To Build a Castle-My Life as a Dissenter
Bukovsky, Vladimir
BOOK REVIEWS To Build a Castle-My Life as a Dissenter Vladimir Bukovsky / The Viking Press / $17.50 Joseph Shattan The history of the world," wrote Hegel, "is none other than the progress of the...
...BOOK REVIEWS To Build a Castle-My Life as a Dissenter Vladimir Bukovsky / The Viking Press / $17.50 Joseph Shattan The history of the world," wrote Hegel, "is none other than the progress of the consciousness of human freedom...
...There are, then, two antithetical forces at work in the Soviet Union today: the expansive thrust of an entrenched militaryideological-industrial complex, and the countervailing assault of the aroused human spirit...
...The Soviet state, Bukovsky argues, is like a paranoiac, obsessed by a fantastic delusion-that it is building Communism-and trying to enforce its mania on everyone else...
...In fact, with every day that passes it seems to be growing less and less docile...
...You cannot achieve democracy by going underground...
...Nevertheless, Bukovsky and his fellow psychotics refused to change their "negative attitudes,'' and throughout their grim ordeal they steadfastly maintained their solidarity and their fighting spirit...
...After all, "what normal man takes Soviet laws seriously...
...Bukovsky's precious contraband is his piercing insight into what he calls "the soul of man under socialism...
...As the details of Stalin's crimes became widely known, Bukovsky and his friends were overcome with revulsion at what they regarded as the universal complicity of the Soviet people in their own destruction, and they drew up a terrible, sweeping indictment of their countrymen's behavior during the Stalinist era...
...Which will ultimately prevail...
...To free their countrymen, Soviet dissidents would first have to free themselves from the psychology of the underground...
...It was precisely this "feeling that somebody cares" which prisoners in Stalin's camps, as in Hitler's, were deprived of, and in losing it they lost part of their courage as well...
...Those Americans who regard Radio Liberty broadcasts with sophisticated scorn, who argue that the United States should confine its efforts on behalf of Soviet political prisoners to "quiet diplomacy," would do well to inform themselves of the hopelessness which overwhelmed Russian prisoners only a generation ago, when the diplomacy was so quiet that no one could hear it, riot even the diplomats...
...In Kolyma, for example, the frightful motto of the prisoners during the forties was, "You die today and I'll live tomorrow...
...Courage is contagious...
...We shall never be rid of this terror," he concludes, ''never acquire freedom and security, until we refuse categorically to recognize this paranoid version of reality and oppose to it our own reality and our own values...
...even they were intrigued by this radio war.'' In a recent article on the Holocaust published in Encounter magazine, Bruno Bettelheim, the Viennese-born psychoanalyst who was incarcerated in Dachau and Buchenwald, observed that "One cannot meet catastrophic events and survive when deprived of the feeling that somebody cares...
...In 1976 he was expelled from the Soviet Union in exchange for the imprisoned Chilean Communist leader Luis Cor-valan...
...They soon recognized the danger inherent in such an approach...
...During the forties, he charges-and it is only a mild exaggeration-"not a word was said about the prisoners" in the Western media...
...Jews are insisting on emigrating to Israel...
...against official propaganda they asserted the sovereignty of the individual conscience...
...industrial workers are forming genuine trade unions...
...This is their fundamental error...
...Vladimir Bukovsky's engrossing and exhilarating memoir addresses itself to this very question...
...To be sure, in a capitalist society where life is degraded and humanity debased, dissent is mandatory...
...Bukovsky cites a number of similar diagnoses: The Jewish activist Edward Kuznetsov, for instance, was judged schizophrenic because, in the words of the examining psychiatrist, "He asserts that there is no such thing as a Communist moral code, and that the credit for its creation should go to the Bible...
...And this is just what Bukovsky and the other human-rights activists did: Against official lawlessness they counterpoised the rule of law...
...If everything had gone according to the Party's overall plan," writes Bukov-sky, "crime would have disappeared, and in place of the mass terror, spy mania, and other mistakes of the personality cult, we would all have been looking apprehensively at each other to see who was a loony and who wasn't...
...The question immediately presents itself: Why has Bukovsky's generation of political prisoners succeeded in staving off demoralization, where a previous generation of prisoners, equally tough, failed...
...These agonizing reflections culminated in a fateful decision: Come what may, there must be an end to complicity...
...Truly," he avers, "we were born to make Kafka live...
...Over the last two decades, an astonishing efflorescence of civic courage has rendered the once-congealed Soviet landscape almost unrecognizable...
...According to what passes for sociological wisdom in the West nowadays, none of this ought to be happening...
...Having been exposed to ceaseless propaganda and merciless terror for decades, the Soviet populace should have been transformed into a docile, cowering mass long ago...
...At first, Bukovsky and his like-minded contemporaries thought of forming an underground organization, which would draw up manifestoes, issue proclamations to the people, and engage in desperate actions...
...Thus, when Bukovsky was picked up by the KGB in 1963 with a photocopy of Milovan Djilas' The New Class in his possession, he was sentenced to 18 months in a mental hospital-the first of many such ordeals that he underwent...
