Posts Tagged ‘bukovsky’
Artists, dissidents look to EU after US human rights law
Artists, exiles and rights campaigners say the EU can help Russia by closing its door to regime officials with blood on their hands.
Vladimir Bukovsky knows what it is like to be inside a Russian jail. He spent 12 years in and out of them in the 1960s and 1970s for trying to expose the Soviet Union’s use of psychiatric institutions to torture dissidents.
The 69-year-old scientist now lives in the UK, but travels to Russia from time to time.
Speaking in London on Tuesday (20 November) after the staging of a play on Sergei Magnitsky – a Russian accountant who was killed in prison in 2009 for trying to expose high-level corruption – Bukovsky said today’s Kremlin reminds him of the old one.
“Russia is going around like a blind donkey … They used to write plays about psychological abuse and now we are here to talk about this play,” he noted.
He added: “Magnitsky was a political prisoner because corruption is at the heart of Russia’s political system and this is exactly what he went against.”
The play – One Hour and 18 Minutes, by Elena Gremina – tries to show the human side of what happened.
It uses home videos of Magnitsky – a portly, jovial 37-year-old – at family parties.
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Trade Sanctions as a Test of U.S.-Russian Relations
To the Editor:
Re “Russian Opposition Urges U.S. to End Cold War Trade Sanctions” (news article, March 13):
Rewarding President-elect Vladimir V. Putin with the revocation of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which for almost 40 years has linked the Kremlin’s human rights performance to United States trade benefits, would add insult to the injury of President Obama’s congratulating Mr. Putin for his “victory” in last week’s “election.”
If anything, the link should be strengthened by having Congress enact the “Magnitsky bill,” which restricts travel to the United States by corrupt officials of Mr. Putin’s regime.
But the administration strives to abandon the whole notion of linkage. Initiated by Senator Henry M. Jackson and the Soviet Nobel laureate Andrei D. Sakharov, American legislative pressure is as important today as at the time of Soviet repression. Appeasement of Mr. Putin would be a betrayal of this legacy.
VLADIMIR BUKOVSKY
ALEX GOLDFARB
TATIANA YANKELEVICH
London, March 13, 2012
The writers are, respectively, a former Soviet political prisoner; a former assistant to Andrei D. Sakharov; and a former director of the Andrei Sakharov Program on Human Rights at Harvard. займ на карту срочно без отказа микрозайм онлайн https://zp-pdl.com/fast-and-easy-payday-loans-online.php https://zp-pdl.com/get-quick-online-payday-loan-now.php unshaven girl
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