Torture in the Soviet Union

...night visits" by the secret police were forbidden, at least on paper, and in the wake of "de-Stalinization" Soviet courts have made a much greater pretense of following due process...

...Pyotr Grigorenko, Leonid Plyushch, Vladimir Bukovsky, and other hospitalized dissidents have all reported horrifying abuses—for example, of drugs, like sulphazin, being administered not for medical purposes but to induce pain...

...Adam Meyerson Torture in the Soviet Union • Two blocks from the Kremlin, on perhaps the busiest square of an increasingly congested Moscow, there stands an imposing statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Polish aristocrat who joined the Bolshevik revolutionaries...

...The location seems somehow appropriate, for facing the square is a wonderful department store, Detsky Mir, a world just for children...

...Of the one-million-plus in the Soviet Union, no one knows how many are political and religious prisoners, but the consensus of Amnesty International and most Western reports is that the abThe Alternative: An American Spectator August/ September 1976 1 7 solute minimum is 10,000 and that, perhaps, there are many, many more...

...There are four different kinds of labor camps—in increasing severity, the ordinary, intensified, strict, and special regimes—and although work requirements vary according to the harshness of the regime, the major distinction seems to be in rations...

...There, the daily ration is only 2,200 calories (mitigated somewhat by the absence of hard labor), while those confined to punishment cells breathe air piped in from open sewers and receive a daily ration of 1,500 calories, barely enough to sustain them lying down...

...or worse, to "SHIZO" cells, where it alternates daily between 2,600 and 1,300...

...Avraham Shifrin, arrested in 1953 during a wave of anti-Semitic hysteria, recently testified before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee about his ten years in over thirty Soviet concentration camps and prisons, where he met thousands of fellow political and religious prisoners—and this all after Stalin's death...

...It is thought that religious prisoners—Catholics, Jews, Orthodox Christians, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, Buddhists, Moslems, and many others—make up the majority of prisoners of conscience, though, except for the Baptists, we do not know how many hundreds of each, •or how many thousands...

...We know that labor camp prisoners may receive parcels only after they have completed half their term, that their correspondence is severely restricted, and that they may bring with them no more than five books...

...As Robert Conquest has pointed out, even the notorious Japanese prisoner-of-war camps on the River Kwai provided 3,400 calories...

...Dissidents have also been tried on trumped-up nonpolitical charges...

...However many, Amnesty International knows of at least 330 prisons and labor camps throughout the Soviet Union to which they have been sentenced, with the majority consigned to two major complexes of work camps—one in Mordovia, some 300 miles southeast of Moscow, the other near Perm, in the cold and dreary Urals...

...Suffice it for the moment just to quote Victor Fainberg, describing one of the favorite forms of hospital punishment, the "roll-up" or "warm-moist roll," in which "the patient is tied up in damp sheets and not only fastened down to his bunk but cocooned as tightly as possible with strips of the sheets placed almost touching one another...

...and penal officials, who are accorded considerable discretionary authority, seem never to be punished for their excesses...

...under such circumstances four years ago, Valentyn Moroz, a Ukrainian historian, was constantly tormented and finally stabbed in the stomach...

...And when he returns, many years from now, battered, shriveled, and sickly, the cold statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky will look on...

...and Dzerzhinsky, as your friendly Intourist guide will surely tell you, was the first Soviet Minister of Youth and founder of the Pioneers, Soviet counterpart to our Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts...

...But there are also the religious prisoners, about whom we know little—in part because of the astonishing apathy of Western churches toward their plight...

...One example of worsening conditions is that in 1972 Soviet authorities removed the 15-day limit on "SHIZO" isolation...

...What is more, the diet can be reduced still further as a means of inflicting additional punishment...

...The Cheka was the first name for the Soviet secret police...

...There have been cases when the patients have been 'rolled-up' on ten successive days...

...After Stalin's death in 1953, an estimated ten million political prisoners were granted amnesty, the infamous Adam Meyerson, managing editor of The Alternative, recently spent a month in the Soviet Union...

...Such prisoners tend to be convicted of "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda," "organizational activity directed to commission of especially dangerous crimes against the state," "circulation of fabrications known to be false which defame the Soviet state and social system," and the like—charges in the criminal code which have been interpreted by the courts as covering virtually all dissent, and under which, according to Amnesty International, not one defendant has ever been acquitted...