...Actually, ubiquity provokes obloquy...
...But while the number of dissidents keeps multiplying, the Soviet Leviathan continues a program of military growth unprecedented in peacetime, and the non-Communist world main tains a steady retreat in the face of its fearsome power...
...Crimean Tartars are trying to get back to their homeland...
...the dissident Vladimir Bori-sov was consigned to a mental home because, as his diagnostician put it, "His mental condition and conduct are characterized by...
...They would have to challenge the Soviet state openly, not as conspirators skulking in alleyways but as free men demanding their lawful rights...
...Upon the answer to this question hinges the fate of mankind...
...The realization gradually dawned on them that "our Soviet life was actually nothing more than an imaginary schizophrenic world populated with invented Soviet men building a mythical communism...
...This contrasts very markedly with the experience of political prisoners in the Stalin era...
...From top to bottom," Bukovsky reveals, "no one believes in Marxist dogma anymore, even though they continue to measure their actions by it, refer to it, and use it as a stick to beat one another with: It is both a proof of loyalty and a meal ticket...
...a disturbed sense of orientation and an incorrect interpretation of his surroundings...
...Whether or not Hegel's dictum is generally valid, it clearly does apply to recent developments in the Soviet Union...
...In a socialist society, however, where life verges on the paradisiacal, what can there possibly be to complain about...
...In their attempts to deal with the problem of domestic dissidence, Soviet authorities face a peculiar dilemma: Their ideology prevents them from acknowledging even the possibility of genuine dissent...
...This is cited in Elinor Lipper's extraordinary mem- oir, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps, published in 1951 and well | worth reading even today...
...The underground only produces tyranny, only Bolsheviks of a different color...
...The immense disparity between official propaganda and observed reality has fatally discredited the former...
...It so happened that as the human-rights movement was gaining momentum in the early sixties, the Soviet Communist Party, under Khrushchev, had decided to back away from Stalin's reign of terror and to treat dissent as a disease rather than a crime...
...against official terror they pitted a boundless courage...
...The authorities believe that "men are as malleable as wax," that the ceaseless dinning of the official line will produce complaisant, Joseph Shattan is a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...Like the slow but steady movement of a glacier, there is no stopping it...
...The protest movement in which Bukovsky was so active a participant has spread to other sectors of Soviet society...
...Thus he takes the hospital for a concentration camp and the doctors for sadists...
...Injections with mind-destroying drugs, physical abuse, aching hunger, back-breaking labor, and long stretches of solitary confinement-this is the lot of a political prisoner in the Soviet Union...
...Bukovsky was born in 1942 and spent nearly half his adult life in Soviet prisons, labor camps, and insane asylums...
...Unlike the Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth century, for whom constitutionalism, the rule of law, and political liberty were no more than "political desserts" (the phrase is Chernyshevsky's) to be savored only after the Revolution had established "genuine freedom," for Bukovsky and other Russian dissidents the rule of law is the very basis of civilized life, and it was in its name that they went off to do battle with the KGB...
...and Ukranians, Caucasians, and Baltic peoples are clamoring for national independence...
...In the early sixties, however, a number of younger Soviet intellectuals, Bukovsky among them, decided that they were through with "thinking one thing, saying another, and doing a third...
...Soviet man," Bukovsky notes, "is pursued everywhere by propaganda, by that ubiquitous bawling that drowns out the spring chirping of the birds...
...Everyone was guilty," declares Bukovsky, "those who did the actual killing, those who approved the results, and even those who kept silent...
...How is this possible...
...The answer, Bukovsky suggests, lies in the changing attitude of the West toward Soviet prisoners...
...Bukovsky's insistence on the rights guaranteed him by the Soviet constitution convinced a panel of examining psychiatrists that he really was crazy...
...Despite his almost jaunty tone, Bukovsky's description of his experiences in Soviet insane asylums, and his subsequent sojourns through various labor camps, makes for harrowing reading...
...It therefore follows that those who do complain either are in league with diabolical forces-world imperialism, world Zionism, the "Trotskyite-Buk-harinite center"-or are unfortunate victims of mental illness...
...Suddenly, people are speaking out: Dissidents are demanding that the provisions of the Soviet constitution be enforced...
...As we drove to the airport terminal" in Geneva, Bukovsky writes, "I couldn't rid myself of a strange sensation-as if, thanks to a blunder by the KGB, I had carried out something very precious, something that should never have been let out of the country...
...Bukovsky regards these sentences with ironic detachment...
...By the sixties, though, "the West had long since got wind of the fact that its own fate and its own future were in some part being decided within [Soviet prisons] . The Western press started paying attention to us and even began to investigate our battles over food and living conditions And so it came about that sometimes we had barely finished one of our regular hunger strikes when the guards whispered to us the contents of some broadcast by the BBC or Radio Liberty on the subject of that very strike...
...loyal subjects...
Vol. 12 • June 1979 • No. 6
