"Today few traces remain of the activities of Resistance International", writes Galina Akkerman in a memoir describing her work for writer Vladimir Maximov at the organisation's "tiny office on the Champs Elysée" in Paris.
[4] Among the members of the International's advisory committee were Cornelia Gerstenmaier, Lord Nicholas Bethell, Winston Churchill Jr, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Simon Wiesenthal.
[a] Between 1985 and 1987 Resistance International organised major events in Western Europe, two in Paris and one in Vienna, to draw attention to the lack of free speech and human rights in the Soviet Union.
"Freedom of speech in the USSR and Eastern Europe", noted Galina Akkerman, "was something more people could agree on than aid for the Contras or the Afghan mujahideen," and forty famous writers attended, including Joseph Brodsky, Czeslaw Milosz and Georgy Vladimov.
In 1985 the organisation was put on a more serious footing with the establishment of the American Foundation for Resistance International which had a roster of famous names and influential right-wing politicians on its advisory committee (among them Saul Bellow, William F. Buckley Jr, and, later, Richard Perle), while Jeane Kirkpatrick served with Bukovsky and Albert Jolis on its board.