Andrew Higgins

His death, at Addenbrookes Hospital, was caused by heart failure, said Elizabeth Childs, the president of the Bukovsky Center, an American-based volunteer organization. He underwent heart surgery in Germany in 2015.

Bukovsky had lived mostly in Cambridge since 1976, when the Soviet authorities freed him in exchange for the jailed leader of the Chilean Communist Party. He had spend 12 years in Soviet prisons and hospitals.

Lionized by Soviet-era dissidents, Bukovsky also inspired a new generation of Kremlin critics opposed to Putin, including the activist rock band Pussy Riot. For a time he was an informal adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain and President Ronald Reagan.

Even as tributes poured in Monday from Russia and abroad, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, when asked about the death, said, “We don’t have any comment about that.”

For all his attacks on the Soviet and Russian authorities, Bukovsky also took a dim view of the European Union, which offended his commitment to increasingly libertarian views. He denounced the EU as a “monster” that had to be stopped and co-wrote a book, “EUSSSR,” which explored what he saw as the “Soviet roots of European integration.”

Bukovsky was best known for exposing the misuse of Soviet medicine to “treat” political dissent as a psychiatric disorder — something he knew about firsthand, having been sent to a psychiatric hospital. The practice began under Yuri V. Andropov, the KGB chief who became head of the Communist Party for a little more than a year before his death at 69 in 1984.

Bukovsky’s courtroom denunciation of the KGB’s hijacking of Soviet medicine to serve political persecution enraged the authorities and established his reputation as a hero to fellow dissidents.

“Bukovsky’s heroic speech to the court in defense of freedom and his five years of martyrdom in a despicable psychiatric jail will be remembered long after the torturers he defied have rotted away,” exiled Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote in 1974.

Galina Ackerman, a Russian émigré writer and translator in Paris who worked closely with Bukovsky in Resistance International, an anti-communist organization set up in the 1980s, described him in a phone interview Monday as “the great thinker of the whole Soviet dissident movement — the most resolute and politically clearheaded.”

Bukovsky, she said, “had a better vision than anyone of what was needed to weaken the Soviet regime.”

Bukovsky was freed in 1976 in exchange for Chile’s release of Luis Corvalán Lepe, the head of the Chilean Communist Party at the time, with the United States acting as intermediary. Bukovsky, who was 33, had been serving a seven‐year prison sentence on charges of anti‐Soviet agitation. The exchange took place in Switzerland, and Bukovsky then flew to London.

While many exiled dissidents, many of them intellectuals, focused on writing tracts, Bukovsky lobbied politicians in Britain and the United States to stand firm against Moscow. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, he pressed for the release of Soviet soldiers taken prisoner so that they could publicize the Soviet army’s brutal tactics.

His stubborn hostility to Soviet power led him to misjudge Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and he initially dismissed as a ruse Gorbachev’s liberalizing policies that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

But it also made him deeply aware of the tenacity of anti-democratic forces in Russia, and long before Putin took power on New Year’s Eve 1999, Bukovsky had warned that what seemed to be a new dawn of democracy in Russia would not last long. “His skepticism put him far ahead of everyone else,” Ackerman said.

A believer in the importance of practical, even if doomed, political action, he tried to compete in Russia’s 2008 presidential elections, holding rallies in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The electoral commission barred him from running against Putin’s handpicked candidate, Dmitry A. Medvedev, who won easily.

Gravely ill but still chain smoking, Bukovsky spent his last years in Cambridge trying to salvage his reputation after he was criminally charged in Britain over pornographic images of children found on his computer.

He pleaded not guilty, and insisted to The New York Times in 2016 that the images had been planted, probably as part of a dirty tricks operation by Russia. But a British computer expert who testified at his trial in December that year said there was no evidence of tampering, and that Bukovsky had apparently downloaded the images himself.

The trial, at the Cambridge Crown Court, was suspended soon after it started when Bukovsky was taken to a hospital with bronchial pneumonia. A full hearing of the evidence against him never took place. The trial was scheduled to resume in February 2018 but the judge, citing Bukovsky’s “serious illnesses of the heart, lungs, liver and kidneys,” ordered the case halted.

Whatever the truth of the prosecution’s allegations, they did little to dent his standing as a giant of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union and later Russia, which he visited periodically until the Russian authorities, maintaining that they could not confirm his nationality, declined to renew his passport.

“Nobody I know really believed the accusations,” Ackerman said. “He remained a hero.”

Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky was born Dec. 30, 1942, in the southern Urals region now known as Bashkortistan, where his parents, both journalists and loyal communists, had settled after being evacuated from Moscow during World War II. The family later moved back to the capital. There, in 1953, the death of Stalin stirred the young Bukovsky’s first doubts about the Soviet system; he had been taught that Stalin was immortal.

As a student in the 1950s during the post-Stalinist period known as “the thaw” under Nikita Khrushchev, Bukovsky took part in public readings of previously banned poetry and started an irreverent literary magazine. After winning entry to Moscow University, Russia’s most prestigious academic institution, to study biology, he caused outrage by describing the Soviet Union as a doomed “illegal society.” He was promptly expelled. (He completed his biology studies decades later at Cambridge University.)

He was arrested for the first time in 1963 and detained for a time at Lefortovo, a notorious czarist-era jail in Moscow. Doctors at the infamous Serbsky Institut of Forensic Psychiatry soon pronounced that he was suffering from mental illness. Declared to be too ill to stand trial, he was sent to the Leningrad Special Mental Hospital for treatment. The move delighted him, he later wrote, because the hospital was “by all accounts a better place than a concentration camp.”

A solitary man who never married and whose most trusted companion in Britain was his cat, Bukovsky acknowledged in his autobiography that his ordeal in the Soviet Union had warped his previously sociable nature and made him suspicious of other people. Too many whom he had trusted, he recalled, later testified against him.

After being imprisoned for a fourth time, he wrote, “I realized that there is no greater disappointment than the life one experiences after leaving prison.” He explained what he meant: “When you meet someone for the first time, you inevitably view them as a future witness in your future trial.”

This article originally appeared in

Vladimir Bukovsky, Revered Soviet Dissident and Putin Critic, Dies at 76

Vladimir K. Bukovsky, a revered Soviet dissident who, after his release from the gulag, spent the second half of his life in Britain, denouncing President Vladimir Putin with the same fervor he had directed at the Kremlin’s Communist leaders, died Sunday in Cambridge, England. He was 76.

His rival, Volodymyr Zelensky, had made clear beforehand that he would not attend the debate because of a quarrel over timing. But the president, struggling to revive his flagging re-election campaign, went ahead anyway, assailing his opponent as an unserious “virtual candidate.”

The one-man “debate,” held in a stadium complex in Kiev, the capital, and broadcast live on television, came just a week before the second and decisive round of an election that has been dominated from the start by theatrical stunts and dirty tricks rather than policy issues such as how to settle a 5-year-old war in the east of the country.

Poroshenko, 53, speaking with journalists invited to the event, seized on Zelensky’s absence to press his campaign pitch that voters should not trust Ukraine’s future to an untested comic at a time of war. Zelensky, 41, has never held office, and has no political experience — aside from a television role in which his character, a teacher, accidentally becomes president.

“I don’t like it when instead of participating in debate we have a virtual candidate who wants to convince us only through videos,” Poroshenko, a candy tycoon, said of Zelensky. “It is not worthy of Ukrainian democracy.”

Noting that the president commands the armed forces and does not hold just a ceremonial position, he derided Zelensky, saying he was treating the election like “a plot from the movies.”

Hundreds of the president’s supporters gathered outside the stadium, waving Ukrainian flags and cheering his mocking of Zelensky, who has said he is ready to debate, but not until Friday. The runoff election is Sunday.

Poroshenko, who was elected after street protests in 2014 toppled Ukraine’s deeply corrupt leader, Viktor Yanukovych, has struggled to win over voters, besieged by accusations of corruption from some of his close friends and political allies.

Many Ukrainians are angry and disappointed over the dashing of hopes raised by their country’s so-called Revolution of Dignity in 2014. This has made it difficult for Poroshenko to win traction for his argument that electing Zelensky would play into the hands of President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

In the first round of voting in late March, Zelensky won far more votes than Poroshenko and more than 30 other candidates. Since then, opinion polls have shown him far ahead of the president.

This article originally appeared in <a id="325eab3d-7ca4-30da-a81b-c93de07fc7d8" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/world/europe/ukraine-elections-president-debate.html">The New York Times</a>.

In one-man 'debate,' Ukraine president makes pitch and mocks rival

KIEV, Ukraine — The Ukrainian presidential race took a surreal turn Sunday when what was supposed to be a debate between the two candidates featured President Petro Poroshenko discussing Ukraine’s future with an empty lectern bearing the name of his rival, a comedian.

