54 Facts About Vladimir Bukovsky

Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky was a Russian-born British human rights activist and writer.

Vladimir Bukovsky spent a total of twelve years in the psychiatric prison-hospitals, labour camps, and prisons of the Soviet Union during Brezhnev rule.

In 2001, Vladimir Bukovsky received the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom, awarded annually since 1993 by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Vladimir Bukovsky was born to Russian parents in the town of Belebey in the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, to which his family was evacuated during World War II.

In September 1960, Vladimir Bukovsky entered Moscow University to study biology.

Vladimir Bukovsky portrayed the USSR as an "illegal society" facing an acute ideological crisis.

Vladimir Bukovsky was interrogated twice before being thrown out of the university in autumn 1961.

Vladimir Bukovsky was later convicted, in absentia, by reason of his "insanity", under Article 70.1 of the RSFSR Criminal Code.

Vladimir Bukovsky was examined by Soviet psychiatrists, declared to be mentally ill, and sent for treatment at the Special Psychiatric Hospital in Leningrad where he remained for almost two years, until February 1965.

In December 1965, Vladimir Bukovsky helped prepare a demonstration on Pushkin Square in central Moscow to protest against the trial of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel.

On 1 September 1967, at his own trial, Vladimir Bukovsky used his final words to attack the regime's failure to respect the law or follow legal procedures.

Vladimir Bukovsky invoked Article 125 of the 1936 Soviet Constitution to defend the right to organise demonstrations and other public protests.

Vladimir Bukovsky further suggested that the prosecution had repeatedly failed to observe the revised 1961 Code of Criminal Procedure in its conduct of the case.

Vladimir Bukovsky was defiant and, like fellow demonstrator Victor Khaustov, was given three years in an "ordinary regime" corrective-labour camp.

Vladimir Bukovsky was sent to Bor in the Voronezh Region to serve his sentence.

Vladimir Bukovsky's letter appeared on 12 March in The Times and later in the British Journal of Psychiatry Vladimir Bukovsky was arrested on 29 March and held in custody for nine months before being put on trial in January 1972.

The information Vladimir Bukovsky had gathered and sent to the West galvanised human rights activists worldwide and those within the Soviet Union.

Vladimir Bukovsky later characterised this reaction as "the most important victory for the dissident form of glasnost".

Vladimir Bukovsky was sentenced to two years in prison, five in a labour camp, and five more in internal exile.

In December 1976, Vladimir Bukovsky was deported from the USSR and exchanged at Zurich airport by the Soviet government for the imprisoned general secretary of the Communist Party of Chile, Luis Corvalan.

Vladimir Bukovsky moved to Great Britain where he settled in Cambridge and resumed his studies in biology, disrupted fifteen years earlier by his expulsion from Moscow University.

Vladimir Bukovsky gained a master's degree in Biology at Cambridge University.

Vladimir Bukovsky wrote and published To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter.

Since he has lived in the West, Vladimir Bukovsky has written many essays and polemical articles.

In 1983, together with Cuban dissident Armando Valladares, Vladimir Bukovsky co-founded and was later elected president of Resistance International.

Vladimir Bukovsky supported Yeltsin against the Supreme Soviet in the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis in October that year but criticised the new Constitution of Russia approved two months later, as being designed to ensure a continuation of Yeltsin's power.

In 1992, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, President Yeltsin's government invited Vladimir Bukovsky to serve as an expert witness at the trial before the Constitutional Court where Russia's communists were suing Yeltsin for banning their Party and taking its property.

Vladimir Bukovsky hoped that an international tribunal in Moscow might play a similar role to the first Nuremberg Trial in post-Nazi Germany and help the country begin to overcome the legacy of Communism.

In early 1996, a group of Moscow academics, journalists and intellectuals suggested that Vladimir Bukovsky should run for President of Russia as an alternative candidate to both incumbent President Boris Yeltsin and his main challenger Gennady Zyuganov of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.

Vladimir Bukovsky wanted to discuss the strategy of the Russian opposition.

In January 2004, with Garry Kasparov, Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir V Kara-Murza and others, Bukovsky was a co-founder of Committee 2008.

In 2013 Vladimir Bukovsky was featured in a documentary series by Natella Boltyanskaya Parallels, Events, People.

In 2009, Vladimir Bukovsky joined the council of the new Solidarnost coalition which brought together a wide range of extra-parliamentary opposition forces.

In EUSSR, a booklet written with Pavel Stroilov and published in 2004, Vladimir Bukovsky exposed what he saw as the "Soviet roots of European Integration".

Two years later, in an interview with The Brussels Journal, Vladimir Bukovsky said he had read confidential documents from secret Soviet files in 1992 which confirmed the existence of a "conspiracy" to turn the European Union into a socialist organisation.

Ten years earlier, Vladimir Bukovsky sketched some of the ways in which cooperation was secured.

In May 2007, Vladimir Bukovsky announced his plans to run as candidate for president in the May 2008 Russian presidential election.

On 16 December 2007, Vladimir Bukovsky was officially nominated to run against Dmitry Medvedev and other candidates.

Vladimir Bukovsky secured the required number of signatures to register and submitted his application to the Central Election Commission on time, 18 December 2007.

Vladimir Bukovsky's candidacy received the support of Grigory Yavlinsky, who announced on 14 December 2007 at the Yabloko party conference that he would forgo a campaign of his own and would instead support Vladimir Bukovsky.

The Action Group in support of Vladimir Bukovsky's candidacy denied claims by pro-government media that Vladimir Bukovsky had failed in his campaign to become RF President and in appeals before the RF Constitutional Court.

Vladimir Bukovsky appealed against the decision at the RF Supreme Court on 28 December 2007 and, subsequently, before its cassation board on 15 January 2008.

On 30 March 2011, Vladimir Bukovsky requested the arrest of Mikhail Gorbachev by the British authorities after submitting to Westminster Magistrates' Court materials on crimes against humanity that the former Soviet leader had allegedly committed in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Vladimir Bukovsky was among the first 34 signatories of "Putin must go", an online anti-Putin manifesto published on 10 March 2010.

In May 2012, Vladimir Bukovsky Putin began his third term as president of the Russian Federation after serving four years as the country's prime minister.

The West responded with sanctions targeted at Putin's immediate entourage, and Vladimir Bukovsky expressed the hope that this would prove the end of his regime.

On 17 March 2015, at the long-delayed inquiry into Alexander Litvinenko's fatal poisoning Vladimir Bukovsky gave his views as to why the former FSB man had been murdered.

In 2015, the UK Crown Prosecution Service announced prosecution of Vladimir Bukovsky for "prohibited images" of children allegedly found on his computer.

Vladimir Bukovsky noted that while the original announcement by the CPS accused him of "possession and making", the prosecution materials passed to the court only charged "possession".

In early May 2015, it was reported that Vladimir Bukovsky had undergone a nine-hour heart operation in a private German clinic, during which he was given two artificial valves.

Subsequently, Vladimir Bukovsky was kept in a medically induced coma for three days to improve his chances of recovery.

Vladimir Bukovsky was later ruled to be too ill to stand trial.

Vladimir Bukovsky died of a heart attack on 27 October 2019 at the age of 76 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, after a period of ill-health.

Vladimir Bukovsky is buried on the eastern side of Highgate Cemetery.