...The Lubyanka, and Soviet prisons generally, are far less horrifying today than they were under Stalin...

...The Soviets really are beginning to practice some modicum of legality and due process, but in their use of psychiatry they have discovered a convenient way to circumvent the frustrations of judicial procedure: if 18 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1976 they cannot convict a dissident by legitimate means, they can always have state psychiatrists declare him insane—the favorite diagnosis in political and religious cases is "paranoid schizophrenia" —and confine him in mental institutions, particularly in one of the seven major "special psychiatric hospitals...

...And out of Vladimir come gruesome tales of political prisoners being put in the same cells with violent criminals...

...of widespread beatings by orderlies, many of whom are criminals hired expressly to be vicious...

...The building is the Lubyanka, KGB headquarters and site of one of the most infamous prisons in all history, where Dzerzhinsky's praxis of terror and torture continues, though less frequently, to this very day...

...The subject is so vast it demands an article of its own, and indeed one will soon appear in these pages...

...Most prominent among these is the calculated policy of keeping prisoners in a constant state of debilitating hunger...

...Despite ferocious efforts to suppress it, the Soviet samizdat (self-published) network continues to circulate the Chronicle of Current Events, which, meticulously and undramatically, reports on Soviet political trials, and documents specific examples of mistreatment in prisons, prison camps, and psychiatric institutions...

...We know, particularly from Yuri Galanskov's tragic death from a stomach ulcer at the age of 33, how abysmal is medical care in the camps and in the prisons...

...The children of Moscow laugh and play just like children all over the world, and as we stand on the square, watching the cars whiz by and the women strolling in their colorful new dresses, we realize that in many ways the Soviet people are much better off today than ever they were before...

...And last November, Amnesty International published a harrowing 154-page report, Prisoners of Conscience in the USSR: Their Treatment and Conditions, the most concisely informative survey of present conditions that is now available in English...

...Officials in special regime camps may confine prisoners to "punishment blocks," where the ration is 2,100 calories...

...Those prisoners we hear most of are the political dissidents—such as Sergei Kovalev, the biologist sentenced last December to seven years of hard labor for distributing samizdat material, whose trial was closed to Sakharov and international observers even though the Soviet Constitution guarantees open trials...

...nowhere is cruelty or humiliation explicitly prohibited...

...such as Mustafa Dzhemilev, the Crimean Tatar leader who was sentenced this April to 21/2 years in the labor camps, for protesting the policy that forbids his people to return to their Black Sea homeland after an exile within the Soviet Union of 32 years...

...We have come a long way in Fain-berg's description from Detsky Mir, the children's world on Dzerzhinsky Square, and perhaps we had best return, for it is important not to exaggerate the impact of terror on Soviet society...

...No longer are hundreds of prisoners executed daily...

...Within a few months he will be sent to the Urals...

...It is no wonder, under such treatment, that most strict and special regime prisoners contract serious stomach and other diseases...

...And yet it is important to contemplate the statue of Dzerzhinsky, and to consider that it was built, on Nikita Khrushchev's orders, in 1961...

...In 1973, for example, Alexander Feldman, a Ukrainian Jew who applied for an emigration visa, was sentenced to 3'/ years in the labor camps for "malicious hooliganism," even though there is substantial evidence from many witnesses that the charges were completely unfounded...

...Under the strict regime, where many political prisoners are consigned, not only is the food poor in nutrition, mostly rotten, and infested with vermin, but the diet is limited to 2,600 calories daily—and this for strenuous toil in what is often bitter cold, conditions which, according to World Health Organization standards, require a minimum between 3,100 and 3,900 calories per day...

...Andrei Sakharov has estimated that there are 1.7 million, the CIA has suggested a figure slightly under 2.5 million, on the basis of satellite photos, and scholarly Western estimates tend to posit a minimum of 1 million—a range of remarkably high numbers when one considers that the United States, with only 50 million fewer people, incarcerates but 250,000...

...such as Victor Fainberg, who was confined to a brutal psychiatric hospital for over five years, merely because he participated in a demonstration against the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and who was told he would be released if he renounced his opposition...

...But, as Amnesty International points out, all this article really says is that punishment "shall not aim" at suffering or degradation...

...The most frightening incidence of torture in the USSR takes place in the psychiatric institutions...

