Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovskij has died
He was 76 years old. In 1960 he was one of the initiators of the Soviet dissent movement with rallies in Mayakovsky Square. He spent 12 years in Soviet concentration camps and psychiatric mental hospitals. In 1971 he revealed to the world the Soviet use of asylums against dissidents. He was a great critic of the European Union, which he regarded equiparated to the Soviet regime.
Moscow (AsiaNews) - Two days ago, on October 27th, at the age of 76, one of the most famous Soviet dissidents, the founder of the human rights movement Vladimir Bukovsky, passed away. The website dedicated to the writer and activist reported that he was admitted to Cambridge hospital after a heart attack.
Bukovsky was born on December 29, 1942 in a small town in the Urals of the Soviet republic of Bashkortostan, during the evacuation for the Nazi invasion during World War II.
In 1960, still very young, he was one of the initiators of rallies at the monument to Mayakovsky in the homonymous Moscow square, which represented the first public expression of the Soviet dissent movement. The young people gathered to hear the poems of the "forbidden" writers, starting from the censored compositions of Vladimir Majakovskij himself, a revolutionary poet who committed suicide in 1930 after disillusionment with the dictatorial developments of the Bolshevik regime.
Bukovsky spent 12 years in Soviet concentration camps and psychiatric mental hospitals, in which opponents of the regime were locked up. His last arrest was in 1971, with a sentence of seven years; in 1976 he was exchanged with the leader of the Chilean communists Luis Corvalan, in an operation that had much resonance in the international public opinion. After the exchange, the Russian dissident lived in Britain, often traveling to speak about the violation of human rights in the USSR.
In a 1999 interview with Radio Svoboda, Bukovsky recounted how the activist's conscience in favor of human rights had already formed in him at the age of 16, following readings of nineteenth-century texts such as essays by Herzen, one of the first Russian socialists who did not accept Marxist theories.
Bukovsky actually represented the "secular" dissent, which called for reforms in the USSR in the sense of a democratic and liberal socialism. The beginning of the samizdat was linked above all to the poets: Pasternak, Mandel'stam, Anna Akhmatova, exponents of the Russian intelligentsija of the post-revolution years, who constituted the bond with the antecedent Russia, but with suffered visions of the future.
Bukovskij recounted the mild spirit of Russian dissidents, who asked only to be able to live their lives in freedom, and express their ideas: "We did not want to make any revolution, or counter-revolution. Ours was a kind of philosophical defense. We didn't want to change the system, improve it or make it worse, let alone destroy it. The sense of our protest was in the fact that we said: you want to build communism, well do it! But without us, leave us in peace ... can we live so that in the midst of your communism there is also a small space for us, where we will not try to build anything, but simply to live? ".
Vladimir Bukovskij obtained a doctorate in biology in Cambridge, then devoted himself to the study of neuro-physiology. His stay in Soviet psychiatric hospitals led him to take an interest in the profound mechanisms of the psyche, he who in 1971 had revealed to the world the use of asylums against dissidents, smuggling out an explosive document for publishing abroad. After a period of notoriety, in the West he then fell into oblivion, due to his charges against Western bureaucracies (in particular against the European Union), which he believed were the perfect continuation of the Soviet regime.
His destiny partly resembles that of Aleksandr Solženicyn, the great dissident writer who criticized the weaknesses of the West, and in 1994 he returned to his homeland, eventually inspiring Putin's orthodox nationalism. Bukovsky, on the other hand, tried to oppose Putin, and to run for the 2007 presidential election, but was excluded because of his British citizenship. His death forces us to reflect even today on true respect for the rights of every person.
.png)
11/12/2018 09:22
21/05/2021 09:51
28/01/2004
15/09/2020 08:48
