A Hero of our Times?

It’s not every day that one’s client is a legendary figure – as mine was, in the shape of Vladimir Bukovsky. It turned out that he was far too ill to be tried on the charges that he faced, of having indecent images of children, which he denied. At 75, his body was giving out, and the Judge at Cambridge Crown Court found his cluster of illnesses meant he could not effectively participate in the trial, even via a videolink from his home. The prosecution was stayed and remains in suspense until, perhaps, he is well enough again. This was a man who took on the Soviet state as a boy – he was expelled from school and then from university in 1961 for ‘lacking the character of a Soviet citizen’, and he spent the next 12 years in and out of prisons, labour camps and psychiatric wards – for the offence of ‘hooliganism’ – or as we would say, for telling the truth about the state’s systematic abuse of human rights. In 1971 he smuggled documents out of Russia that showed how political prisoners were treated as insane – and was promptly locked up again.  Recognised by now across the world as a prisoner of conscience, in 1973 he won his freedom, albeit in exile, by being exchanged like Cold War chess pieces for the leader of the Chilean Communist Party, Luis Corvalan, whom the Pinochet regime had imprisoned after the military coup. Bukovsky settled in the UK, and became a figurehead for the pro-democracy Russian diaspora all over the world. The Yeltsin government eventually restored his citizenship that the Soviets had removed, but Putin stripped him of it again when he had the temerity to stand against him in the 2008 presidential election. A man of extraordinary courage, but what a dismal last chapter to a heroic life.