LaLa_RawRaw: Vladimir Bukovsky Asks For Your Help...

[Hissyspit]

http://www.atlargely.com/2008/03/vladimir-bukovs.html

Vladimir Bukovsky asks for your help...

My good friend, author and former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky is asking for your help. First, if you don't know who Mr. Bukovsky is, here is a brief bio:

"Vladimir Bukovsky is a Soviet dissident, author, and human rights activist who spent a total of twelve years in Soviet prisons, labor camps, and forced-treatment psychiatric hospitals. As a student, Mr. Bukovsky was expelled from his Moscow school for creating an unauthorized magazine. Subsequently he was forcibly interned in a psychiatric ward for organizing poetry meetings in the center of Moscow.

On three more occasions he was arrested and imprisoned for organizing demonstrations defending other Soviet dissidents. After he managed to smuggle to the West documents detailing the Soviets' political use of psychiatric institutions, he was arrested and convicted for “slander of Soviet psychiatry.” While in prison he co-authored A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents to help other dissidents fight psychiatric torture.

In December 1976, Bukovsky was exchanged in Zurich for Chilean communist leader Louis Corvalan. He moved to England, where he published his bestselling autobiography, To Build a Castle: My Life As a Dissenter. In 1983, with Armando Valladares, he founded and was elected president of Resistance International, which fought for the freedom of political prisoners throughout the Communist bloc. In 1992, President Yeltsin’s government invited Bukovsky to serve as an expert witness at the trial conducted to determine whether the activity of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was unconstitutional.

The result of his testimony and research was the book Judgment in Moscow. In January 2004, with Garry KasparovLife-Imitates-Chess Sep-07 and others, he founded the Committee of 2008, an umbrella organization of the Russian democratic opposition that aims to ensure free and fair presidential elections in 2008. Bukovsky is also the author of Soviet Hypocrisy and Western Gullibility and To Choose Freedom."

Now for his request, which I got via email today:

Our friends from St. Petersburg are asking for support. Maxim Reznik, the leader of the democratic opposition in the city, was arrested about three weeks ago on fabricated charges. People campaigning in defence of him suffer repression, too. This is certainly a start of a major attack by the regime against the dissidents, so it must be countered the sooner the better.
On Sunday 30 March I will picket the Russian Embassy in London with the poster saying 'Freedom to Maxim Reznik! Freedom to political prisoners!'.

I ask you to do the same in your own cities on the same date. I need it to happen in as many countries as possible. Do mobilise media to report that. Do let me know if you are going to support me, to give us time to help you with the media if we can.

It is very important to have all of us doing that simultaneously, that is, on the 30th of March. I believe such an international demonstration is the only way to force the Russian regime stop that chain of repression.

I think we might want to add Don Siegelman, Paul Minor, Jose Padilla, and countless others to our signs. Regardless of what other names you add, when Mr. Bukovsky asks for our help, we have to give it.

[babylonsister]

1. Rec'd for LaLa and Hissy! nt

[fascisthunter]

2. Kick

Maxim... my middle name given to me by my parents in honor of my grandfather. He too was a political dissident who spent part of his life in Siberia.

[formercia]

3. The Russian 'GULAG' where death is a blessing.

http://markofcainfilm.blogspot.com/

As early as the 1920's, Russia's prisons and gulag began to attract the attention of researchers. The prisoners of the Stalinist Gulag, or "Zone," as it is called, had developed a complex social structure that incorporated highly symbolic tattooing as a mark of rank. The very existence of these inmates at prisons and forced labor camps was treated by the state as a deep secret, and their tattoo art was considered a forbidden topic.


http://www.phaseloop.com/foreignprisoners/exp-russian_tats.html

According to the book of Genesis, God placed a mark on the world's first murderer before sending him into exile. The mark of Cain indelibly branded its bearer as a criminal and social outcast.

It is not known when tattooing first became a common practice in Russian prisons and Stalinist Gulags. Soviet researchers first discovered and studied this underground activity in the 1920s; photographs of prisoners from that period suggest an already elaborate and highly developed subculture. More than simple decoration, the images symbolically proclaim the wearer's background and rank within the complex social system of the jailed.

The Russian prison population is one of the largest in the world. From the mid-1960's to the 1980's, thirty-five million people were incarcerated, and of those, twenty to thirty million were tattooed. The tattoos display inmates' contempt for official justice and retribution-- phrases and images directly mock the political system and the absence of any possibility for "reform" within the jails. "For a convict, prison is a crime college," reads one typical statement. Convicted female gang members sometimes prefer the simple declaration, "People are wild animals."

http://www.phaseloop.com/foreignprisoners/prison-russia.html

Russia has over 1,200,000 prisoners serving time in it's 840 prisons.

One in every four adult men in Russia is a former prisoner. The prison population has reached the size of the Stalin's GULAG, more than one million people are held in prisons in inhumane conditions, suffering from hunger, disease, and unemployment. Three percent of Russian families have lost their provider.

The overwhelming majority of prisoners are not professional criminals, but people who found themselves in prison because of misery, unemployment, or homelessness.