Praise for Judgment in Moscow

Russian interference in American politics didn’t start in 2016, but stretches back decades. Vladimir Bukovsky uses the Kremlin’s own documents to show this and much more: how the Soviet Union provided a false face to the world and how Soviet leaders used Western leaders as dupes or willing actors. Judgment in Moscow provides the written Nuremberg trial the Soviets never got when the USSR fell.
— Anne Applebaum, Author of Gulag: A History (Pulitzer Prize), Washington Post columnist, and visiting Professor of Practice at the London School of Economics
Judgment in Moscow is at once urgent and relevant, witty and unsparing, perceptive and moving, with a moral clarity shaped by deep suffering.
— Victor Madeira, author of Britannia and the Bear (2014)
Russian interference in Western politics has been in the news of late, but Bukovsky’s deep dive into Soviet-era documents demonstrates that for much of the 20th century it was not paranoid fantasy, but cold, hard fact.
— Glenn Harlan Reynolds, Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Tennessee and author of An Army of Davids
The most important work to appear for decades on the Soviet empire and its aftermath.
— Edward Lucas, former senior editor of The Economist , from the introduction
Offering crucial archival documentation of the crimes of the Soviet era, Vladimir Bukovsky demonstrates how the failure to address its past has doomed Russia to repeat it. This book is essential for understanding why Russia did not make the transition to democracy after 1991 and why the men who now rule the Kremlin operate just like the communist apparatchiks and KGB bureaucrats who preceded them.
— Amy Knight, author of Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder
A fascinating work which demolishes a few more myths prevalent in the West about the Soviet Union and the Cold War .… stunning revelations.
— Richard Pipes, former director of Harvard’s Russian Research Center and member of the National Security Council
A massive and major contribution.… highly valuable material.
— Robert Conquest, author of The Great Terror and Harvest of Sorrow
At last, a book in the West that describes the Red Empire as seen by we who had to live under it.
— Mart Laar, former Prime Minister of Estonia and recipient of the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom
Judgment in Moscow is an essential warning of the dangers of collaborating with authoritarian regimes. It’s also a timeless reminder that evil doesn’t die, but must be battled back constantly. The crimes of the Soviet Union were enabled by appeasement and rationalization by politicians in the free world who ignored that the lesser evil is still evil. Today we are witnessing a similar plunge into the depths of moral equivalence and convenient deals with dictatorships. As Bukovsky writes in Judgment in Moscow, using a word much in vogue today, ‘any sane person knows full well when he has entered into collusion with evil.’

Vladimir Bukovsky’s moral compass has never failed, always pointing at the truth regardless of the circumstances or consequences. No one has written with greater clarity on why engagement between the free world and despots spreads corruption, not freedom. He writes, ‘The voice of conscience whispers that our fall began from the moment we agreed to “peaceful coexistence” with evil.’ We have fallen far indeed, and Judgment in Moscow holds the mirror of history up to politicians today proclaiming the need to find common ground with a dictator like Vladimir Putin.
— Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion and author of Winter is Coming
Judgment in Moscow combines a devastating archival documentation of key points in Soviet history with a passionate polemic directed at those in the West who averted their eyes, minimized, or justified Communist totalitarian oppression and Soviet aggression. Students of Soviet history as well as historians of the Western reaction to Soviet communism must grapple with his Soviet archival documents and listen to Bukovsky’s fervent indictment of Western apologists.
— John Earl Haynes, author of In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage
After 23 years of underhand censorship, Vladimir Bukovsky’s Judgment in Moscow has finally appeared in English. In 1995, thanks to his access to the secret documents of the Soviet Communist Party and the KGB, he was the first to reveal in detail how the totalitarian USSR misled and manipulated Western public opinion and, by corrupting its politicians and supporting guerrilla groups and terrorists, sought to subvert and destroy democracy. This is a fundamental historical study and major testimony by one of the great dissidents.
— Stéphane Courtois, editor of The Black Book of Communism
A glimpse into what should have happened if Russia's leaders had had the courage to fully account for the Soviet past.
— Vladimir Kara-Murza, Russian opposition politician and contributing writer to the Washington Post
If you seek to understand why we now face a renewed Cold War, one even more dangerous than the first, this is the first book you must read. If you seek to understand Russia’s interference in electoral democracies throughout the free world, this too is the first book you
must read. But above all, if you seek to understand why you never even heard about this book—published in nine languages, an international bestseller—this is the book you must read.
— Claire Berlinski, contributing editor of City Journal and author of Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too
Steve Ditko introduced me to the writings of Vladimir Bukovsky, a heroic figure we both had come to admire and respect. We were eager to read Judgment in Moscow, but no publisher was brave enough to publish it. Now, at last, it is available, and every bit as worthy as we anticipated. A giant of the 20th century now makes his mark on the 21st.
— Robin Snyder, writing and editing partner of Steve Ditko, original artist of Spider-Man
Everyone who cares about liberty should read this book.
— Evgeny Kissin, award-winning classical pianist
‘The inhuman Utopia fell, but neither spiritual freedom nor honorable thought has risen from the ruins.’ So writes the incomparable Vladimir Bukovsky in Judgment in Moscow, his long-awaited epic examining the ghastly intertwining of Communist East and Free West, and how it could possibly be that judgment of the crimes of communism still eludes a world sick with socialism.

