The Man Who Could Only Say Nyet

By R.Z. Sheppard

TO BUILD A CASTLE -MY LIFE AS A DISSENTER by Vladimir Bukovsky Translated by Michael Scammell; Viking; 438 pages; $17.50

The literature of the Soviet Union's political dissidents continues to crowd the imagination like a 19th century novel. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov echo in the dramatic testimony of Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky, Daniel, Sakharov, Medvedev and Mandelshtam. Vladimir Bukovsky's To Build a Castle adds the spirit of Lewis Carroll. His Soviet Union seems like a vertiginous rabbit hole lined in permafrost, or the other side of the looking glass, where the Red kings and queens of the Kremlin can sometimes be made to play by the rules.

There is no hope of mating such an opponent. Bukovsky, 36, played only to guarantee his rights under the Soviet Constitution and Criminal Code. His gambit was to exchange a third of his life in prisons and psychiatric clinics for the dignity of saying nyet. It gained him an international reputation for incorrigible heroics. In 1976 the Soviet government solved their embarrassment by swapping Bukovsky for Chilean Communist Luis Corvalan, then a prisoner of the Pinochet dictatorship. Today Bukovsky lives in England, where he has resumed his frequently interrupted study of biology.

He will be remembered best as one of the great jailhouse lawyers. As a prisoner, with the right to petition any public official, Bukovsky clogged the arteries of bureaucracy with paper. His advice on how to tackle the system has universal application: "If you want your complaint to be examined by a high official, complain about his immediate subordinate ... And, most importantly of all, you should write enormous numbers of complaints and send them to the officials least equipped to deal with them." One objective of these tactics was to cause unsightly bulges in the official statistics, "the most powerful factor of all in Soviet life."

Thus Bukovsky exploited the rivalries and hidden disputes among the KGB, prison administrations, schools of psychiatry and political commissars. Legal affronteries never won him liberty but a different form of freedom: the ability to choose jail over silence. His life as a moral goad was organized around the harsh facts of imprisonment. "Every time I was released," he writes, "my only thought was how to get as much done as possible, so that afterward, back in prison again. I wouldn't have to spend sleepless nights dwelling on lost opportunities."

Bukovsky made one of his first decisions at the age of ten. He quit the Young Pioneers, the Soviet equivalent of the Cub Scouts. He had been asked to reprimand another boy, did it blisteringly well, felt ashamed of himself and decided that "I couldn't and wouldn't play this idiotic role any longer." At 14 he refused to join the Komsomol, and at 16 he was running with a harmless group of youthful Pimpernels who sympathized with the Hungarian uprising.

A few years later, his cycle of transgression and punishment became a routine. In 1961: expelled from Moscow University for arranging illegal poetry readings in Mayakovsky Square. In 1963: 15 months in a mental hospital for possessing photocopies of a Milovan Djilas book. In 1965: eight months for protesting the closed trials of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. In 1967: three years in a labor camp for supporting other critics of the system. In 1972: twelve years for telling Western journalists about Soviet psychiatric abuses.

The concept of political dissent as a symptom of mental illness is hard to imagine except as an obscenity. Bukovsky is properly outraged, both as victim and witness. But he is also bitterly amusing. For unlike most children of the Gulag, the au thor manages to combine the traditions of Dostoyevsky's brooding victims with Gogol's antic farceurs. The more benign psychiatrists, he notes, diagnosed opposition as a mild form of paranoia that did not require special treatment. The hardliners called it "creeping schizophrenia" and prescribed agonizing sulfur injections.

Bukovsky concludes that it is the regime that is demented: "It doesn't require conscious citizens demanding legality, it requires slaves ... It doesn't require partners, it requires satellites. Like a paranoiac, obsessed by a fantastic idea, it cannot and will not recognize reality."

When reality does break through it can be deeply self-abusive and cynical. A Soviet journalist tells Bukovsky that he is happy with Communism because it allows him to earn a good living writing demagogic rubbish. "In a normal country," he says, "they wouldn't let me within a mile of the press! What would I be do ing? Working as a navvy." The most pervasive reality, bureaucratic absurdity, al lows Bukovsky to score even in the last wild moments of his captivity.

" 'We have crossed the Soviet border,' says the KGB agent, 'and it is my duty to inform you officially that you have been expelled from the territory of the U.S.S.R.' 'Do you have some sort of decree or order?' 'No, nothing.' 'And what about my sentence? Has it been quashed?' 'No, it remains in force.' 'So, I'm sort of a prisoner on holiday, on vacation?' 'Sort of.' " "They don't ever know either how to jail or release you properly," concludes Bukovsky. The Inspector General could not have said it better. --R.Z. Sheppard

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