Vladimir Bukovskiy: Belarusian opposition does its job

A meeting with a former dissident Vladimir Bukovskiy took place in Prague.

It was devoted to the publication of his book “And wind comes back” in the Czech language, Radio Svaboda reports.

Vladimir Bukovskiy is now 70, approximately half of these years he spent in the Soviet Unon and half – in emigration. At the beginning of the 1990-ies the dissident returned to Russia and was a witness at the proceedings at the country’s Constitutional Court on the case CPSU against Eltsin. Preparing to the proceedings Bukovskiy was granted access to the co-called “special folder” from the archive of the president of Russia – secret documents of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Soviet KGB. Bukovskiy copied and later published some of these documents. He says that among the things that surprised him in the documents was first of all the behavior of Western politicians in the relations with the Communist leadership of the USSR.

“We recently published a document stating that the senator Joe Biden, the current Vice-President of the USA, came to the Soviet Union in 1979 and in a private conversation in the Central Committee said: “Do not pay attention that we organize protests about the issue of dissident, political prisoners – we do that for public. You will say “no” and we will accept that “no”. Such an open hypocrisy of an American senator. Why did he say that? Did he think that the Soviet authorities would like him better for that? No, they despised such things and did not like people without principles. We published this document in the USA, but, of course, it did not have any effect on the results of the elections”, - Vladimir Bukovskiy told.

The former dissident explained that his decision to leave post-Soviet Russia was mainly influenced by the refusal of the then Russian president Boris Eltsin to take the Communist Party to court – something like a Nuremberg process against the leadership of the Nazi Germany. Without such a trial the people, responsible for the crimes committed during the existence of the USSR, remained in power and received an opportunity to control Russian business.

In the elections 2008 Bukovskiy tried to run for president in Russia, but the Russian Central Electoral Commission did not register him as a candidate. He explains that in this way he tried to bring the attention of the international community to the new attempts of the Russian authorities to use punitive psychiatry against dissidents. According to him, the return of punitive psychiatry in Russia is still possible and even logical since the people, who once diagnosed false mental conditions with Soviet dissidents, retained their positions and diplomas.

The participants of the meeting asked Bukovskiy, which major mistakes he saw in the activities of the current Russian opposition. Among such mistakes he mentioned the passion for party battles in the conditions when parties cannot really become influential.

“In the end they start competing with each other. In different words, the energy of these parties goes on fighting each other, but not the regime”, - he said.

Vladimir Bukovskiy’s opinion about the Belarusian opposition is different. He is sure, that is has achieved a lot, especially in the international arena.

“Your opposition is very active – it is hard to reproach it for anything. It is heard in the West. It arranges big protests inside Belarus too. At some point Lukashenka was totally a persona non-grata in Europe, he was not received anywhere, and it was the result of the work of the opposition, which led many campaigns on the issue of the political repressions. They do their job, but it is not always clear what to do with regimes of that kind”, - Bukovskiy claimed.