[13] They made contact with earlier participants of the readings such as Vladimir Osipov,[14] the editor of Boomerang (1960), and Yuri Galanskov who issued the Phoenix (1961), two examples of literary samizdat.

[17] Bukovsky was examined by Soviet psychiatrists, declared to be mentally ill ("schizophrenia"), and sent for treatment at the Special Psychiatric Hospital in Leningrad where he remained for almost two years, until February 1965.

[19] In December 1965, Bukovsky helped prepare a demonstration on Pushkin Square in central Moscow to protest against the trial of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel.

He circulated the "Civic Appeal" by mathematician and poet Alexander Esenin-Volpin, which called on the authorities to obey the Soviet laws requiring glasnost in the judicial process, e.g. the admission of the public and the media to any trial.

[17] The demonstration on 5 December 1965 (Constitution Day) became known as the Glasnost Meeting or rally, and marked the beginning of the openly active Soviet civil rights movement.

Healthy individuals were held among mentally ill and often dangerous patients; they were forced to take various psychotropic drugs; they might also be incarcerated in prison-type institutions under overall control of the KGB.

[c 2] During a clandestine interview filmed by CBS News correspondent Bill Cole in a forest near Moscow, Bukovsky described how the Soviet government was committing political dissidents to mental institutions and subjecting them to drug treatments.

[15]: 138–141 [32][33]: 29–30 In recent years in our country a number of court orders have been made involving the placing in psychiatric hospitals ("of special type" and otherwise) of people who in the opinion of their relatives and close friends are mentally healthy.

As the person at the centre of this unprecedented international row, Bukovsky waited in almost total isolation, without access to a lawyer, to be tried and sent to the camps or a special psychiatric hospital.

[c 11] At first held in Lefortovo Prison, in August, Bukovsky spent approximately three months in the Serbsky Institute, which this time pronounced him mentally sound and able to stand trial.

[27]: 31–32 [c 13] While in prison Bukovsky and his fellow inmate, the psychiatrist Semyon Gluzman, wrote a brief 20-page Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents, which was widely published abroad, in Russian (1975) and in many other languages, including [40] English,[41] French,[42] Italian,[43] German,[44] and Danish.

[39]: 175 In December 1976, Bukovsky was deported from the USSR and exchanged at Zürich airport by the Soviet government for the imprisoned general secretary of the Communist Party of Chile, Luis Corvalán.

[52] Bukovsky moved to Great Britain where he settled in Cambridge and resumed his studies in biology, disrupted fifteen years earlier (see above) by his expulsion from Moscow University.

[62] Among the prominent members of the board were Albert Jolis and Jeane Kirkpatrick while Midge Decter, Yuri Yarim-Agaev, Richard Perle, Saul Bellow, Robert Conquest and Martin Colman were on the body's advisory committee.

[64][65] In March 1987, Bukovsky and nine other émigré authors (Ernst Neizvestny, Yury Lyubimov, Vasily Aksyonov and Leonid Plyushch among them) caused a furore in the West and then in the Soviet Union itself when they raised doubts about the substance and sincerity of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms.

[17] With the help of a small hand-held scanner and a laptop computer, he managed secretly to make photocopies of many of the documents (some with high security clearance), including KGB reports to the Central Committee.

[72] Bukovsky hoped that an international tribunal in Moscow might play a similar role to the first Nuremberg Trial (1945–1946) in post-Nazi Germany and help the country begin to overcome the legacy of Communism.

[74] Many of the same documents were extensively quoted and cited in Bukovsky's Judgment in Moscow (1995), where he described and analysed what he had uncovered about recent Soviet history and about the relations of the USSR and the CPSU with the West.

Random House bought the rights to the manuscript, but the publisher, in Bukovsky's words, tried to make the author "rewrite the whole book from the liberal left political perspective."

[79] On 30 March 2011, Bukovsky requested the arrest of Mikhail Gorbachev by the British authorities after submitting to Westminster Magistrates' Court materials on crimes against humanity that the former Soviet leader had allegedly committed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by ordering military suppression of demonstrations in Lithuania, Tbilisi, Baku and Tajikistan.

[81] In 2001, Bukovsky was elected President of the Comitatus pro Libertatibus – Comitati per le Libertà – Freedom Committees in Florence, an Italian libertarian organisation which promoted an annual Memento Gulag, or Memorial Day devoted to the Victims of Communism, on 7 November (the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution).

In 2002, Boris Nemtsov, former Deputy Prime Minister of Russia who was then an elected member of the State Duma and leader of the Union of Rightist Forces, paid a visit to Bukovsky in Cambridge.

[84] In 2005, Bukovsky was among the prominent dissidents of the 1960s and 1970s (Gorbanevskaya, Sergei Kovalyov, Eduard Kuznetsov, Alexander Podrabinek, Yelena Bonner) who took part in a documentary series by Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr.

[89] Two years later, in an interview with The Brussels Journal,[90] Bukovsky said he had read confidential documents from secret Soviet files in 1992 which confirmed the existence of a "conspiracy" to turn the European Union into a socialist organisation.

[101][102] Responding to pro-Kremlin politicians and commentators who expressed doubt about Bukovsky's electoral prospects, his nominators rejected a number of frequently repeated allegations.

[107] On 22 December 2007, the Central Electoral Commission turned down Bukovsky's application, on the grounds that he had failed to give information about his activities as a writer when submitting his documents, that he was holding a British residence permit, and that he had not been living in Russia during the past ten years.

The following year, Bukovsky published a collection of interviews in Russia which described Putin and his team as The heirs of Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's last and most notorious secret police chief.

[123] A prosecutor made several allegations to the court: that Bukovsky admitted to possessing child abuse materials which he downloaded over the course of 15 years,[120][119][124] and that he described the activity as a "hobby" and "research".

[124] Forensic examination of Bukovsky's hard drives revealed thousands of child abuse images and videos[125] – some category A[125][126] – featuring mostly boys[120] and children of toddler age, a court was told.

According to a book by investigative journalist Bill Gertz, Bukovsky was targeted "in a Russian disinformation operation shorty before he was to testify before the Owen commission in March 2015.