The online archive of Central Committee documents surreptitiously photocopied by Vladimir Bukovsky was created and made accessible and usable largely through the work of Yulia Zaks, a Moscow native who, alongside an accomplished professional career, devoted much of her life to assisting dissidents in her homeland, and later from the United States.
Born in Moscow in 1937, Zaks received a doctorate in chemistry and became a senior researcher at the Research Institute of Plastics in that city. In 1968, when Yury Galanskov, Alexander Ginzburg and two co-defendants were put on trial, she was one of those who signed petitions protesting against their prosecution and the closed-door conditions in which the trial was held.
In 1976 she was a witness for the defense at the trial of her step-brother Andrei Tverdokhlebov, who had participated in setting up a Russian branch of Amnesty International. In 1977 she signed a petition in defense of political prisoners in the USSR. The following year she put her name to the Moscow Helsinki Group’s document (No 58) “Ten Years Ago”, concerning the events of the Prague Spring. Fined for “sheltering” her brother, she was subjected to searches of her apartment and other forms of harassment.
In 1979 she became one of the administrators of the Solzhenitsyn Fund, providing vital assistance to Soviet political prisoners. This charitable enterprise was seen by communist authorities as a criminal organization. Many of her predecessors had landed in prison. Zaks, harassed by the KGB, was on the edge of arrest when she emigrated with her two sons and parents to the United States in the summer of 1979.
Zaks settled in Indianapolis. There she worked as a polymer research fellow for AT&T Bell Labs (now Lucent). She also continued working with the Solzhenitsyn Fund, organizing and managing a group of Soviet immigrants who sent parcels to political exiles in the USSR.
In 1999 Zaks created the website bukovsky-archives.net, formatting and organizing Bukovsky’s 4,500 pages of scanned documents into a researchable archive organized by topic, including English translations of selected documents that others had translated.
She was diagnosed with cancer in 2011, and died on 11 July 2014. Her site, still online, provided the core materials for the current bukovsky-archive.com site to which this book’s source references link.