As communist regimes crumbled across Eastern Europe after 1989, once-marginalized dissidents found themselves in positions of high office. Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa were merely the most prominent. Jiri Dienstbier, Czechoslovakia’s first post-Communist foreign minister, recalled how he worked his final shift in the boiler room (a typical place of work for dissidents in communist countries) before attending his first cabinet meeting.
Russia never managed to complete this path, but if it had, it’s clear who would have been its answer to Havel and Walesa. Vladimir Bukovsky — who died last week at age 76 of cardiac arrest in Cambridge, England — was the most prominent and charismatic of that small group of people who defied the odds by challenging a brutal dictatorship. “We were a handful of unarmed men facing a mighty state in possession of the most monstrous machinery of oppression in the entire world,” Bukovsky wrote in his seminal memoir “To Build a Castle” (known in Russian as “And the Wind Returns”). “And … even in jail we had proved too dangerous for it.”
Bukovsky’s life story reads like a chronicle of the Russian dissident movement. A nonconformist since his school days, he was among the organizers of public readings of banned poetry on Mayakovsky Square in 1960, and he also helped to set up the 1965 demonstration on Pushkin Square, Moscow’s first opposition rally in four decades. A committed proponent of peaceful nonviolent struggle, Bukovsky considered the spread of information to be the main tool against totalitarianism — and he furthered it by all available means, from helping to spread samizdat (uncensored underground publications) to alerting world media to the horrors of Soviet punitive psychiatry that saw dissenters committed to psychiatric institutions.
The campaign paid off. On Dec. 18, 1976, the KGB took Bukovsky — still in handcuffs — straight from his prison cell to a military airfield near Moscow. There they put him on a plane to Zurich, where he was swapped for the freed Chilean Communist Party leader Luis Corvalán in what remains the most famous Cold War prisoner exchange. As the U.S.S.R. did not have diplomatic relations with Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, the agreement was negotiated by the administration of U.S. President Gerald Ford. Nathaniel Davis, U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, coordinated the exchange on the tarmac.
Bukovsky would return to Russia in 1991, as the ground began to shake under the Soviet system. After its collapse, he emerged as the leading proponent of a Nuremberg-style trial for the crimes of communism and — no less important — of opening the archives to reveal the full scope of those crimes, their Soviet instigators and Western enablers. Bukovsky’s demand was met only partially: During the 1992 hearings at the Russian Constitutional Court on the legality of President Boris Yeltsin’s ban of the Communist Party, he was briefly given access to hundreds of Politburo and Central Committee documents that were later published in his book “Judgment in Moscow.”
But a full-fledged trial never came, and the archives were soon resealed. “Be careful, it’s like dealing with a wounded beast. If you don’t finish it off, it will attack you,” Bukovsky warned the Russian government before leaving Moscow in 1993, this time voluntarily. His words proved chillingly prophetic. Six years later, a former KGB officer became president of Russia.
“Vladimir Bukovsky was Russia’s missed opportunity to break from its disastrous and criminal 20th century,” Victor Shenderovich, a prominent Russian writer, noted last week. “The fact that this great man died as an outcast in exile, and that his name is unknown to most young Russians is our shame. … But no effort is in vain, and Bukovsky, with his audacious fate, his fearlessness, and his intellect, has managed to reach a great many people.”
He has indeed. And, although he will not be here to see it, one day the wind will return.