Correspondents' Correspondence Punitive Medicine'
FIRESIDE, HARVEY
'Punitive Medicine' New York—Perhaps because of the focus on the convictions of prominent Soviet dissidents like Yuri Orlov, Aleksandr Ginzburg and Anatoly Shcharansky, little attention has been...
...He was sentenced last August 15 to five years of "exile" at a remote Siberian location, following a trial held in Elektrostal, an industrial city 40 miles outside Moscow that is off-limits to Western journalists and other foreigners...
...One of these reached the London headquarters of Amnesty International, and in August the human rights organization had "Punitive Medicine" presented to delegates at the Honolulu congress of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA...
...Novikov's statement was particularly damning, because until his flight last year to West Germany he had been a department head at the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow, where numerous dissenters have been certified insane...
...Although Western publicity has brought about the release of some patients, he found no change in the staffing of the institutions that process political cases...
...He charged that "the KGB's control extends to psychiatric institutions," and that Podrabinek's exposes of psychiatric abuse were "both very important and very necessary...
...They will continue to offer moral support to the inmates of the psychoprisons, material assistance to their families, and a challenge to the West to live up to its verbal commitments to human rights.—Harvey Fireside...
...If anything, the WPA has gone out of its way to mollify Soviet colleagues by circulating a resolution adopted last December by the society of Soviet psychiatrists...
...Aleksandr Volos-chuk, a dissenting Baptist, is confined in a Moscow psychiatric hospital for "schizophrenia with religious delirium...
...Felix Serebrov, a commission member, was picked up for allegedly making a false entry in his workbook...
...The prosecution's entire case, however, consisted of denials by staff members of the incriminated institutions that they were guilty of the abuses described in "Punitive Medicine...
...Punitive Medicine' New York—Perhaps because of the focus on the convictions of prominent Soviet dissidents like Yuri Orlov, Aleksandr Ginzburg and Anatoly Shcharansky, little attention has been paid in the West to the plight of Aleksandr Podrabinek, a 25-year-old paramedic who has been instrumental in exposing the operations of Soviet psy-choprisons...
...In July, 15 persons submitted evidence to a hearing in London asserting the veracity of Aleksandr's reports...
...The KGB warned him that unless he emigrated to Israel with his brother Kirill and his father Pinkhas, a retired physician, they would face legal charges...
...Western observers believe that the number of political and religious dissenters confined in the psychoprisons for "especially dangerous" criminals continues to hover around 1,000, and that a substantially greater number are being kept under the comparatively milder conditions of "ordinary" psychiatric hospitals...
...His real crime seems to have been writing a samizdat essay criticizing the cruel treatment of Red Army conscripts during basic training...
...In December, Kirill was arrested on charges of possessing "firearms"—actually, a harpoon pistol used for underwater fishing—and sentenced to two-and-a-half years in a labor camp...
...On August 16, the day after Podrabinek's trial, another Soviet psychiatrist, Aleksandr Voloshanovich of the Dolgoprudny psychiatric hospital, told Western correspondents in Moscow he was convinced that diagnoses of political dissidents were unfounded...
...On June 26,50 members of the U.S...
...Investigators would allow neither their testimony nor supportive statements by Podrabinek's coworkers...
...Even the watchdog committee authorized in Honolulu is not scheduled to begin work until the end of this year...
...It persuaded them to condemn "the systematic abuse of psychiatry for political purposes in the USSR," and to authorize the formation of a watchdog committee...
...Aleksandr, who also led a commission investigating the political use of psychiatry that was part of Orlov's committee monitoring Soviet compliance with the Helsinki accords, refused to be deterred...
...Voloshanovich reported examining 27 persons officially referred for compulsory treatment...
...Two former inmates of the psychoprisons, Yuri Belov and Mikhail Kukobaka, volunteered to attest to the truth of Podra-binek's "slanderous" indictment of Soviet psychiatry...
