[NYReviewOfBooks] Vladimir Bukovsky, who gained world renown as a leader of the Soviet human rights movement, died of congestive heart failure in Britain on October 27, but his legacy lives on. His book Judgment in Moscow—published in Russian, French, and German more than twenty years ago and now appearing in English for the first time—is an eye-opening account of the ways in which the post-Stalin Communist Party leadership responded to the challenges it faced at home and abroad. Bukovsky expertly analyzes secret documents copied from the Soviet archives to show how the decaying Kremlin regime cynically used coercive psychiatry and incarceration in labor camps to suppress dissent, while pursuing highly effective “active measures” against the West to further its aggressive foreign agenda. The book also tells the story of Bukovsky’s personal struggle against the arbitrary lawlessness of the Soviet system, and later against the Communist bureaucrats and former KGB officials who remained in Boris Yeltsin’s government after the August 1991 coup.
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