Vladimir Bukovsky Quotes

Justice is always naive and self-confident; believing that it will immediately win once recognized. That is the reason why the forces of Justice are so poorly organized. On the other hand, the Evil is cynic, sly and fantastically organized. It never ever has the illusion of the ability to stand on its own feet and to win in a fair competition. That is why it is ready to use any kind of means without hesitation. And of course it does - under the banners of the most noble ideas.

This was an idea of Professor Cristin’s friend, the late Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who believed that a trial of communism was necessary if only to confront the world with communism’s many unpunished crimes. Cristin has a unique way of explaining the collapse of communism. It is a collapse, he says, in which the Iron Curtain was replaced with emerging communist movements in every Western country.

Soviet Jews would be released because the Soviet empire was in tatters. That was certainly my view, one that I had developed over the previous decade through telling conversations. In 1979, at the first Jonathan Institute conference in Jerusalem, I had spoken with the great Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. “Benjamin,” he had said, “please understand, the Soviet regime is desperate. Everything is rotten inside. Nothing works. It’s one big rotten core held together by the façade of invincibility provided by nuclear ICBMs parading in Red Square.” He predicted that within a decade the Soviet Union as we knew it would collapse. He was right on the

Furthermore, as if forgetting the existence of the Soviet “Evil Empire”, she practically called for the various peoples of the USSR to stay “loyal to the Soviet Union as a commonwealth of nations”, to be content with a certain degree of cultural and religious autonomy, like the various tribes in Nigeria. And this was said at the time of the offensive against the sovereignty of the Baltic republics, whose absorption into the USSR was never acknowledged by Britain or the USA. Alas, Thatcher was no exception. Even Ronald Reagan, President of the USA, a man for whom the very name Lenin was always anathema, did not fail to praise Gorbachev for his “return to the paths of Lenin.” This was also said in a radio address transmitted to the USSR. As for his successor, George Bush and his Secretary of State Jim Baker, they outdid everyone, opposing the inevitable disintegration of the USSR until the very last day. “Yes, I think I can trust Gorbachev,”—said George Bush to Time magazine357 just when Gorbachev was beginning to lose control and was tangled hopelessly in his own lies—“I looked him in the eye, I appraised him. He was very determined. Yet there was a twinkle. He is a guy quite sure of what he is doing. He has got a political feel.

One of the most famous enemies of Soviet communism is Vladimir Bukovsky. He was tortured by Soviet authorities and spent many years in Soviet prisons. He was even declared “insane” and sent to a psychiatric prison. When Bukovsky was exiled to the West, people paid lip service to his courage; but few heeded his warnings about Gorbachev’s Perestroika. Bukovsky reminded everyone that all Soviet leaders were liars. Gorbachev, he said, was no exception—and was certainly no democrat. Like Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, Gorbachev was a liar and a hangman. But hardly anyone listened. Everyone wanted to believe the Cold War was over.

People in general, and the intelligentsia in particular, are extremely arrogant, egotistic animals, considering themselves smarter than anyone else in the world, and certainly smarter than their governments. I can think of no occasion on which the intelligentsia admitted that it had been wrong, especially when it came to disputes with the lawful authority. The reason for this is probably the intelligentsia’s belief that its real abilities remain unwanted. Terrible. After all, they are the elite, and that means that they should rule the world or, at least, rule people’s minds. But life, that unfair judge, has condemned them to more humble pursuits: teaching children the alphabet, curing our aches and pains, studying bacteria through a microscope, being bored in provincial courtrooms, or giving communion to parishioners and listening to their endless complaints about the injustice of life. And all around, out in the big world, completely different people make important decisions that determine the fate of mankind. Moreover, those people are not brighter, better educated, or morally worthy. How can one accept that? So a member of the intelligentsia cannot simply force himself to do his job without contrivances and pretensions. He cannot just teach children to read and write—no, he has to “raise future generations”; he cannot just prescribe pills for a patient and ease his suffering—no, he needs to concern himself with the health of all mankind. A priest, meanwhile, is convinced that God Himself has put him in the pulpit for the salvation of one and all.

As Christendom suffers attack upon attack, indignity upon indignity, defeat after defeat, a new religion moves in to take its place. This great and rising sect of our time, which is socialism, has three major objectives as outlined by Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. First, socialism wants to destroy capitalism (i.e., in terms of private property in the sense of business ownership); second, socialism wants to destroy the family; and third, socialism wants to destroy the nation state. As Bukovsky pointed out, the socialists failed to destroy the idea of private property, but they have partly succeeded against the family and the nation state. The breakdown of the family is all too real for anyone to deny, and this breakdown spells disaster for a society that is too weak to resist.