ORYOL, Russia — After 19 months in a Russian jail awaiting trial for “extremism,” Dennis O. Christensen, a Jehovah’s Witness from Denmark detained for his faith, received an unexpected lift from President Vladimir Putin at the end of last year.

The president, speaking in the Kremlin in December, declared that prosecuting people for their religious affiliations was “a total nonsense” and had to stop.

But instead of curbing a campaign across Russia against Jehovah’s Witnesses, Putin’s remark has been followed by more arrests; a conviction and six-year prison sentence for Christensen; and, in a new low, reports late last month of the torture of believers detained in Siberia.

The gulf between what Putin says and what happens in Russia raises a fundamental question about the nature of his rule after more than 18 years at the pinnacle of an authoritarian system: Is Putin really the omnipotent leader whom his critics attack and his own propagandists promote? Or does he sit atop a state that is, in fact, shockingly ramshackle, a system driven more by the capricious and often venal calculations of competing bureaucracies and interest groups than by Kremlin diktats?

The belief, widespread among critics of President Donald Trump, that Russia propelled him to the White House by colluding with his campaign is premised in part on the first view of Putin’s capacities and reach. The Mueller report, if ever released to the public, may help Americans better understand how Russia does or doesn’t work in reality.

But to some of Putin’s fellow citizens, the Russian president’s grip looks less firm than often imagined.

Ekaterina Schulmann is a political scientist in Moscow and a member of Putin’s Council for Civil Society and Human Rights who challenged the president over the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses at the December meeting in the Kremlin. She said Putin’s grip on the country had been vastly exaggerated by both supporters and opponents.

“This is not a personally run empire but a huge and difficult-to-manage bureaucratic machine with its own internal rules and principles,” she said. “It happens time and again that the president says something, and then nothing or the opposite happens.”

A plethora of bureaucratic and political forces both reinforce and sap the president’s power: the security services, the Russian Orthodox Church, billionaire oligarchs, local officials and others, each with its own sometimes competing and sometimes overlapping interests. Putin has to manage them as best he can, but he doesn’t control everything they each do.

One analyst is even more blunt about Putin and the state he presides over. “The system is dysfunctional,” said Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow and now an associate fellow at Chatham House, a research organization in London. “No one man could possibly control everything.”

To most Westerners, accustomed to seeing Putin strutting in front of TV cameras and projecting an aura of effortless command, such statements can sound incredible. It is true that in high-prestige matters of state, like hosting the Olympic Games or the World Cup soccer tournament, or building a bridge to Crimea, Putin has made the system act on his commands. The same is true for matters that ensure his grip on power, like cracking down on disobedient oligarchs and political opponents.

And after he came to power at the end of 1999, he effectively curbed the conspicuous disorder and noisy infighting that under his frequently drunk predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, left Russia with a state that barely functioned.

But many projects he has backed, like a critical bridge over the Amur River between Russia and China, and a high-profile undertaking to build a highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg, have stalled.

There are limits to just how much time and political capital Putin can invest in prodding corrupt or incompetent officials and contractors to do as they are told.

The construction of a new rocket launch center in the Russian Far East, pushed by Putin as “one of modern Russia’s biggest and most ambitious projects,” is taking years longer than planned, slowed by corruption, strikes by unpaid workers and other setbacks. The prosecutor general’s office in Moscow says that more than $150 million has been stolen from the project, which it said had been marred by 17,000 legal violations by more than 1,000 people.

This stark mismatch between Putin’s words and the system’s actions was on display again last month when police in Moscow arrested Michael Calvey, the American founder of one of the oldest and biggest Russia-focused investment funds, on fraud charges after a dispute with a rival over control of a Russian bank.

Calvey’s arrest, on charges that could result in up to 10 years in prison, was at odds with repeated statements by Putin that Russia must attract foreign investors and keep law-enforcement agencies from meddling in business disputes.

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, insisted that Putin had no prior knowledge of Calvey’s detention, but no one outside the president’s innermost circle can be sure.

Alexei Kudrin, a liberal-minded old friend of Putin’s from St. Petersburg and his former finance minister, complained that the arrest “fully disregards the directives of the president” and had created an “emergency for the economy.”

Kudrin’s observation drew widespread scorn. Critics of Putin accused the former minister of deluding himself with the idea that the president was not responsible for Calvey’s troubles and countless other examples of Russian law enforcement run amok.

Some recalled how at the height of murderous purges in the 1930s, many of Stalin’s acolytes refused to believe that the Soviet dictator knew what was going on — which he clearly did, since he signed off on lists of people to be executed — and blamed out-of-control underlings.

