An initiative group suggested a famous Soviet dissident and former political prisoner Vladimir Bukovsky, living now in the UK, as a candidate on the presidential elections in 2008.
The initiative group explained its choice in the following way: “The opposition needs its own candidate for President. Strong, straight-out, resolute. Who has stainless political and moral authority. Famous and respected. Who is not associated with any party or group. Able to propose an honest program of democratic, legal and social reforms. We require candidate who can be supported by all democratically oriented electorate of Russia.”
Among those who has signed the suggestion there are such figures as Roman Dobrokhotov, chairman of the “We” democratic movement, journalist Kara-Murza (junior), political scientists Andrey Pionkovsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky, full member of Russian Academy of Sciences Vladimir Ryzhkov.
Vladimir Bukovsky, 64, has already given his consent to participate in the elections as a candidate from the opposition. He claimed that “too many Soviet myths have returned”; that “Chekist authority is strengthening”; and that “we should speak not about recovery but about rescue”.
Two more candidates from the opposition have agreed to be a presidential candidate, it is ex-premier Mikhail Kasyanov and former head of the central bank Victor Gerashenko.
But all they had little chances to become a president, and Bukovsky less than other. The matter is that there is a law that prohibits persons with dual citizenship to take up state positions. Moreover, according to Constitution only a person who lives in Russia over 10 years can be a presidential candidate.
However Bukovsky realizes that fully. That is just the reason why he finished his announcement with the following statement: “Our favorite toast says “for our hopeless business”. Today this business seems to be quite hopeless. That’s why I agreed at it”.
Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky
Writer, publicist, scientist (neurophysiologist). Like Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, he is considered to be a prominent Soviet dissident.
Born in 1942, in early 60s was an active advocate of the democratic, human rights protection movement in the USSR. In 1960-1962 was one of the organizers of recitation of forbidden verses near the Mayakovsky Monument. In December 1965 he participated in organising of the Glasnost Meeting (meeting of publicity) on the Pushkin Square that became the first opposition demonstration in Moscow over the last 40 years. 1970 he prepared and filed for publication in foreign media a dossier on the punitive psychiatry in the USSR.
He has been arrested four times for anti soviet propaganda (1963, 1965, 1967, 1971), spent more than 12 years in sum in prisons, concentration camps, mental hospitals. In December 1976 he was expelled by the decision of the Politburo in Switzerland, in exchange for leader of Chile communists Luis Alberto Corvalбn.
In the 80s headed the international anti-Communist organisation Resistance International.
April, 1991, he arrived in Moscow by invitation of the Chairman Supreme Council Boris Yeltsin. 1992, stood as an expert of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation in the “case of the C.P.S.U.”. Summer 1992, was nominated for election on the post of Moscow mayor, but resigned. 2004, along with Boris Nemtsov, Garry Kasparov and others became a founder of the “Committee 2008”.
Live in Cambridge (the U.K.). Author of several books, e.g., And the Wind Returns, Judgement in Moscow, To Build a Castle - My Life as a Dissenter, Letters of Russian Traveller.
