic speech in defense of freedom” before being led away to labor camp. In Judgment, he berates Americans as soft, capitulating followers who backpedal from their convictions—not to avoid labor camp, but to keep their comfy careers. He compares us to the professional intelligentsia of the Soviet era, who strode safely in and out of the Institute of Literature past unbending poet and playwright Andrei Platonov, whose terms of censure by the government let him work at the Institute, but as a watchman in a hut outside:
All these people were phony “authorities” whose works did not, and could not, survive the regime. Listening now to the keening and wailing of the intelligentsia about how they suffered, how they were forced to lie, I am deeply puzzled: Why was it necessary to become writers, professors or academics at any price? As we can see here, talent has nothing to do with it; talent survives being a watchman. Everyone has a choice. But no, nobody was prepared to become a watchman, everyone wanted to suffer in comfort. Everyone needed an honorable justification for their own conformism.
By contrast, Bukovsky wondered why Hollywood’s actual communists of the 1950’s didn’t stand up to Joe McCarthy. “They faced no threat of camps, or torture, or destruction. At worst a loss of their jobs. It’s curious how the majority of them broke so shamefully, pointing fingers at their friends and neighbors and lying under oath. Only a few refused to speak. Suffering heroes indeed!”
In his writings, Bukovsky was forgiving to fellow dissidents who signed phony recantations and diagnoses of mental illness to get out of lifetime lockup. He was touchingly sympathetic to his prison guards, whom he saw dehumanized and made miserable by years of bullying and torturing fellow humans under orders. He saved his perpetual spite for the sellouts who lie about their beliefs as a career move. The skilled naysayers who always know where the approved bounds of dissent are drawn. The poseurs who curate their public personas to appear defiant while posing no real threat to either the state or the mob.
Many won’t agree with Bukovsky’s take on world events, but reading him conveys an inarguable insight: Whatever you believe in, you’ll know when you’re up against the wall to deny it in word or in deed. At that moment, he wrote, change is wrought by people like himself who are less brave than stubborn: “With his back to the wall, a man cannot sacrifice a part of himself, cannot split himself up. And an astonishing thing happens. In fighting to preserve his integrity, he is simultaneously fighting for his people. It is such individuals who win the right for their communities to live — even, perhaps, if they are not thinking of it at the time.”
Paul Boutin is Executive Editor at Ninth of November Press, which published Judgment in Moscow in English.