His life has been a monument of perfect integrity, though we love to say such people don’t really exist. Bukovsky was locked up in several psychiatric institutions (“psikhushka”) where he spent the time finding ways to document the abuses and smuggle out the proof. (150 pages of psychiatric files on six dissidents, leading to global outcry. Bukovsky was returned to prison.) While in a psychiatric institution, Bukovsky was offered the chance to recant and escape prison; he refused and was instead sent to labor camp. All in all, he endured 12 years in the gulag, including labor camp, prison, and psychiatric prisons — all starting at the young age of 19, the first time he registered opposition to the Komsomol (a Communist Party-controlled youth organization).

Bukovsky reminded everyone that all Soviet leaders were liars. Gorbachev, he said, was no exception—and was certainly no democrat. Like Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, Gorbachev was a liar and a hangman. But hardly anyone listened. Everyone wanted to believe the Cold War was over. But how could we have won the Cold War? This was the inconvenient question Bukovsky asked. Random House senior editor Jason Epstein rejected Bukovsky’s question altogether. And so, Bukovsky’s book on the equivocal “fall of communism” was not published in English—until now.

It was as if the Allies at the end of the Second World War had not demanded the unconditional capitulation of Nazi Germany, but contented themselves with its perestroika, namely a certain liberalization of the regime. Had that been so, what would Europe be like today?” Bukovsky had traveled back and forth to Russia from Cambridge, England, in the early 90s after President Boris Yeltsin’s government invited him as an expert witness in a trial before the Constitutional Court in which the communists were suing the government for outlawing them and taking their property.The West was entirely complicit in the soapy dismissal of the entire Soviet communist death apparatus. Had there been Nuremberg-style trials, many shocks would have emerged, including the vast number of Western media correspondents who were on the Kremlin payroll, and chirping along accordingly.

Ninth of November Press—a small West Coast press—deserves enormous credit for raising “Judgment” from the sea floor where it had languished. In 1995, Random House bought the book and then tried to bowdlerize it. Bukovsky recounts that he was strong-armed—by the editorial director, Jason Epstein, no less—to “rewrite the whole book from the liberal-left perspective.

Look at the resulting shift in the global balance of power decades later: Putin’s regime links arms with the communist regime in China, with the communist regime in Cuba, with Nicaragua and South Africa, Vietnam and North Korea, Bukovsky’s words come home. The communist bloc rises from the ashes, with new weapons, new technologies, and new economic clout. We believed the communist lies and invested our “peace dividend.” Now we are threatened from within and from without. “The whole thing hangs in the balance,” said Bukovsky.

J.R. Nyquist: “And how will Bukovsky’s tale of Western complicity in communist crimes, and Western obliviousness—and the bungled ‘end of the Cold War’—be received in the English-speaking world?” Mr. Bukovsky: “It is a lonely struggle I have conducted since the age of 16. And the struggle will continue to be lonely. The real problem is the elite in the West, the forces of ‘peace and progress.’ The Western elite is socialist. They were never serious about fighting Soviet power.

Mr. Nyquist: “We have a similar problem in the West.” Mr. Bukovsky: “At the moment, you’re right. The absence of leadership is frightening. Our so-called elites became rotten. In the past, in history, the elites would be periodically wiped out in revolutions. In our time, it does not happen. We are too civilized.

Instead, a KGB general like Oleg Kalugin, who bragged about his murders, retired to live in the West. If there is no statute of limitations on murder, how can this happen? Bukovsky wrote that Glasnost and Perestroika were “diabolical inventions” that ratified what followed in its wake. “Out of hundreds of thousands of politicians, journalists and academics, only a tiny handful retained sufficient sobriety not to yield to temptation, and it was an even tinier one that had the courage to voice their doubts out loud.” Later in the book, Bukovsky characterized the American elite as “raised on lies and betrayal,” damning them as the “natural ally of the USSR.” And so it remains true as ever today.

It lays bare the raw, true history of the Cold War, and—drawing on CPSU documents—shows how the tentacles of the Russian communist apparatus reached into every facet of our society, media, political system, educational system, and Hollywood. “It was de rigueur in those times to write only enthusiastic babble about the USSR, to the extent that it was surprising that the paper on which it was written did not go up in smoke from shame,” Bukovsky writes.