[The Mises Institute] Few remember him today, for reasons that should unsettle us all, but Vladimir Bukovsky was a hero from a dark age whose example confirms Mises’s motto, taken from the Aeneid: "Do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it." Often glossed in the press as a "Soviet dissident," Bukovsky was infinitely more important. He took on the entirety of the Communist behemoth and lived to see it fall ‐ only to watch pieces of it rise again, he claims, and all with the conniving of the West.Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky seemed destined to be a dissenter. The son of true-believer communists, Bukovsky realized at age ten, when Stalin died, that a mortal god was no god at all. He began to distrust the propaganda of the Soviet state. Apparently preternaturally incapable of lying, to others or, most important, to himself, Bukovsky refused to acquiesce in the quiet suicide of the conscience that is the necessary condition for any totalitarian government to succeed. As an undergraduate, Bukovsky began taking part in public demonstrations against the Soviet regime, after which he was marked for life as an enemy of the state.
Bukovsky embraced this role. Like a handful of others ‐ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, of course, and poets Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstein, to name just a few ‐ Bukovsky valued integrity above all else. He knew that communism was a lie and that everyone complicit with it was a liar, and he would not be a part of any of it. Tortured, imprisoned, subjected to psychological torment and physical deprivation, Bukovsky didn’t yield. He went on hunger strikes, published samizdat that circulated widely inside and outside of the Soviet Union, and made it the purpose of his life to tell everyone, everywhere: man must be free, and freedom and truth are ultimately the same thing.
Bukovsky detailed the decades of abuses and outrages in a book he published after the Soviet Union, grown tired of imprisoning him and increasingly wary of dissidents in general, exiled him. To Build a Castle, which Bukovsky put out in 1978 after he had settled in England, tells the story of the depravity of communist rule. In particular, and especially under Yuri Andropov (a man whom Bukovsky hated like no other), the Soviets learned how to weaponize psychiatry in order to diagnose those who resisted socialism as suffering from "sluggish schizophrenia" or some other nonsensical malady. Declared insane (as were thousands of other dissidents), Bukovsky relied on what he called "the implacable force of one man’s refusal to submit." He was a tiny leaven of truth against the abuse of psychiatry, but even that small truth won out. The Soviets were eventually censured by their psychiatry colleagues in the West; Bukovsky had again not given in to evil, but had proceeded ever more boldly against it. In time, the Iron Curtain fell, and the Evil Empire, which had had a stranglehold on Eastern Europe and half of Eurasia, collapsed. Bukovsky had stared down the Soviet Union ‐ the individual had defeated the collective.
It is at this point in the story of the Soviet Union that we in the West tend to swell with pride. We defeated the communist beast, we believe. Freedom prevailed.