...But your guide will not tell you that Dzerzhinsky also founded another organization, called the Cheka, nor will she point out the massive unmarked building on the other side of the square, even though it confers upon the statue just as much significance...

...it was the original predecessor of what is today the Committee for State Security, or KGB...

...No longer do a million innocents die each year in the Arctic and Far Eastern labor camps...

...Instead, under the pretext of protecting the laws separating church from state, Soviet authorities can arrest parents who give their children religious instruction, a practice which has come down particularly hard on the Baptists and other groups which insist upon such instruction...

...We know how they are often denied the right to practice their faiths—how guards in the Mordovian camps have for four years prevented Vasily Romanyuk, a Ukrainian village priest, from ever once reading the Bible, how hundreds of Christians have been denied the sacrament of confession...

...In My Testimony, a record of prison camp life in the 1960s, and Prison Diaries, a comparable memoir of the 1970s, Anatoly Marchenko and Edward Kuznetsov have each written powerful accounts of the emaciation, beatings, and desperate self-mutilation they have witnessed—stories that recall Solzhenitsyn' s grisly descriptions of an earlier time...

...And we know, both from accounts by prisoners and from reading recent official instructions, that camp conditions have in the last few years been getting harsher...

...These prisoners cannot be tried on charges like "anti-Soviet agitation," because "freedom of religious worship" is supposedly guaranteed under the Soviet Constitution...

...The authorities, moreover, have almost infinite latitude in arresting religious leaders, for, according to Article 227 of the Russian Criminal Code, it is illegal to organize activity which "under the appearance of preaching religious beliefs and performing religious ceremonies, is connected with the cause of harm to citizens' health or with any otherinfringements of the person or right of citizens...

...This was the very year in which Stalin's body was removed from Lenin's side in Red Square, five years after Khrushchev's "Crimes of Stalin" speech, one year before Solzhenitsyn was allowed to publish One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich...

...Worse is what we know about the deliberate policy of torture...

...According to the first article of Soviet penal legislation, "the execution of a sentence shall not aim at inflicting physical suffering or degrading human dignity...

...Most prisoners of conscience are sent to the camps, but others languish in prisons across the country, including 35 in Vladimir, thought to be Russia's worst jail...

...Just how many prisoners of conscience there are, it is very difficult to say...

...Thus, although Soviet law does not authorize the occasional beatings and numerous humiliations which guards inflict upon their charges—afavorite practice is to strip prisoners' wives naked before allowing them to visit their husbands—neither does it proscribe them...

...How much of this religious oppression goes on, no one quite knows, but thanks to the courageous reporting of the Council of Baptist Prisoners' Relatives, we have precise figures for one sect: between 1964 and 1972, 644 Baptists were imprisoned on religious grounds...

...The Soviet Unionpublishes no penal statistics whatsoever, so one cannot even determine how many prisoners there are overall...

...The sheets dry out and squeeze the entire body as in a vice (the patient often loses consciousness), and the whole section can hear the wails of the tortured victim...

...Yet across the place the Lubyanka still stands, and some poor Russian is being interrogated there this very hour...

...That the Soviet regime would so honor the founder of its secret police at a time of "de-Stalinization" and comparative intellectual freedom, indicates the limits of its genuine change...

...And yet these labor camp inmates are lucky compared with those who are sentenced to prisons, where conditions are even more debilitating...

...Its report on the Soviet Union (available for $2.00 from AI Publications, 53 Theobald' s Road, London WC1X 8SP, England) is therefore all the more convincing, and I draw from it substantially in what follows...

...All the Soviets need do, in other words, is to conjure up some threat to the public safety, as in 1972 when they indicted Bidya Dandaron, a Buddhist teacher in Siberia, on the preposterous charges that he led his followers to "bloody sacrifices" and "ritual copulations" ; Dandaron died in a labor camp two years later, and four of his associates were sent to mental institutions...

...Celebrated for its reports on torture in Chile (after Allende) and South Vietnam (before its fall), Amnesty International cannot be accused of an anti-Communist bias...

...If we know too little about the number of prisoners, however, we know much, perhaps too much, about the lives they must lead...

...Furthermore, there are many features of penal life which clearly are designed to inflict human sufferings...

...Indeed, when Khrushchev articulated in 1959 what has since been the official position—namely, that "There are no political prisoners in Soviet prisons today" —he was, in the Soviet fashion, simply lying...