With disarming intimacy (you can almost see the conversational curls of cigarette smoke), Bukovsky tells a dark new history of deception, corruption and betrayal on both sides of the "Iron Curtain” as gleaned from masses of never-before-seen secret Kremlin documents; these historical contributions can hardly be overstated. However, what makes the book unique and even transformative lies in Bukovsky's eye-witness and personal experience of the dark history he relates.

Soviet dissident, KGB prisoner, then celebrated former dissident and ex-prisoner, Bukovsky has lived his entire life on these same battlefields, East and West, now ruins. If Judgment in Moscow can’t infuse the survivors with conscience, nothing can.
— Diana West, author of American Betrayal
[Judgment in Moscow] is the most remarkable inside record about the workings of the Communist Party and the KGB in the last thirty years of Communism.
— Norman Stone, late professor of history and author of The Eastern Front, 1914-1917
The heroic Soviet dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky, makes use of extensive first hand documents that he personally stole from Russia's Central Committee (C.C.) archives, which have never before been accessible to Americans. . . Up until now, the depth and extent of the Kremlin's subversion of America has been understood by just a limited number of subject matter experts. But that could all change now.
— American Thinker
This book will be a hard pill to swallow for many in the United States and the West. It raises uncomfortable moral dilemmas and exposes Western weaknesses . . .... this book may shed some light on the nature of the current Russian regime and why, after our apparent victory in the Cold War, we face a Russia seeking once again to expand its influence in Eastern and Central Europe and which denies freedom and liberty to its people.
— New York Journal of Books
Judgment in Moscow remains an extremely powerful and important source for anyone who wants to understand the true nature of our deadly adversary. Bukovsky recounts such secrets as the Kremlin’s clandestine payments to foreign Communist parties and leaders, covert paramilitary training in places like Czechoslovakia for their foreign comrades, and extensive disinformation campaigns throughout the “West.” He also details the cooperation between the Kremlin and our own political class. Time for you to catch up on the corruption of our elite, on the basic facts of the Cold War, and on one of the most remarkable men I know.
— Michael Ledeen, Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies

Praise for Vladimir Bukovsky

A hero of almost legendary proportion among the Soviet dissident movement.
— The New York Times
Bukovsky’s heroic speech to the court in defense of freedom, and his five years of martyrdom in a despicable psychiatric jail, will be remembered long after the torturers he defied have rotted away.
— Vladimir Nabokov
A human rights champion undeterred by fear.
— Pussy Riot's Nadezhda Tolokonnikova
Bukovsky did what any decent man should have done, but what only a hero is capable of doing.
— Leonard Ternovsky, Soviet dissident
An individual man, Vladimir Bukovsky anchored his mind, life and fate to intellectual honesty against existing torture and hell created by the Marxist-socialist-communist-collectivist mind. He is one of the few with sinew and soul to survive severe effects of a so-called “perfect system” while doing the risky work to tell the world the truth. His life work and books stand to equip and fortify the novice or expert for the ongoing fight against powers of deceit.
— Janet Lynn, five-time U.S. Ladies Figure Skating Champion and Olympic and World Bronze medalist
Bukovsky has published the dirty little secrets no one in the West wants to know.
— Jeff Barganier, The Mongomery Independent