Reckoning with Moscow

After spending 12 years in Soviet labour camps, prisons and lunatic asylums, the dissident Vladimir Bukovsky was deported from Russia in 1976 in exchange for the leader of the Chilean Communist Party. He continued to campaign tirelessly in defence of the rights of his fellow countrymen and, sticking to his belief that the communist regime was deep in crisis, he urged that no compromise should be offered to the Politburo in trade or diplomacy. After the fall of the communist regime in Moscow in 1991 he returned to do what he could to ensure comprehensive reform. His particular project, which is the heart of this volume, was to examine the secret Kremlin archives so as to expose the nastiness of the regime not only under Stalin but even under Gorbachev. He has brought back from Moscow a cornucopia of high-level political secrets about the events that have shaped our times: "detente", the anti-dissident campaign, the Polish solidarity movement, the Societ invasion of Afghanistan and the origins of "perestroika".
Through his access to the archives - including documents of his own dissident activity - he indicts not only the regime but also its foreign supporters and "fellow travellers".