This book was written more than twenty years ago and published in many languages, but not English. The reason for this is amply explained in the book, and I don’t think I need to repeat it here. Rather, I have to explain how it was resurrected contrary to my expectations.
“We cannot guess ahead/What echo our words shall have,” said a Russian poet some 150 years ago. Indeed, when I was introduced to the famous pianist Evgeny Kissin, the last thing I expected was to talk about this book. Yet that is what he wanted to do, insisting that it must be published in English. Thanks to his persistent efforts, it finally is.
Twenty years is a long time, particularly in view of the many things that happened in the meantime. At first I thought I would have to update it significantly. But after rereading it for the first time since I wrote it, I discovered (to my dismay) that it needs no updating at all. Alas, my worst forecasts have come true: failure to finish off the Soviet system conclusively has led to its revival. Clearly Putin and his KGB cohorts would have never climbed to power if Russian society had the courage to launch what we advocated twenty-three years ago: a Nuremberg-style trial and lustrations. Without it, the country went full circle and reverted back to the USSR.
So this book is as topical today as it was two decades ago. The only changes made in this edition are in chapter 6, and even those were not corrections, but additions. At the time of writing, I did not have all the necessary documents at my disposal, and made some assumptions on the basis of circumstantial evidence. Since then quite a lot of those documents have surfaced and confirmed my guesses, enabling the expansion of chapter 6.
However, the credit for this achievement must go to Pavel Stroilov, not to me. After I published this book in 1995–1996, the Russian authorities would no longer permit me to visit Russia, and I needed a capable assistant on the spot. It happened that such an assistant emerged all by himself; back in 1991, upon returning from my first trip to Moscow, I received an unexpected letter. Its wording suggested the writer was more accustomed to speaking Russian than English:
“Good day, Vladimir Konstantinovich! My name is Pavel and I am 7 years old. I have read in a newspaper that you don’t like communists. I dislike them, too. Let’s keep a company.”
Naturally I responded that of course we, the anticommunists, must stick together. But as I live in Britain, he must improve his English, and I sent him a lot of books for that purpose. By the age of twelve Pavel was fluent in English, and a few years later became a student in one of Moscow’s universities.
Around 1999–2000, when he was seventeen or eighteen years old and still living in Moscow, we discussed the idea of his trying to continue my work in the Russian archives and copy more secret documents. As Pavel likes to say, he became my “man on the inside” in Russia.
In particular, we discovered that a large body of top-secret Communist Party documents had been semi-officially copied from the Kremlin archives in the “revolutionary” chaos of 1991, and could now be accessed in the Gorbachev Foundation Archive more easily than their originals in the official Kremlin files. However, there were restrictions on which documents you were allowed to see, and a ban was imposed on removing or copying any of the material. Yet ultimately he was able to gain access to many prohibited documents, also to secretly electronically smuggle out a huge number of them—somewhere between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand pages. This was quite sufficient for Pavel to complete chapter 6 (for which we all are indebted to him).
We are also grateful to Alyona Kojevnikov, who translated this book into English brilliantly and incredibly quickly. It must surely be a world record!
Special thanks to John Crowfoot for his invaluable work with my archive, Originally placed on the internet by Yulia Zaks and Leonid Chernikhov in 1999, it consists of documents I copied in Moscow in 1992 that serve as the foundation of this book. However, the archive required a major effort to be put in order, a task accomplished ably by John. He also deserves credit for the meticulous translation of dozens of documents into English.
Finally, we must applaud the publisher, Ninth of November Press, for daring to publish a book no other English-language publisher in the world had the courage to touch for twenty years. A special thanks also goes to the dedicated volunteers who donated their time to prepare this book.
Vladimir Bukovsky
Cambridge, November 2018