Vladimir Bukovsky - To Build a Castle

About the Book

Praise for TO BUILD A CASTLE

Sometimes ironic, sometimes detached, sometimes written in cold fury, but always compelling. The New Yorker

This is a landmark book and a human document that remains vital. Sir Tom Stoppard, Oscar-winning screenwriter of Shakespeare in Love

Vladimir Bukovsky has written an extraordinary account of his life in the Soviet Union. Listen closely. New York Times

A huge story we must not forget. Even inside prison, a revolt of the mind is possible. Masha Alyokhina, co-founder of the anti-Putinist punk rock group Pussy Riot, who read To Build a Castle while serving time as a prisoner of conscience

This book is important. Former US President Ronald Reagan

If human bravery were a book, it would be To Build a Castle. Bukovskys memoir serves as testimony to the horrors of totalitarianism, a reference manual of the Soviet gulag during the Brezhnev years, and an unforgettable tribute to the courage of dissidents like Bukovsky. Unfortunately, the book is a reminder we still very much need today, when Western moral equivalence would have us believe that such monsters no longer exist. They do, and To Build a Castle is an essential guide to understanding them, and how to fight them. Garry Kasparov, Chairman of the Human Rights Foundation

Bukovsky is properly outraged, but he is also bitterly amusing. TIME Magazine

One of the masterpieces of the period. Michael Ledeen, former consultant to the US National Security Council, Department of State, and Department of Defense

A gripping and evocative account of the evil empire from a man who helped bring it down. Edward Lucas, Senior Editor, The Economist, author of THE NEW COLD WAR: Putins Russia and the Threat to the West

To Build a Castle is a fascinating document of its era, as well as the inspiring story of one mans courageous battle against a totalitarian state. While the era Vladimir Bukovsky chronicles has long passed, this memoir has not lost its relevance. Its insights on freedom, justice, personal responsibility, and the temptation of communist utopia remain as timely as ever. Bukovsky has an eye for both mundane and striking details that bring this tale to life, and tells his story with superb clarity, compassion, and wry humor. An engrossing and satisfying read. Cathy Young, assistant editor at Reason, columnist for Newsday and Real Clear Politics

This book is one of the best literary works of 20th century Russia. It was also a great inspiration to those of us who fought for freedom and human rights against the cruel Soviet communist system. Yuri Yarim-Agaev, leading Soviet dissident and a member of Moscow Helsinki Group.

One of the classic works of Soviet dissent, as relevant today as when it first appeared. Philip Boobbyer, author of Conscience, Dissent and Reform in Soviet Russia

Vladimir Bukovsky was the heart and soul of the struggle for human rights in the Soviet Union. In To Build a Castle, he describes in telling prose what it meant to fight against overwhelming odds, to defend principles that others thought did not exist - and to prevail. David Satter, Journalist and author of The Less You Know the Better You Sleep: Russias Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin

Bukovskys convictions and his indomitable spirit come through strongly in this compelling narrative of his ordeal in the prisons, labor camps and psychiatric hospitals of the U.S.S.R. FOREIGN AFFAIRS

His sense of mission mutes the prison-is-hell-type testimony we often get what is notable here is the revolving, buzzing, feverish commitment. KIRKUS REVIEW

An intensified version of the same tone projected by Solzhenitsyn. NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

This book is a panorama of Soviet life in and out of prison, seen from below; it is an enthralling account of the now-famous protest movement; it is the record of a personal odyssey of remarkable quality.There have been, and are, many extremely brave freedom fighters (more than we know) in the Soviet Union, but it is only Bukovsky who regarded imprisonment and police persecution not as an oppression to be avoided if possible (and if not, endured) but as the mark of victory, of positive achievement. Edward Crankshaw, author and former specialist on Soviet affairs

To Build a Castle...is one of the finest works of contemporary Russian literature I have ever read. Bukovsky is a highly talented writer, with a novelists gift for characterization and conversation. His account of his life as a dissenter... is no mere cataloging of horrors, but a very human saga that tells, in a new way, the old story of mans spirit refusing to be defeated by mans cruelty. Bukovskys sense of humor, of detachment and irony, elevates his memoirs to a work of art.... His vignettes of daily Soviet life, its bleakness and frustration, tell us more about modern Russia than all the textbooks with their dry statistics. I really cant say enough about the book. Philip Caputo, author of A Rumor of War

The sections of Bukovskys book dealing with his experience in Soviet prisons and camps are harrowing and brilliant, worthy of comparison with Dostoevsky. Irving Howe, literary critic and founding editor of Dissent magazine

Photo by Horst Tappe

Vladimir Bukovsky

Truly we were born to make Kafka live.

The man whom the New York Times called a hero of almost legendary proportions among the Soviet dissident movement, Vladimir Bukovsky was expelled from Moscow University at 19 years of age, and by the time he was 35 had spent a total of twelve years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric hospitals.

Mounting pressure in the West led to his release in 1976, when he was famously traded for the Chilean Communist leader Luis Corvalan. He then accepted an invitation to continue his interrupted biology studies at Cambridge University. His fame as a major irritant to the Soviet government was sealed with the publication of his powerful bestselling prison memoir To Build a Castle.

A masterful writer, whom Nabokov called that courageous and precious man, Bukovsky continued to write about life under totalitarianism. The great truth was that it was not rifles, not tanks, and not atom bombs that created power, he wrote. Power depended upon public obedience, upon a will to submit. He himself never offered that obedience or submission to totalitarian authority.

Bukovsky has used his acclaim to warn world leaders of continuing deceit and manipulation by Soviet leaders and their successors, up to and including President Putin. He recently said: Having failed to finish off conclusively the communist system, we are now in danger of integrating the resulting monster into our world. It may not be called communism anymore, but it has retained many of its dangerous characteristics.

In 2014 Bukovksy testified at the British inquiry into the 2006 murder by radiation poisoning of his friend, the FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko; the inquiry found that the killers were probably acting with the approval of President Putin.

Vladimir Bukovsky lives in Cambridge, England.

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