In the spring of 2019, I sat down with Vladimir Bukovsky, at his home in Cambridge, England. He died that fall, at age 76. On that afternoon in Cambridge, I asked him, “Did you ever think you would not survive?” He answered, “Oh, yeah. It was the dominant idea.” He thought they would kill him. “Most of my friends never expected to live to the age of 30. We all thought it was a given. It was just luck that I survived. Most of my friends were killed.”
Bukovsky was one of the greatest, one of the most admired, of the Soviet dissidents. He was in the Gulag for twelve years: prisons, labor camps, and sadistic psychiatric hospitals. He wrote a memoir called “To Build a Castle.”
I reported our conversation here at National Review Online, in four parts (I, II, III, and IV).
As we talked, I asked Bukovsky about the current boss in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin. He said that, if you don’t know about the past, you can’t possibly deal with Putin in the present. “Putin will provoke the West again and again,” said Bukovsky. “What he is doing now, you remember, used to be called ‘brinkmanship.’ He will push things to the limit — to test the strength and resolve of the West.”
Putin is a classic Soviet man, said Bukovsky: “a product of the system.” Putin did not spend all those years in the KGB for nothing. “Everything that comes from him has a birthmark on it,” said Bukovsky: a Soviet birthmark.
The annexation of Crimea? It was a test, said Bukovsky. Putin was testing the West. Could he change international borders by force and get away with it? Could he prove that a taboo was not a taboo, after all? He could. He did.
Putin rubbed the nose of the West in the annexation of Crimea, Bukovsky told me. He showed that he was a criminal who could do whatever he wanted. No one would stand in his way. Once Crimea was grabbed, everything got easier. Further possibilities opened up — including additional changes to borders.
The Kremlin, said Bukovsky, wants to restore as much of the Soviet Union as possible. Even a morsel, such as Crimea, counts. And Soviet men such as Putin always regretted the loss of Ukraine with a special bitterness and anger.
You cannot understand Vladimir Putin without understanding the Soviet system that produced him.
In the new Russia, meaning in the early 1990s, there was no accounting for 70-plus years of Soviet crimes. No Nuremberg trials, no denazification. “Too messy,” everyone said. “We should just move on.” One of the popular lines of the day was, “We must not have witch hunts.” But Bukovsky, Andrei Sakharov, and others said, “If we don’t hold them to account, the witches will come back and hunt us.” Which is exactly what happened.
One fact: There are more political prisoners in Russia today than there were in the late Soviet period.
On the international stage, Putin will not stop until he is stopped. “We can’t be the world’s policeman,” everyone says. True. But I think of what Jeane Kirkpatrick said, in response: What if there’s a world criminal? Who will stop him? Anyone? Will he just rampage from house to house, country to country, with impunity?
For years, whenever I have criticized Putin and his criminality — his crimes at home and abroad — people have said to me, “Russia is not the Soviet Union, you know! You are suffering from Cold War nostalgia.” If only that were so. Putin is a Soviet man, surrounded by other such men, and acting like it. Ukrainians know this better than anyone, except, perhaps, for the political prisoners in Russia.
One more thing. “Without a trial — a Nuremberg-style trial — the regime was bound to return,” Bukovsky told me. He was talking about Putin and his Soviet ways and means. Bukovsky continued, “In Germany, if we hadn’t conducted denazification, if we hadn’t convened the Nuremberg tribunals, the Nazi regime would have come back to power. Under a different name, in a different guise, but it would have come back.”
Honestly, I thought this was far-fetched. Fanciful. Not true. I don’t know, though. I don’t know. Maybe Bukovsky was right.