Free Republic

<p>The Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky has been on hunger strike at his home in Cambridge for more than a week in protest at what he calls the “Kafkaesque” British judicial system.</p> <p>Bukovsky was charged last year with child pornography offences. He strenuously denies the allegations. In August he took the unusual step of suing the Crown Prosecution Service for libel: he is seeking £100,000 in damages and claims the CPS has “falsely and maliciously” hurt his reputation.</p>

Vladimir Bukovsky, the veteran Soviet era dissident, has been charged with making and possessing indecent images of children, the CPS has announced. The 72-year-old, who has been living in the UK since the 1970s, is facing five counts of making indecent images, five of possessing indecent images and one count of possessing a prohibited images. Mr Bukovsky spent 12 years in Soviet prisons and labour camps, before being released as part of a prisoner swap in 1976. He was forced into exile and moved to the UK, where he studied biology at Cambridge University. He has been an outspoken critic...

A Hidden History of Evil Why doesn’t anyone care about the unread Soviet archives? In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains...

A group of Russian dissidents and Kremlin critics said in an open letter Tuesday that Poland gives too much credit to Russia by not asking any questions about Russia’s investigation into the April crash that killed the Polish president. Russian-Polish relations have for years been spectacularly bad as both countries fought for influence in the post-Soviet countries of eastern Europe and the Caucasus and Poland asserted it independence. Current disagreements over energy and military plans continue to cloud the relationship already marred by historic disputes, especially over the Soviet Union’s brutal domination of nations in central and eastern Europe in...

May 14, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A prominent former Soviet dissident says that the European Union is disturbingly similar in its ideological foundations, and its methods, to the Soviet Union. Author and political activist Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky, who spent 12 years in the Russian gulag, is now warning the people of Europe that they are in danger of allowing a new totalitarian superstate to rise. "It is really puzzling to me," says Bukovsky in the documentary "Britain on the Brink," "that having just buried one monster, the Soviet Union, another remarkably similar one, the European Union, is being built." The same...

Ex-Soviet Dissidents Lament Russia's State By GERALD NADLER Associated Press Writer November 13, 2004, 10:35 AM EST NEW YORK -- More than 50 former Soviet dissidents who spent years in prisons and Siberian exile say Russia is in danger of slipping back into a police state under President Vladimir Putin and the former KGB colleagues he has brought to power. Graying and aging, the former political prisoners reminisced one night this week about how they challenged the totalitarian superpower to abide by laws that on paper guaranteed free speech, a free press and fair trials. Today Russians are turning to...

Despite the fall of communism in Russia more than a decade ago, thousands of former KGB officers and other members of the Soviet nomenklatura hold significant positions of power in Russia today. The nation also appears to be experiencing a process of re-Brezhnevization, which is marked by the resurrection of the former secret police. What is the significance of this phenomenon? How will it affect U.S. –Russian relations and, more importantly, America’s war with militant Islam? Frontpage Symposium is honored to host a distinguished panel on this subject. In a world premiere, we have two ex-spy chiefs from opposite sides...