Vladimir's Voice

Gaunt and hollow-cheeked, he wore a gray-flecked crew cut that was clearly the work of a prison barber, and his be wilderment was plain. "You see," explained exiled Soviet Dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, "sometimes I still don 't know whether I'm free or still in prison. I've talked about nothing else but my life in prison since I arrived here. " The first political prisoner ever traded by the Soviets, Bukovsky, 33, had just been swapped for Chilean Communist Luis Corvalan (TIME, Dec. 27). A native of a small town in eastern Russia, Bukovsky was serving a seven-year sentence for "anti-Soviet agitation " in Vladimir Prison, about 100 miles northeast of Moscow, when he was unexpectedly flown to Switzerland. In his flower-decorated Zurich hotel room, Bukovsky last week gave an interview to TIME Paris Bureau Chief Gregory H. Wierzynski and Geneva Correspondent Robert Kroon. Their report:

Chain-smoking American cigarettes and sipping Swiss mineral water, Bukovsky recounted the astonishing tale of his release from jail and his deportation. On a Friday two weeks ago, he had been told by prison authorities in Vladimir to get his things together and prepare to change cells. He was then put in a small KGB (secret police) van and whisked to another jail in Moscow. A ranking official of the KGB personally accompanied the handcuffed prisoner to Zurich on a chartered Aeroflot jet. Once the plane was no longer flying over Soviet territory the official unlocked the cuffs and ex plained that Bukovsky would not be deprived of Soviet citizenship like Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was deported in 1974. Instead, the erstwhile convict was given a Soviet passport val id for five years of travel abroad. This final detail of Kafkaesque bureaucratic procedure amused Bukovsky. Said he: "I can still consider myself a political prisoner--but on holiday."

Bukovsky is committed to calling the world's attention to the plight of the political prisoners in Soviet jails, concentration camps and prison psychiatric hospitals. His last cell at Vladimir, a fortress-like penitentiary, was shared by four men. It was excruciatingly small: Soviet prison regulations allow for only 27 sq. ft. of space per prisoner. There was so little room that Bukovsky spent most of his days sitting cross-legged on his bunk, reading. After the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. signed the Helsinki agreement last year, Bukovsky recalled bitterly, even journals from other Communist countries were taken from the prisoners, leaving them with only a few official Soviet newspapers and magazines to read.

Rotten Fish. Vladimir Prison's 1,300 inmates are allowed into tiny courtyards, about the size of the cells, for one hour of fresh air each day. Bukovsky belonged to the "black" category of political prisoners, so named because of their somber prison garb. Contact with other prisoners was prohibited. "We had lots of ways to communicate, though," said Bukovsky. One way was through a few sympathetic guards who passed on the cheering news of the protest campaign being carried on for Bukovsky in the West. The prison grapevine quickly carried the news of Bukovsky's dramatic month-long hunger strike. Before and after his fast, Bukovsky, like other prisoners, received only minimal fare. Lunch consisted of thin gruel, while dinner was a watery, acid soup. Inmates also received 3/4 oz. of sugar and 2 oz. of salted fish per day. "It's rotten fish," Bukovsky recalled. "I don't know what sea they catch it in, but I couldn't eat it."

Although Bukovsky himself was never tortured, he told of prisoners being beaten. "The worst thing was boredom," Bukovsky said. In the lunatic asylum run by the KGB, where he was confined from 1963 to 1965, Bukovsky had to endure countless hours of propaganda "reindoctrination," while the police doctors argued about whether his dissident views qualified him as a schizophrenic or a psychopath. In the asylum he found some textbooks for the study of English. "You know," he confided, "English grammar is funny--a bit mad to us Russians--so why not study it in a prison madhouse?"

Bukovsky plans to spend a few weeks in England with British Actor David Markham, who has campaigned indefatigably for the Russian's freedom for the past six years. After that he hopes to go to Holland to study biology at the University of Leyden. "Leyden had very old ties with Russia," Bukovsky ex plained. "Peter the Great sent Russians to study there. The university mailed postcards to me in prison for my birthday and, remarkably enough, this was the only correspondence from abroad that ever got through to me."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.