79-09-B2
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Bukovsky[edit]
Transcript[edit]Vladimir Bukovsky is a 27 year old refugee from the Soviet Union who spent half his adult life in prison camps and infamous Soviet mental hospitals (call them torture chambers) before finding sanctuary in this country. In 1976 he was exiled from Russia in exchange for the Chilean Communist leader Luis Corvalan. He has written a book, "To Build a Castle -- My life as a Dissenter". In this book he tells of his years in prison and of the attempts to destroy his mind when his persecutors would move him from the Gulag into Russia's so-called mental hospitals. Far more important however is what his book tells us about the change that is taking place in the Soviet Union. He writes of what was in his mind as the K.G.B . drove him to the airport in Geneva, Switzerland where the official exchange for Corvalan took place. "I couldn't rid myself of a strange sensation -- as if, thanks to a blunder by the K.G.B., I had carried out something very precious, something that should never have been let out of the country." He was referring to his insight into what was happening within the minds and souls of the Soviet people. All of us in America -- that is all of us who view the Soviet Union as a potential threat to the free world, have some awareness of the Soviet military buildup and the Soviet lust for world power. Bukovsky tells us of a Soviet Union where dissidents are not skulking in alleys and basements trying to create an underground movement. They are speaking out openly, citing their rights under the Soviet Constitution (yes there is such a thing). True, they are sentenced to prison or sent to the mental hospitals as insane but they are also proving that the six decades of unceasing propaganda has not made the people a docile mass of willing slaves. Jews are insisting on their right to emigrate to Israel; industrial workers are forming genuine Unions; Ukranians, Tartars and Baltic peoples talk of national independence. "From top to bottom", says Bukovsky, "no one believes in Marxist dogma anymore." He says everyone, including the hierarchy, knows that the idea that they are building a Communist stats is a fairy tale. But here is where his book is important to us. In the 40's when Stalin was burying millions and millions of Soviet citizens in the torture camps of Siberia, there was no word in our press about this. The victims lived in total hopelessness because there seemed to be no awareness of their plight. He makes it plain that it was in the 1960's when the western nations began to realize their future was somehow tied to what was going on in Soviet prisons. The prisoners lived with hope and determination to continue dissenting and resisting. Guards would tell them that Radio Liberty and the BBC had carried stories of their hunger strikes and protests and thus they were encouraged to carry on. Let our State department take heed--a little less detente with the Politburo and more encouragement to the dissenters might be worth a lot of armored divisions. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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