He died of cardiac arrest in Cambridge, England, on Sunday evening after a period of ill health, according to reports.
Bukovsky was repeatedly imprisoned in the former Soviet Union for organising demonstrations in defense of government critics.
Thanks to him, the West learned about the Soviet practice of confining dissidents to psychiatric hospitals; Bukovsky himself spent almost 12 years in mental institutions, according to Poland’s niezalezna.pl website.
He was deported to the West in 1976 and lived abroad from that time onward.
After the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 he visited Russia several times, but did not decide to return permanently.
He also visited Poland on several occasions, Poland's PAP news agency reported.
Bukovsky had Polish roots, according to public broadcaster Polish Radio’s IAR news agency.
Born in 1942 in the town of Belebey, 800 kilometres east of Moscow, he was a great-grandson of a Polish officer who had been deported to Russia’s Siberia region after the failure of Poland’s November 1830 Uprising against czarist rule, the news agency reported.
(gs/pk)
Source: niezalezna.pl, PAP, IAR