But Russia today, Schulmann said, resembles not so much the rigidly regimented country ruled by Stalin as the dilapidated autocracy of Russia in the early 19th century. The ruler at the time, Czar Nicholas I, presided over corrupt civilian and military bureaucracies that expanded Russian territory, led the country into a disastrous war in Crimea and drove the economy into a stagnant dead end.

Nicholas knew the limits of his power: “It is not I who rule Russia,” he complained. “It is the 30,000 clerks.” The only real difference now, Schulmann said, is that “clerks,” or bureaucrats, now number more than 1.5 million.

“It is a great illusion that you just need to reach the leader and make him listen and everything will change,” she added. “This is not how it happens.”

The illusion, however, is largely a result of the Kremlin’s own propaganda about the man at the top of what it calls the “power vertical.”

An annual call-in show broadcast on state television features Putin taking hours of questions and complaints from the public. The ritual is invariably followed by reports in state media about how crumbling schools, broken heating systems, giant potholes and other problems raised by callers have been fixed on Putin’s orders.

Christensen, the Dane who has been jailed since May 2017, said he still held out hope that Putin might command compliance with his December statement that “we can and even must be more liberal” toward Jehovah’s Witnesses, a Christian denomination.

“I was very encouraged by this statement,” Christensen, 47, said last month, interviewed from behind bars while on a video link to a courtroom in Oryol, a city 230 miles south of Moscow. “I hope that the Russian president was telling the truth and was speaking honestly.”

Putin, he said, had sent a clear signal that “this should not be happening in the 21st century. We don’t live in the Middle Ages anymore.”

For taking part in Bible readings and prayer sessions in Oryol, Christensen, a former carpenter, was found guilty in early February of committing “a grave, premeditated crime directed at the foundations of the constitutional order and the security of the state.”

His wife, Irina, who is Russian, attended the court hearing where a lawyer made a request that her husband be released to house arrest pending an appeal of his conviction. She said she did not know whether Putin had made his Kremlin comments only as a public relations ploy or had bowed to other forces in the system that favored harsh crackdowns.

The Orthodox Church has campaigned for years against Jehovah’s Witnesses, a rival it views as a heretical sect. This hostility has meshed neatly with the interests of the security services, which since Soviet times have viewed the denomination as subversive because its global headquarters are in the United States and its members steadfastly refuse to inform on one another.

To buttress Christensen’s plea to be let out of jail, his lawyer, Irina Krasnikova, noted in court that judges previously involved in the case “have apparently not read the president’s statement.” The judge, unimpressed, ordered that the Dane be kept behind bars.

“The cult of Putin at the top of an all-powerful ‘power vertical’ is a myth. It does not exist,” said Mark Galeotti, a British Russia expert and the author of the new book “We Need to Talk About Putin: How the West Gets Him Wrong.” Instead, Galeotti said, Putin is a “gray blur that allows us all to create our own Putin,” either all-powerful and Machiavellian or struggling just to hold an essentially decrepit system together.

This at times chaotic setup has proved particularly advantageous to Russia’s security apparatus, notably the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the domestic arm of the Soviet-era KGB. Putin, a former KGB officer, has largely given the FSB free rein, even when its actions directly contradict his stated goals.

Putin has frequently spoken, for example, of Russia’s need to develop small and medium-size businesses but has left the FSB, which operates mafia-style protection rackets, to ride roughshod over many enterprises.

In his annual state of the nation address last month, he again stressed the need to let business people work freely. Noting that he had made the same demand in a previous address, Putin acknowledged that “unfortunately, the situation has not improved much.”

Christensen blamed the FSB, with an assist from the Orthodox Church, for his own legal troubles. Putin may think it’s “total nonsense” for people like Christensen to be sitting in jail. But for now, that is where he waits. He was recently joined there by a second believer from Oryol, Sergei Skrynnikov, whom prosecutors want jailed for three years for “extremism.”

“A properly run dictatorship looks very different from this,” Galeotti said.

This article originally appeared in <a id="c00c2938-a635-411c-842d-3490a28029e4" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/sunday-review/how-powerful-is-vladimir-putin-really.html">The New York Times</a>.

(Sunday Review) ; (News Analysis)

How powerful s Vladimir Putin really?

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Andrew Higgins

Articles written by the author

Vladimir Bukovsky, Revered Soviet Dissident and Putin Critic, Dies at 76

In one-man 'debate,' Ukraine president makes pitch and mocks rival

How powerful s Vladimir Putin really?