Soviet Presswatch/The Gorby Club

...It is only natural that there should be: once the Soviet system had become established, its champions had to espouse some policies needed to preserve social stability, such as strong families...

...She not only acknowledges past political abuses of psychiatry (claiming, however, that they only affected a tiny fraction of patients) but admits that under the strict old rules, people suffering from nothing more than a mild temporary neurosis often found themselves caught in wheels of the psychiatric machine...

...The program, made by and starring one Oleg Tumanov—a KGB mole in the Munich office of Radio Liberty who became head of the Russian service before his spectacular defection to the Motherland in the early 1980s—was broadcast right after Vremya, pushing back a scheduled "Soccer Revue...

...It opened with the assertion that "since 1988, jamming of Radio Liberty has been virtually stopped...

...Moreover, he finds that to comply meekly with a criminal's demands—the advice routinely given now in the Soviet press—is degrading to human dignity: "I don't know how a family can go on after the wife was raped by hoodlums in front of her husband while he, at the point of a gun, could not do anything to help...

...An interview with the general director of the Klub Gorbi, as the Moscow-based organization is known, appeared on March 25 in the Moscow weekly Stolitsa ("The Capital...

...They also favor a tough stand on criminals, while the "liberals" tend to oppose the death penalty...

...So what, says Voina: it was one of the precious few sources from which Soviet people could learn the truth about their society and who cares where the money came from...

...An appropriate companion piece is "Weapons Against Fear" by S. Karkhanin (April 30), which deals with letters in response to a January 16 article, "How to Save Yourself From a Criminal," written, no less, by a special investigator in the office of the Prosecutor General of the USSR...

...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991...

...Journalist Vladimir Voina, who dissected the film in the April 13 issue of Nezavisimaya Gazeta ("Independent Gazette"), wonders just what "virtually" could mean, adding that more sophisticated interference methods had reappeared lately in place of the crude static din of old: the Liberty signal sometimes fades, and sometimes gets crowded out by other frequencies or music of mysterious origin...

...Charles Krauthammer has even suggested that the habit of calling such folks "conservatives" and their pro-capitalist opponents "liberals" was some sort of plot by our left-liberals to claim the good guys for themselves...

...Alien Voices" concluded with Tumanov opining that "if the American government were to show its good will, Radio Liberty would cease to exist...

...A Communist functionary was appointed to oversee the club's work, and its "best ideas" were being stolen by the establishment...

...Since respectful references to all things American are now in vogue, Lukyanova points to the mental patients' rights movement in the United States and the human tragedy of deinstitutionalization...

...Radio Liberty was described as a tool of the CIA...

...I haven't been able to find anyone since January...

...He has never even met his idol...

...She cites cases of newly discharged patients who harmed or killed others, and quotes psychiatrists who complain about assertive patients refusing treatment and THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 dangerous people being turned loose...

...Only recently, Gorbachev gleefully pointed out that the people who were calling themselves "left-wing" in Russia were really "right-wing," since it is generally the right that stands for private property and free enterprise...

...Lukyanova is either too progressive or too subtle for that...

...Most recently, two items caught my eye in the leading "conservative" newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya...

...But Osadchuk's troubles were not...

...And, he adds, what about the cozy relationship between Gosteleradio and the KGB...

...It has an agenda—one that can be glimpsed throughthe civilized rhetoric of these two articles...

...I even began to suspect," writes Voina, "that one has to try really hard to become a paid agent of the CIA...

...Striking another blow for press freedom, the Soviet Journalists' Union has finally expelled the infamous radio and television chief Leonid Kravchenko...

...On a more threatening note, it was said that the Soviet miners' strike committees were getting their instructions straight from RL broadcasts that is to say, from the CIA via RL...

...On April 18, she was found innocent on all counts: the newspaper had been properly registered, and the headline, it seems, referred not to the collage but to the profile of an actual pimp on the same page...

...Around that time, he happened to lay eyes on Raisa Gorbachev's now-famous doctoral dissertation on the sorry state of the Soviet village...

...Lukyanova seems merely to argue for a rational middle ground: "It makes no sense for an aggressive paranoid and a quiet kleptomaniac to have equal opportunities to run their own lives...

...And it is quite likely that the real motive of the Karkhanin piece is not to provide ad copy for the National Rifle Association, or to make Russians safer from criminals, but to whip up more panic about the recent crime wave, seen as a result of economic and social liberalization...

...RL was also accused of helping the CIA study the causes and manifestations of discontent in the Soviet Union, fomenting ethnic violence, and recruiting Soviet citizens abroad as CIA spies...

...But a more interesting and somewhat touchy question is whether there are any areas of agreement between Soviet and American conservatives...

...Humanitarianism' in psychiatric matters, taken to an absurd extreme, has contributed to the fact that we have more destitute people lacking care: those who beg on public transport or in pedestrian underpasses are often former patients of mental hospitals...

...Under the guise of civil rights, such people have been deprived of the right to health...

...The Baltic crisis began, and the club's board of directors scattered...

...Fired with enthusiasm, Osadchuk headed for Gorbachev's birthplace, where he discovered that young Misha had been a born leader who often led older boys in raids on fruit orchards...

...Alien Voices," however, seems to have been only slightly more sophisticated than its Cold War-era forerunners...

...The writer asserts that after the 1988 relaxation of rules that allowed psychiatric patients to be treated without their consent, it has become difficult to hospitalize or treat the truly insane...

...Not one of the letters unequivocally opposed the idea, and many endorsed it...

