Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky, a Russian writer born in 1942 but educated at Cambridge, was a dissident in the Soviet Union of the 1960s and 1970s. Because he exposed the Soviet practice of jailing political prisoners in psychiatric institutions, the young Russian was sentenced to twelve years (1964-1976) in prison, labor camps, and psychiatric wards under the brutal Soviet regime that did not allow any dissenting opinions. He was released to the West in 1976.
After the fall of the Soviet empire, the Russian government invited him in 1992 to testify against the criminal actions of the Soviet Communist Party. According to Paul Belien, who interviewed Bukovsky in 2006, in order to "prepare for his testimony, Bukovsky was granted access to a large number of documents from Soviet secret archives. He is one of the few people ever to have seen these documents because they are still classified. Using a small handheld scanner and a laptop computer, however, he managed to copy many documents (some with high security clearance), including KGB reports to the Soviet government."
