A few days ago, I met with a colleague and we took the train to Cambridge to visit Vladimir Bukovsky. One can read a lot about the atrocities committed in communist Russia, but nothing prepares you for a face-to-face meeting with a real-life hero who has overcome physical and psychological torture, imprisonment, prosecution, and years of harassment from perhaps the most effective military repression in the world (KGB), armed with nothing but strength of character and dignity. I wanted to pick his brain and try to get some answers, so after a few initial formalities, we moved on to a more meaningful conversation.
One of the first things I remember him saying was: “It’s been 30 years since we defeated Ortega, and he’s back in power. These guys are indestructible!” We were discussing, of course, Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, and his petrodiplomacy. Naturally, the topics of Ortega, Morales, Correa, FARC, and other unpleasant useful idiots came up early. Bukovsky has a keen interest in the progress of socialism/communism anywhere in the world, so we explained that the postmodern dictator, embodied by Chávez, doesn’t need to kill or disappear his opponents, as was done in Bukovsky’s time, because killing their political and public personas is a much more effective way of getting rid of enemies. In this sense, I recalled a comment he made about one of the methods used by the KGB: putting their enemies on INTERPOL’s wanted list to restrict their activities. For days, I had been thinking about Venezuela’s novel approach of asking INTERPOL to include student leader Nixon Moreno in their group of innocents sentenced to 30 years for false charges that could never be proven in court.
As we walked around King’s College, he explained how, after spending around 12 years in various prisons and psychiatric wards in Russia, he suddenly found himself on the peaceful and perfectly manicured lawns of King, marking the beginning of his academic career. In later years, the Yeltsin government invited Bukovsky to return to Russia to use his expertise in a Constitutional Court. He told me that before accepting, he made a request: to gain access to classified documents from the COMINTERN and other Communist Party organs. The KGB files remained out of reach. However, he took a laptop and a handheld scanner directly from its inventor—this was new technology at that time—and, taking advantage of the ignorance of the Russian politburo apparatchiks, who really didn’t understand what was happening, managed to copy thousands of documents that he later used to write a book titled Jugement à Moscou. But, as he recounted, what was interesting wasn’t just his findings, but his inability to publish the book in English due to potential lawsuits from Westerners appearing in the documents. He said that influential politicians in the UK and the US were happily passing information to the KGB and the Politburo in exchange for bribes. I asked him if he came across any notorious names from Latin America and Venezuela, and he replied that the Communist influence, in the form of intelligence exchange, training, arms supply, advising, etc., was old and widespread. Unfortunately, I don’t read Russian, but it would surely be fascinating to review the archives to see what’s in them.
We shared some thoughts on life in socialist Europe, Gramsci, and the victory of the Frankfurt School in imposing their miserable invention of political correctness as the norm in our societies. We laughed at the naivety of Western politicians when it comes to dealing with bullies like Putin, Chávez, Castro, Mugabe, or Ahmadinejad. Traveling through Latin America, except for Cuba, one gets the impression that Venezuelans are a few pages ahead in the script of postmodern dictatorship. Yet, meeting with Bukovsky takes us back to an era that most thought had ended in 1989: 20th-century communism. The tactics may be more refined, but the neocommunists and their ’21st-century socialism’ are just as effective at crushing the human spirit as their predecessors. Bukovsky lamented that after the Reagan administration, the US government stopped relying on information provided by sources like himself. He said that, for example, there are many thousands of Russian and Iranian expatriates living in the US, yet the State Department or intelligence agencies do not utilize this vast pool of knowledge, leading to many errors and failures in foreign policy. Meanwhile, the words of fundamentalists elected to office, despite their ideological and religious predisposition against Western norms, principles, and laws, are taken literally. This lack of commitment to those who know is echoed in other countries. Bukovsky mentioned that expecting Russia to help with nuclear dealings with Iran is more than naive; it’s downright foolish.
Curious about his courage and motivation to oppose oppression, Bukovsky gave me a remarkable response, which raises the topic to epistemological levels and somewhat aligns with the slogan of this blog: “When you’re not allowed to think for yourself, when you’re not allowed to have and express an opinion, to the extent that such opinion contradicts the dictates of the ruling party, you lose the one thing that makes us human. You become like an object in a nonsensical life, and such a life isn’t worth living. So, I decided to rebel against that system and wasn’t afraid to die, because living in such condition was like being dead.”
Unfortunately, this world of ours lacks imposing figures, like this Marlon Brando of dignity. For Bukovsky, opposing communism and its associated ideologies is not a choice but a moral imperative that reaffirms the human spirit.