This Book and its Sources (Revised)

This book was first written thirty years ago.

French and other editions appeared in the mid-1990s, not long after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the break-up of the eastern bloc [1]. Its publication in Russian at the time was funded by the Solzhenitsyn Foundation (and by Ilya Roitman).

Yet it was 24 years later, shortly before the author’s death (2019), when a English version printed and released in book form, appeared.

*

BUKOVSKY’S SOURCES & VIEWS

Prompted by the classified documents he discovered and copied in 1992, and by his own disenchantment with Western behaviour towards the previous Soviet regime and then with regard to Gorbachov and his “reforms”, Bukovsky later drew (see, especially, Chapter 13, “Withdrawal without Retreat”) on many documents from the Gorbachov Foundation brought to the West by Pavel Stroilov.

The first half of Judgement in Moscow, six chapters entitled “In the East”, relies heavily on classified documents from the CPSU Central Committee archives, located and duplicated by the author. They have been posted online since 1999 and may be accessed today at the Hoover Institution in California. Chapters 7-14 (“In the West”), draw on such unpublished sources, and on the Gorbachov Foundation papers. The three longest chapters (7, 9 and 13) contrast those clandestine documents with contemporay published reports and books.

Most of the unpublished sources quoted by Bukovsky to support and confirm his arguments are accessible in this online archive. Some are a page in length, others contain more than one document and are, therefore, referred to throughout as “files”. Many, one fifth of the total, have been translated wholly or partially into English and lightly annotated.

*

TRANSLATION

When efforts were first made to provide a widely-read English version of the book

and secure a publisher, Aljona Kozhevnikova translated Chapters One and Two. As Bukovsky later explained, however, major US publishers were not prepared to issue the book as its author had written it.

This impasse lasted for twenty years. Translation of the subsequent sections and chapters began, at long last, in 2013.

The book was composed, in part, from the 1996 Russian edition (Moskovsky protsess), a version edited and prepared by the late Natalya Gorbanevskaya. The last three chapters (“The Revolution that Never Was”, chapters 11-13) were substantially updated and rewritten for the present edition by the author.

*

Almost all the footnotes were derived and adapted from the 1995 French edition, Jugement à Moscou (Robert Laffont, Paris). More, especially links to the contemporary uncensored Chronicle of Current Events (CCE 1968-1982), were added by myself.

John Crowfoot
March 2025

===========================

NOTES

  1. See the note on various language editions (1995-2016) of Judgement in Moscow: French, German, Russian, Italian, Polish and English.
    ↩︎

========================