Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky: 1942 – 2019

Tom G. PalmerThe Cato Institute mourns the passing of a colleague, Vladimir Bukovsky, asenior fellow of the institute and a giant among champions of freedom.A single name was enough to enrage powerful dictators: Bukovsky. Vladimir Bukovsky was a tower of strength, with the integrity never to buckle and the courage to endure. The word dissident barely suffices to describe him. He was interrogated and then expelled from university at 19 for attending illegal poetry readings and for criticizing Komsomol, the Young Communist League. In 1963 he was arrested for making two copies of Milovan Djilas ’s workThe New Class, which argued that communist states, far from eliminating class oppression, merely cemented the rule of a new class of party bureaucrats.He was sentenced to two years of torture in a psychiatric prison-hospital in Leningrad, on the grounds that being critical of communism was a symptom of a mental illness. That was only the first of his multiple imprisonments. Bukovsky spent a total of twelve years in psychiatric prison-hospitals, forced labor camps, and prisons in the USSR. In 1976 the top leaders of the USSR, in exasperation, decided to expel him in exchange for a Chilean Communist. Mainly they wanted to be rid of him. Bukovsky was too prominent merely to murder, as he had in 1971 arranged for documents to be smuggled to the outside world that showed the monstrous tortures inflicted on free-thinking people, who were imprisoned and subjected to experimentation and ...

Source: Cato-at-liberty - October 28, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Tom G. Palmer Source Type: blogs