“the greatest subversive of our time”

RIP Vladimir Bukovsky 1942-2019

https://www.vladimirbukovsky.com/

Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky, once dubbed “a hero of almost legendary proportion among the Soviet dissident movement” by the New York Times, died of cardiac arrest in Addenbrookes Hospital, in Cambridge, England at 9:30 PM Greenwich Time on 27 October, 2019. He was 76. His health had been poor in recent years.

A gifted writer, Bukovsky was revered for his ability to document both the daily insults and grand oppression of Soviet prison life, and to convey with detail the soul-crushing effects of torture on both prisoner and jailer.

Bukovsky's longtime friend and translator, Alyona Kojevnikov, spoke from the hospital: “A very dear friend of many, a brilliant interlocutor, a man of amazing courage and integrity. God rest his soul. They broke the mould after he was made.”

Novelist Vladimir Nabokov praised him as a "courageous and precious man" in a 1974 letter to the editor of The Observer. Nabokov wrote, "Bukovsky's heroic speech to the court in defense of freedom, and his five years of martyrdom in a despicable psychiatric jail will be remembered long after the torturers he defied have rotted away."

Historian and former CIA analyst Richard Pipes said shortly before his death, "Vladimir Bukovsky was an outstanding dissident both in the Soviet Union and abroad, and a man who courageously identified and criticized the totalitarian policies of Moscow. He ought to be remembered as a true hero."

Edward Lucas, editor of Standpoint, said, "Vladimir Bukovsky was a moral and political titan in the existential struggle of the Cold War. His courage and clarity inspired a generation and fueled the victory of dignity, freedom, and justice. Moreover, he also saw that the victory was incomplete--sounding the alarm about Russia's unburied totalitarian and imperialist history."

A leading Russian human rights writer and activist, Bukovsky spent a total of 12 years imprisoned by the USSR. After his release to the West in 1976, he spent his last four decades writing and campaigning against successive regimes in his homeland.

https://bukovsky-archive.com/

https://www.city-journal.org/html/hidden-history-evil-13281.html