Clashing with the Soviet government over poetry

In the summer of 1958, a monument to the futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was dedicated in Moscow, and a poetry reading was included as part of the ceremony. However, the dedication soon devolved into a spontaneous event that would likely be called a flash mob today: Audience members simply started reading their own poetry aloud. Soon, the reading was extended into a series of similar events called “Mayak” (Lighthouse) or “Mayakovka.” One of the organizers of the series was Vladimir Bukovsky, then a soil biology student at Moscow University and a budding critic of the Soviet regime. The mood of the poems Bukovsky curated swung between the lyrical and the explicitly anti-Soviet. The latter category quickly earned him unwanted attention from the state. “The performances given by one sector of the youth are full of pessimism, resignation, and a spirit of opposition,” a report by the Central Committee of the Komsomol complained.

In 1961, the readings were officially banned (several members would subsequently be sent to prison). Bukovsky was expelled from university and interrogated by the KGB. Later on, a search of his possessions turned up a set of ideas Bukovsky had written down on how to democratize the Komsomol; an investigators later interpreted the notes as evidence that Bukovsky had attempted to “break up” the organization. Finally, in 1963, the young man was jailed for attempting to make copies of Milovan Đilas’s dissident volume New Class. That case led to Bukovsky’s first psychological diagnosis, “slow-onset schizophrenia,” and his first bout of forced psychiatric treatment in a special hospital.

After he helped organize a “transparency protest” in 1965 to defend the writers Andrey Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel, Bukovsky was once again sent away for treatment, first to the Lyuberetskaya Psychiatric Hospital and then for eight months to the Serbsky Institute. When the resident psychiatrists there could not arrive at a consensus regarding Bukovsky’s diagnosis, he was released. The dissident’s third arrest came two years later after he helped set up a demonstration opposing the detention of Alexander Ginzburg, Yury Galanskov, and several other human rights advocates. In court, Bukovsky gave a sharply-worded speech arguing that the KGB was discrediting itself; his words resonated strongly enough for samizdat producers to begin copying them in print. Bukovsky was sentenced to three years in a prison camp for “active participation in collective actions that disturb the public order.”

The Mayakovka readings that Bukovsky helped organize when he was still a soil-biologist-in-training have continued to this day.