Vladimir Bukovsky - Judgement in Moscow

Judgement in Moscow

In April 1991 Vladimir Bukovsky visited Moscow for the first time since his forced deportation. In the run-up to the 1991 presidential election Boris Yeltsin's campaign considered Bukovsky as a potential vice-presidential running-mate (other contenders included Galina Starovoitova and Gennady Burbulis). In the end, the vice-presidency was offered to Hero of the Soviet Union Alexander Rutskoy.

In 1992, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, President Yeltsin's government invited Bukovsky to serve as an expert to testify at the CPSU trial by Constitutional Court of Russia, where the communists were suing Yeltsin for banning their party. The respondent's case was that the CPSU itself had been an unconstitutional organization. To prepare for his testimony, Bukovsky requested and was granted access to a large number of documents from Soviet archives (then reorganized into TsKhSD). Using a small handheld scanner and a laptop computer, he managed to secretly scan many documents (some with high security clearance), including KGB reports to the Central Committee, and smuggle the files to the West. The event that many expected would be another Nuremberg Trial and the beginnings of reconciliation with the Communist past, ended up in half-measures: while the CPSU was found unconstitutional, the communists were allowed to form new parties in the future. Bukovsky expressed his deep disappointment with this in his writings and interviews:

It took several years and a team of assistants to compose the scanned pieces together and publish it (see Soviet Archives, collected by Vladimir Bukovsky, prepared for electronic publishing by Julia Zaks and Leonid Chernikhov). The same collection of documents is also massively quoted in Bukovsky's Judgement in Moscow, a book which in the end was never published in English (Random House bought the rights to the manuscript but according to Bukovsky, “tried to force to rewrite the whole book from the liberal left political perspective.” Bukovsky replied that “due to certain peculiarities of my biography I am allergic to political censorship.” The contract was subsequently canceled. A French translation of the book was published as Jugement à Moscou in 1994, and it has been published in Russian, and a few other Slavic languages.