IMMENSE COURAGE

This is a must read for anyone interested in international affairs.

https://www.mercatornet.com/features/view/a-soviet-dissident-shatters-western-illusions/23089

PCB: In the late 1970s, I read Bukovsky's To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter At the end of this Reilly article, there is an indication that the late Bukovsky may have become a Christian. 

Feature: The book Bukovsky can't publish By STEPHEN BATES 09.18, 2001

https://www.upi.com/Archives/2001/09/18/Feature-The-book-Bukovsky-cant-publish/9481000785600/?ur3=1

The book has been published in France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Bulgaria. Leading historians of communism call it "fascinating," "stunning," and "a massive and major contribution."But, six years after the first French edition appeared, you still can't buy an English translation. Random House sought the rights in 1995, but dropped the project a few months later. A small British publishing house, John Murray, secured the rights, but never printed the book. To Bukovsky, it's nothing short of "political censorship."===

He knew whereof he spoke. In earlier internments, he had been shot up with psychotropic drugs in psychiatric prison hospitals to which he had been sent because only an “insane” person would oppose the Soviet Union. Therefore, he said, while he still could, he wanted to tell the truth about the Soviet regime. Having already spent nine years in labor camps and prisons, he knew full well the price he would pay. He did it anyway. (The journalist smuggled the film out of Moscow and it was shown on Western television.)

I was staggered by the man’s courage. In the West, 1970 was deep in the era of the anti-hero. We were no longer supposed to have heroes. I practically shouted out loud, “well, there’s one!” From that time onward, I avidly followed the news about Bukovsky, who was, as he had predicted, soon detained again. Denounced in Pravda as a “malicious hooligan, engaged in anti-Soviet activities,” he was sentenced to 12 years for slandering Soviet psychiatry.

However, in 1976 he was released and sent into exile by Soviet authorities who exchanged him for the jailed Chilean Communist party leader. The KGB could not break this indomitable man, so it expectorated him. He was 34; he had spent a total of 12 years in prison, more than a third of his life. During that time he had gone on hunger strikes 20 times, sometimes joined by all the other prisoners in solidarity with him. He was brutally force-fed with a tube down his nose. Bukovsky’s experiences were chronicled in one of the greatest dissident prison memoirs ever written, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter, published in 1978.

In the West, Bukovsky founded and led Resistance International to continue the fight against Communist totalitarianism from outside the Soviet Empire. It was through this organization that I had the privilege of meeting and, on occasion, working with him.