Vladimir Bukovsky 

BUKOVSKY, who died aged 76 in 2019, was a Soviet dissident, Vladimir Putin critic, and human rights campaigner. He exposed the Soviet use of psychiatry against political prisoners and thus played a key role in undermining communism in eastern Europe.

Bukovsky was always modest about his achievements. He once said that it was the stupidity of those who ruled the Soviet Union that brought about its downfall. And yet together with a small group of fellow dissenters – he put their numbers at between 3000 and 5000 – in the 1960s and 1970s Bukovsky managed to chip away at Soviet power. He spent 12 years in a succession of prisons, labour camps and psychiatric hospitals. The KGB was his sworn enemy. They hated him and he hated them. Eventually, in 1976, they threw him out of the country.

Bukovsky likened his struggle against the Kremlin to that of a Siberian bear who repeatedly climbs a tree to get to a piece of carrion. In the way is a large, heavy block of wood. The bear swats the wood aside and is bashed on the side of the head. Enraged, he hits the wood harder, with a more painful result. Eventually the bear falls unconscious from the tree. “This is an approximate description of my relations with the powers that be,” he wrote.

Still, sometimes the bear won. It was Yuri Andropov – the KGB boss and future head of the politburo – who drew up a secret plan to use psychiatric facilities to “treat” dissidents. It was based on Nikita Khrushchev’s belief that anti-Soviet consciousness was a mental disease. Political opponents including Bukovsky were detained without trial. There was no appeal. They were injected with psychotropic drugs.PC

COURTESY: The Guardian