...On the latter point, Voina writes, not 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 without a shade of regret, that when he was in Germany last summer and freelanced for RL, "no one was tempted to buy my immortal soul...

...Indeed, Karkhanin explicitly states—citing the rise of crime in post-reunification Germany—that the transition to the market, with attendant unemployment and consumerist temptations, will be accompanied by more violence...

...Score 1Rvo for Freedom of the Press...

...So there are now four people left_ in the club...

...While he is upset by Gorbachev's recent tendency to appoint hardliners to key posts, Osadchuk insists that this is nothing more than strategy, and blamesthe democrats who chose to follow Yeltsin, leaving poor Gorby all alone to fight the KGB and the generals...

...Proshkin is currently wrapping up the case of an armed gang that broke into apartments, forcing people to give up their valuables and committing an occasional murder: "They left empty-handed on just three occasions, when they encountered armed resistance...

...The investigator, Leonid Proshkin, advocated private ownership of handguns for self-defense...

...His ostensible conclusion is that people will need guns to protect themselves...

...Ilya M. Osadchuk says he became a Gorby fan in 1984, when Gorbachev was made the youngest member of the Politburo...

...Osadchuk was so aggrieved he handed in his resignation—but history intervened...

...There's no blatant nostalgia here for the good old days when psychos and dissidents alike were packed off to the loony bin...

...It is useful to keep in mind at this point that Sovetskaya Rossiya is the paper that always upbraids Yeltsin for trying to lead Russia to capitalism, attacks the democrats, and praises individuals like Kravchenko and Alexander Nevzorov (of Vilnius infamy...

...After all, its budget is not unlimited, and there are plenty of takers...

...And One for Cold War Propaganda Asample of Kravchenko's recent fare is provided by an April 5 TV special whose very title, "Alien Voices," is rather ominously reminiscent of the bad old times, the "alien voice" being Radio Liberty...

...Just like the Beatles: a Lonely Hearts Club Band...

...With all due respect, that's how the terms are used by the Russians themselves...

...Osadchuk's reverence for the Soviet president does not prevent him from collecting Gorby cartoons, and he can now add an exotic new item to his files...

...One (April 25) was an article by N. Lukyanova entitled "Victims of Demagoguery: What the 'Liberalization' of Our Psychiatry Has Wrought...

...Letters from veteran Soviet journalists in the same issue accuse the Journalists' Union of "intolerante" and "suppressing dissent," which surely ought to be brought to the attention of the organization that hands out those annual doublespeak awards...

...The decision was made by the secretariat of the Moscow section of the Journalists' Union in Kravchenko's absence (which apparently can be done in certain cases), prompting an outburst of angry accusations from Pravda and Sem Dnei ("Seven Days"), the TV and radio guide published by the State Broadcasting Company...

...Lukyanova's piece (regardless of the writer's intent) is grist for the mill of those who deplore not only freedom for the insane but freedom for the sane as well...

...Today, Soviet conservatives—whether of a Communist or nationalist bent—are the prime guardians of old-fashioned sexual morality...

...NRA Communists The confusion between the terms "left" and "right," or "conservative" and "liberal," as used in the Soviet Union and in the West, has generated much awkwardness...

...The investigator concludes that if more citizens were armed, some criminals 31 would be deterred...

...The editorial in Sem Dnei characterized the action as "reprisals against a journalist for taking a stand, for defending his professional and personal principles...

...Karkhanin adds that there are already some projects to manufacture tranquilizer guns as well as short-range, small-caliber weapons especially suited for self-defense: "The prospect of seeing a handgun in a shop no longer seems fantastic...

...And I have not gotten anything out of it for myself—no car, no country home, no apartment...

...The consensus, writes Karkhanin, was that "weapons are circulating all over the country anyway and fall into the hands of criminals, while decent people have no way of resisting them...

...On the other hand, she commends Americans for their more compassionate and accepting attitude toward the mentally ill, noting that in the Soviet Union, "a person under psychiatric observation is still seen as an outcast" and mental hospitals resemble prisons...

...Strangely, his plan did not meet with official support (perhaps because he had never been a party member) and the club did not open until the spring of 1990, when, Osadchuk says regretfully, Gorby's best days were over...

...The lady was hauled into court on charges of distributing pornography and insulting the president...

...Yes, it could...

...In 1986, he decided to start a club in support of his pin-up Cathy Young is the author of Growing Up in Moscow (Ticknor & Fields...

...The April 22 edition of Kommersant reports that on April 16, one Galina Egorenkova was detained outside a metro station for selling copies of the Riga-based "erotic gazette" Eshcho ("More...

...It featured, among other things, a collage that showed Gorbachev watching a couple in sexual congress, while a nearby headline read "Profession: Pimp...

...It's not respectable and even dangerous to be a Gorbachev supporter these days...

...And American conservatives are sometimes understandably rattled when the C-word is used as a label for hardline Marxists like Yegor Ligachev...

...Which, apparently, include silencing those whose "principles" are different...

...Nor did anyone try to recruit him during a ten-month stay in America...

...But could it be that what Sovetskaya Rossiya really wants is to make people wonder whether capitalism is worth it...

...boy's new ideas...

...Granted formal rights to an independent life, they cannot, in fact, make use of them...

...What better evidence that the "good will" of the American government should be put on hold...

...Meanwhile, he fears that if dictatorship comes, he will be jailed or shot: "I have become a hostage to Gorbachev's ideas even more than Gorbachev himself...