The man whom the New York Times called "a hero of almost legendary proportions among the Soviet dissident movement”, Vladimir Bukovsky was expelled from Moscow University at 19 years of age, and by the time he was 35 had spent a total of twelve years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric hospitals. Mounting pressure in the West led to his release in 1976, when he was famously traded for the Chilean Communist leader Luis Corvalan. He then accepted an invitation to continue his interrupted biology studies at Cambridge University. His fame as a major irritant to the Soviet government was sealed with the publication of his powerful bestselling prison memoir To Build a Castle. A masterful writer, whom Nabokov called "that courageous and precious man", Bukovsky continued to write about life under totalitarianism. “The great truth was that it was not rifles, not tanks, and not atom bombs that created power,” he wrote. “Power depended upon public obedience, upon a will to submit.” He himself never offered that obedience or submission to totalitarian authority. Bukovsky has used his acclaim to warn world leaders of continuing deceit and manipulation by Soviet leaders and their successors, up to and including President Putin. He recently said: "Having failed to finish off conclusively the communist system, we are now in danger of integrating the resulting monster into our world. It may not be called communism anymore, but it has retained many of its dangerous characteristics." In 2014 Bukovksy testified at the British inquiry into the 2006 murder by radiation poisoning of his friend, the FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko; the inquiry found that the killers were probably acting with the approval of President Putin. Vladimir Bukovsky lives in Cambridge, England. Photo courtesy The Horst Tappe Foundation
