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in 1936 he chaired the commission that pro-
duced the draft of the 1936 Constitution, later
known as the “Stalin Constitution.” In February
1937, however, with the Great Purge in full
swing, Bukharin was arrested on charges of
counterrevolutionary activities. He served as the
main defendant in the 1938 Moscow show trial,
was found guilty, and was shot soon after. In the
1980s his defense of the mixed economy of the
New Economic Policy was attractive to Commu-
nist reformers, including Mikhail
GORBACHEV
.In
1988, his verdict was reversed and he was fully
rehabilitated by the Soviet Supreme Court.
sentenced to seven years in prison, to be fol-
lowed by five years of exile. In December 1976,
as part of the exchange for Corvalan, he left the
Soviet Union and settled in England. He wrote
his autobiography,
To Build a Castle: My Life as a
Dissenter
(1978), and continued to work for the
human rights movement. In 1983, he was
appointed president of the human rights organi-
zation Resistance International.
Bulgakov, Mikhail Afanasievich
(1891-1940)
writer
Virtually forgotten at the time of his death, with
the posthumous publication of his most impor-
tant works Bulgakov is now considered a major
force in 20th-century Russian letters. Bulgakov
was born in Kiev on May 15, 1891. His father
was a professor of divinity at the Kiev Theologi-
cal Academy. Bulgakov studied medicine and
briefly practiced as a country doctor (1916-18),
before traveling to the Caucasus in 1919 to write
newspaper stories and plays. Arriving in Mos-
cow in 1921, he first worked as a journalist
before turning to literature and drama. His liter-
ary breakthrough came with the novel
The White
Guard
(1926), which was soon adapted for the
stage by the Moscow Art Theater (MkhAT) as
The Days of the Turbines.
Although its portrayal of
White officers was considered by some to be
overly sympathetic, the play was a big success,
and Bulgakov began a long association with the
Moscow Art Theater as dramatist, director, and
author that was richly productive and contro-
versial. A short satirical novel,
Heart of a Dog,
was
also published at this time. In 1929, Bulgakov
was dismissed from the MkhAT staff and his
plays were banned, but after a personal appeal
to
STALIN
the decision was reversed.
The Days of
the Turbines
was restaged and once again proved
a hit with theater audiences. Success and official
acceptance proved fleeting as his next play,
Molière
(written 1930, published 1962), was in
rehearsals for four years and when it finally
opened in 1936, the censors shut it down after
Bukovsky, Vladimir Konstantinovich
(1942-
)
writer
A leading member of the dissident movement of
the 1960s and 1970s, Bukovskii was allowed to
leave the Soviet Union in 1976, as part of an
unusual exchange with the Chilean Communist
Party leader, Luis Corvalan, imprisoned by the
Pinochet government. The son of a
COMMUNIST
PARTY
official, Bukovsky studied biology at Mos-
cow State University, where he became involved
with the Soviet dissident movement. He was first
arrested in 1963 for illegally photocopying the
book
The New Class
by the Yugoslav dissident
Communist Milovan Djilas, and placed in a
Leningrad psychiatric hospital. Freed in 1965, he
was arrested again later that year for organizing
a demonstration in support of the writers Andrei
SINYAVSKY
and Yuli Daniel, who at the time were
being tried on charges of promoting anti-Soviet
views in their works. He was sentenced to
another term in a psychiatric hospital. Freed in
1966, he was rearrested in January 1967 and
sentenced to a three-year term in labor camps
for further political activities. In January 1971,
he collected materials on the Soviet Union's
abuse of psychiatric hospitals for political pur-
poses, which were presented to the World Con-
gress of Psychiatrists in Mexico City and led to
the congress's condemnation of Soviet psychia-
try. He was arrested once more and in 1972 was
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