PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
One of the most widely-known prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union, whom The New York Times called a hero of almost legendary proportions, Vladimir Bukovsky was expelled from Moscow University at age 19 for publishing criticism of a state youth program. By the time he was 35, he had spent a total of twelve years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and ersatz psychiatric hospitals for a series of protests and leaked documents. After his expulsion to the West in 1976, he accepted an invitation to continue his interrupted studies at Cambridge University, where he earned a master's degree in biology. His status as a leading irritant to the Soviet government was ensured by the publication in 1978 of his powerful bestselling prison memoir To Build a Castle, recently re-released in digital format. Bukovsky continued for decades to write and speak about the dangerous abuses of state power. Having experienced brutal forced feeding through the nose during hunger strike himself, he warned post-9/11 America in a Washington Post essay that torture also traumatizes its perpetrators: Our rich experience in Russia has shown that many will become alcoholics or drug addicts, violent criminals or, at the very least, despotic and abusive fathers and mothers. Even into his seventies and despite failing health, he has continued to be a burr under the saddle of Russian leaders. In 2014 his testimony helped the British inquiry into the murder by radiation poisoning of his friend, Alexander Litvinenko, conclude that President Putin had likely sanctioned the killing. Bukovsky sees Russian leadership not as a series of changing regimes, but as an unbroken chain of murderous meddling at home and abroad. After the 2018 radiation poisoning of military intelligence defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England, he quipped: If two cruise missiles were to be launched at the Lubyanka, the level of terrorism worldwide would drop by approximately 80 percent. Writer and security policy expert, former editor of the Economist. From 1976 to 1982, he was the Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times of London. He then became a special correspondent on Soviet affairs of The Wall Street Journal. He is currently a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a fellow of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He has been a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a visiting professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Russian interference in American politics didn't start in 2016, but stretches back decades. Vladimir Bukovsky uses the Kremlin's own documents to show this and much more: how the Soviet Union provided a false face to the world and how Soviet leaders used Western leaders as dupes or willing actors. Judgment in Moscow provides the written Nuremberg trial the Soviets never got when the USSR fell. --Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History (Pulitzer Prize) Russian interference in Western politics has been in the news of late, but Bukovsky's deep dive into Soviet-era documents demonstrates that for much of the 20th century it was not paranoid fantasy, but cold, hard fact. --Glenn Harlan Reynolds, author of An Army of Davids The most important work to appear for decades on the Soviet empire and its aftermath. --Edward Lucas, former senior editor of The Economist, from the introduction A fascinating work which demolishes a few more myths prevalent in the West about the Soviet Union and the Cold War . . . stunning revelations. --Richard Pipes, former director of Harvard's Russian Research Center and member of the National Security Council A massive and major contribution . . . highly valuable material. --Robert Conquest, author of The Great Terror and Harvest of Sorrow At last, a book in the West that describes the Red Empire as seen by we who had to live under it. --Mart Laar, former Prime Minister of Estonia and recipient of the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom Judgment in Moscow is an essential warning of the dangers of collaborating with authoritarian regimes. It's also a timeless reminder that evil doesn't die, but must be battled back constantly. The crimes of the Soviet Union were enabled by appeasement and rationalization by politicians in the free world who ignored that the lesser evil is still evil. Today we are witnessing a similar plunge into the depths of moral equivalence and convenient deals with dictatorships. As Bukovsky writes in Judgment in Moscow, using a word much in vogue today, any sane person knows full well when he has entered into collusion with evil. Vladimir Bukovsky's moral compass has never failed, always pointing at the truth regardless of the circumstances or consequences. No one has written with greater clarity on why engagement between the free world and despots spreads corruption, not freedom. He writes, The voice of conscience whispers that our fall began from the moment we agreed to peaceful coexistence with evil. We have fallen far indeed, and Judgment in Moscow holds the mirror of history up to politicians today proclaiming the need to find common ground with a dictator like Vladimir Putin. --Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion and author of Winter is Coming After 23 years of underhand censorship, Vladimir Bukovsky's Judgment in Moscow has finally appeared in English. In 1995, thanks to his access to the secret documents of the Soviet Communist Party and the KGB, he was the first to reveal in detail how the totalitarian USSR misled and manipulated Western public opinion and, by corrupting its politicians and supporting guerrilla groups and terrorists, sought to subvert and destroy democracy. This is a fundamental historical study and major testimony by one of the great dissidents. --St phane Courtois, editor of The Black Book of Communism
