Updates to our Terms of Use

We are updating our Terms of Use. Please carefully review the updated Terms before proceeding to our website.

Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

Famous Soviet Dissident Vladimir Bukovsky Dies at 76

Vladimir Bukovsky, a prominent dissident and writer who helped expose the Soviet Union's abuse of psychiatry to silence its critics, has died in Britain at 76.

MOSCOW (AFP) — Vladimir Bukovsky, a prominent dissident and writer who helped expose the Soviet Union's abuse of psychiatry to silence its critics, has died in Britain at 76.

Bukovsky, whose health had been poor in recent years, died after suffering a cardiac arrest in hospital in Cambridge, England on Sunday night, said the Bukovsky Center, a U.S.-based volunteer organization.

By the age of 35, Bukovsky had spent 12 years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric hospitals as a dissident who openly opposed the regime.

He was one of the first to expose the practice of punitive psychiatry in the USSR.

Soviet medics issued political dissidents with false diagnoses of mental illness and incarcerated them in psychiatric hospitals where they were forced to take strong medicines.

The practice became widespread between the mid-1960s and the breakup of the Soviet Union.

"The Soviet authorities used to call Bukovsky a hooligan involved in anti-Soviet activities," rights group Memorial said on Twitter.

"We call him a hero and say thank you."

Bukovsky first gained prominence as a student activist.

In 1963, he was arrested for possessing forbidden literature. Authorities declared him mentally ill and put him in a psychiatric hospital. He was arrested again in 1967 and sent to a labor camp for three years.

In 1971, he managed to have psychiatric hospital records for six dissidents smuggled to the West, creating an uproar.

After another prison sentence, in 1976, he was deported from the USSR and exchanged in Zurich for Luis Corvalan, the head of the Chilean Communist party in a prisoner swap with dictator Augusto Pinochet.

He settled in Britain.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Bukovsky returned to Moscow and smuggled out Top Secret documents from the Communist Party's Central Committee archives.

Bukovsky was a critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying that the USSR and Russia under Putin were not much different.

In a 2006 article in The Times dubbed "License to kill," Bukovsky warned that Putin had pushed through legislation that would allow Moscow to assassinate its enemies in any country.

Later that year, Bukovsky's friend and Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko died in London of radioactive poisoning.

In 2008, Bukovsky tried to run for president in Russia but was not allowed to stand as a candidate.

In his later years, he was caught up in a child pornography case.

He was arrested by British police in 2014 and charged with making and possessing indecent images of children. He denied the charges.

The trial was suspended due to his ill health.

Bukovsky wrote a number of books, including his bestselling 1978 autobiography, "To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter," in which he detailed his life in the Gulag and psychiatric hospitals.

On Monday, opposition leader Dmitry Gudkov recommended that Russians read Bukovsky's memoirs.

"Not a single word has become obsolete there," Gudkov said on Twitter.

© Agence France-Presse

Categories / International, Politics

Subscribe to Closing Arguments

Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.

Loading...