Vladimir's Voice

Gaunt and hollow-cheeked, he wore a gray-flecked crew cut that was clearly the work of a prison barber, and his be wilderment was plain. "You see," explained exiled Soviet Dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, "sometimes I still don 't know whether I'm free or still in prison. I've talked about nothing else but my life in prison since I arrived here. " The first political prisoner ever traded by the Soviets, Bukovsky, 33, had just been swapped for Chilean Communist Luis Corvalán (TIME, Dec. 27). A native of a small town in eastern Russia, Bukovsky was serving a seven-year sentence for "anti-Soviet agitation " in Vladimir Prison, about 100 miles northeast of Moscow, when he was unexpectedly flown to Switzerland. In his flower-decorated Zurich hotel room, Bukovsky last week gave an interview to TIME Paris Bureau Chief Gregory H. Wierzynski and Geneva Correspondent Robert Kroon. Their report:

Chain-smoking American cigarettes and sipping Swiss mineral water, Bukovsky recounted the astonishing tale of his release from jail and his deportation. On a Friday two weeks ago, he had been told by prison authorities in Vladimir to get his things together and prepare to change cells. He was then put in a small KGB (secret police) van and whisked to another jail in Moscow. A ranking official of the KGB personally accompanied the handcuffed prisoner to Zurich on a chartered Aeroflot jet. Once the plane was no longer flying over Soviet territory the official unlocked the cuffs and ex plained that Bukovsky would not be deprived of Soviet citizenship like Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was deported in 1974. Instead, the erstwhile convict was given a Soviet passport val id for five years of travel abroad. This final detail of Kafkaesque bureaucratic procedure amused Bukovsky. Said he: "I can still consider myself a political prisoner—but on holiday."

Bukovsky is committed to calling the world's attention to the plight of the political prisoners in Soviet jails, concentration camps and prison psychiatric hospitals. His last cell at Vladimir, a fortress-like penitentiary, was shared by four men. It was excruciatingly small: Soviet prison regulations allow for only 27 sq. ft. of space per prisoner. There was so little room that Bukovsky spent most of his days sitting cross-legged on his bunk, reading. After the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. signed the Helsinki agreement last year, Bukovsky recalled bitterly, even journals from other Communist countries were taken from the prisoners, leaving them with only a few official Soviet newspapers and magazines to read.