...This documented the cases of 208 persons confined to psychiatric hospitals for political reasons, told how 102 psychiatrists had collaborated in abuses of their profession at the behest of the KGB, and described 12 psy-choprisons where inmates were drugged, underfed, beaten by convicts serving as orderlies, and forcibly "cured" of their dissenting beliefs...
...A police search led to the confiscation of his files, but he was able to reconstruct them...
...Of the remaining eight, four are Soviet workers who recently tried to form a free trade union...
...The last issue of the group's bulletin to reach the West carried a pledge by the mathematician Vyacheslav Bakhmin, the physician Leonard Ternovsky and the noted attorney Sofia Kallistratova to carry on in Podrabinek's spirit...
...Among them were such well-known survivors of psychiatric repression as General Pyotr Grigorenko, Vladimir Bukovsky, Natalya Gorbanevskaya and Leonid Plyushch...
...Despite its 1977 resolution, the World Psychiatric Association has taken no further action against Soviet psychiatric abuse...
...This statement directs its anger against a "slanderous anti-Soviet campaign unleashed by the leadership of the psychiatric associations of the U.S., Britain, Australia and New Zealand...
...Starting in June 1977, the commission issued nine bulletins detailing 22 new cases of psychiatric abuse...
...Soviet psychiatrists have been more aggressively self-righteous and defensive than ever," Reddaway commented, "and have evidently convinced their political masters, for the time being at least, that they can successfully 'tough it out' and avoid any further blows to Soviet prestige...
...How long must such persecution of law-abiding Soviet citizens continue...
...Podrabinek began his research five years ago when, as an assistant in the Moscow ambulance service, he saw dissenters being taken furtively to the psychiatric clinics...
...In May 1977, copies of his manuscript began circulating through samizdat channels...
...Mikhail Zhikharev, a construction engineer, has been interned at a clinic in Sochi for "psychopathy of paranoid type, with overvalued ideas and litigious tendencies...
...On May 14, 1978, a year after his manuscript went into circulation, Podrabinek himself was arrested...
...Podrabinek was found guilty of "slandering the Soviet State and social system"—under Article 190/1 of the Russian Criminal Code—by writing a 265 page manuscript entitled " Punitive Medicine...
...Many prominent patients are known to have been released after the exposure of their situations in the West, but their places have been taken by less well-known figures...
...they asked...
...When will your country begin to abide by the agreements reached in Helsinki and other international accords...
...he had originally been arrested for taking up the cause of his workers and "libeling the Soviet system" in a novel he wrote based on modern Russian history...
...Of those I examined," he said, "I found not asingle case of definite mental illness...
...Three former Soviet psychiatrists, Yuri Novikov, Marina Voikhanskaya and Avtandali Papiashvili, testified, too...
...House of Representatives signed a letter by Congressman Jonathan B. Bingham to Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev, urging the immediate release of Aleksandr and Kirill Podrabinek...
...All three refused...
...the resultant publicity led to the release of 14 of these "patients" within two months of their detention...
...The regime is said to be concentrating on purging dissidents in Moscow, to assure their absence from the scene during the 1980 Olympic Games when 300,0000 foreign visitors are expected in the Soviet capital...
...The only hope for future reforms, he concluded, lies in "grassroots resistance to the 'cops in white coats.'" And the remaining members of the commission Aleksandr Podrabinek guided have vowed that such resistance will survive his exile...
...According to the Times of London, Dr...
...Peter Reddaway, a leading British expert on Soviet psychiatric practices, and author of Psychiatric Terror, recently reviewed the mixed record since the WPA's congress over a year ago...
...As for Podrabinek, he was subject to increasing harassment after "Punitive Medicine" appeared...
...The document goes on to threaten a boycott of these groups "until they give up their slanderous fabrications and attacks, and until they present their apologies to their Soviet counterparts...
...Vladimir Rozhdestvov, an engineer, was sent to the Tashkent psycho-prison last November after a court found him guilty of listening to foreign broadcasts and "extolling the Western way of life...
Vol. 61 • October 1978 • No. 21
