Soviet-era dissident Vladimir Bukovsky dies in UK

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EPA

A leading Soviet-era dissident and Russian human rights campaigner, Vladimir Bukovsky, has died at a Cambridge hospital, aged 76.

Bukovsky had a heart attack on Sunday evening after ailing for several years.

He became a prominent Soviet dissident in the early 1960s and was soon after declared mentally ill by authorities.

That avoided the inconvenience of a trial, and Bukovsky would spend the next 12 years, on an off, in psychiatric clinics and prison camps.

In 1971, between prison sentences, Bukovsky helped smuggle to the West the psychiatric hospital records of six well-known dissidents – exposing a Soviet practice of declaring dissidents mentally ill in order to detain and discredit them, rather than have them labelled as political prisoners.

Then in 1976, Bukovsky was expelled to the West, in exchange for the imprisoned Chilean Communist Party leader Luis Corvalán. He settled in Cambridge in the UK.

After settling in the UK, Bukovsky continued writing and campaigning against the Soviet government and was a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He wrote a best-selling memoir, To Build a Castle, and later analysed thousands of pages of top secret Soviet archives that he had stolen in 1992, according to his official website.

In 2015, he was charged in the UK with creating and possessing indecent images of children. He denied the charges and was later ruled too ill to stand trial.