Deportation or the Madhouse (Chapter 4)

One vivid section of “Judgement in Moscow” describes two of the three punishments to which Bukovsky was himself subjected as an active opponent of the Soviet regime.

After his conviction, he was sent in 1972 to Vladimir Central, the prison where ‘serious offenders’ were held, and later to the Perm political camps. In the early 1960s he spent several years in the Leningrad Special Psychiatric Hospital (SPH); late in 1976 he was suddenly deported in handcuffs to Switzerland.

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In this chapter, Bukovsky describes how the regime deported others, most famously Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and he gives an account of the Soviet abuse of psychiatry and its successful exposure abroad.

PART ONE

  • 4.1 “Without the latter’s consent …”
  • 4.2 What can we do about Solzhenitsyn?
  • 4.3 External costs

PART TWO

  • 4.3 External costs (concluded)
  • 4.4 The psychiatric Gulag

SOURCES

text translated & edited, and links restored, by John Crowfoot

(21 June 2026)

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