Vladimir Bukovsky - Post-1992

Post-1992

In 1992 a group of liberal deputies of the Moscow City Council proposed Bukovsky's candidacy for elections of the new Mayor of Moscow, following the resignation of the previous Mayor, Gavriil Popov. Bukovsky refused the offer. In early 1996 a group of Moscow academics, journalists and intellectuals suggested that Vladimir Bukovsky should run for President of Russia as an alternative candidate to both incumbent President Boris Yeltsin and his Communist challenger Gennady Zyuganov. No formal nomination was initiated. In any case, Bukovsky would not have been allowed to run, as the Russian Constitution stipulates that any presidential candidate must have lived in the country continuously for ten years prior to the election.

In 1997, during the General Meeting in Florence, Bukovsky has been elected General President of the "Comitatus pro Libertatibus–Comitati per le Libertà–Freedom Committees", the international movement aimed to defend and empower everywhere the culture of liberties. Re-elected since then, Bukovsky promoted together with Dario Fertilio and Stéphane Courtois, a writer and an historian, the Memento Gulag, or Memorial Day devoted to the victims of communism, to be held each year, on 7 November (anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution). Since then, the Memento Gulag has been celebrated in Rome, Bucharest, Berlin, La Roche sur Yon and Paris.

In 2002 Boris Nemtsov, a member of the Russian Duma (parliament) and leader of the Union of Rightist Forces, and former Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, visited Vladimir Bukovsky in Cambridge to discuss the strategy of the Russian opposition. Bukovsky told Nemtsov that, in his view, it is imperative that Russian liberals adopt an uncompromising stand toward what he sees as the authoritarian government of President Vladimir Putin. In January 2004, together with Garry Kasparov, Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir V. Kara-Murza and others, Vladimir Bukovsky co-founded the Committee 2008, an umbrella organization of the Russian democratic opposition, whose purpose is to ensure free and fair presidential elections in 2008.

In 2005 Bukovsky participated in They Chose Freedom, a four-part documentary on the Soviet dissident movement.

In 2005, with the revelations about captives in the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, Abu Ghraib and the CIA secret prisons, Bukovsky criticized the rationalization of torture. In a Washington Post editorial, Bukovsky recounted his experience under torture in Lefortovo prison in 1971. Bukovsky argued that once commenced, the inertia of torture is difficult to control, corrupting those carrying it out. He wrote that torture "has historically been an instrument of oppression — not an instrument of investigation or of intelligence gathering."

Bukovsky has warned about some parallels between the formation of the Soviet Union and the European Union. In 2006 he described the perils of the past Soviet model in which nationalities were dissolved to create a new people, explaining that while Soviet ideology postulated that the State would eventually wither away, the reality was quite different, with the State becoming paramount.

Vladimir Bukovsky is a member of the Board of Directors of the Gratitude Fund, and a member of the International Council of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation. In the United Kingdom, he is Vice-President of The Freedom Association (TFA) and a patron of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). He holds that Russia is too big and should be broken up into several smaller countries.

Bukovsky is among the 34 first signatories of the online anti-Putin manifesto "Putin must go", published on 10 March 2010.