Latest purge victim exiled for 5 years

Press, 17 August 1978, Page 8

Latest purge victim exiled for 5 years

NZPA-Reuter Moscow The latest trial In a compaign to crush the dissident “Helsinki” groups has ended with a five-year exile sentence for the author of an underground report alleging that authorities used psy-

chiatry to silence dissent. Alexander Podrabinek, aged 25, a medical orderly, has been convicted of defaming the State after a oneday trial at the town of Elektrostal, east of Moscow. He will serve his sentence in Siberia or some other remote area of the country. The charges centred on a dossier entitled “Punitive Medicine” which Podrabinek compiled from information on over 200 alleged case histories of dissidents committed to psychiatric hospitals. His dossier first circulated in typewritten form inside the Soviet Union and reached the West more than a year ago. It helped win support for a resolution condemning alleged Soviet psychiatric abuses which was passed last September by the World Psychiatric Conference in Honolulu. But in a report ®n the

trial the Soviet news agency, Tass, said that Podrabinek “collected all sorts of gossip and lies, and sometimes concocted falsehoods himself,” Tass said that he had invented a non-existent psychiatric hospital at Novocherkassk, southern Russia,

and was wrong in reporting that a patient at another asylum was shot trying to escape. An investigation had showed that the man was never admitted to the hospital, it said. The friends said he had dismissed his Soviet lawyer at the start of the trial when the judge refused to consider a request to allow a distinguished British barrister, Louis Blom-Cooper, Q.C., to take part in the proceedings. Mr Blom-Cooper had earlier sought a visa to go to the Soviet Union for the trial but had not been issued one. Earlier this year, Podrabinek told Western journalists that he had been warned by K.G.B. security police investigators that he would face jail himself if he did not agree to give evidence agafyst the Helsinki group chairman, Yun Orlov,

According to his account, he refused and was arrested as Dr Orlov’s trial — at which the Helsinki Group chairman was sentenced to seven years in a labour camp and five more in exile -—began. One of the most active younger dissidents in Moscow, Podrabinek had helped to set up the self-styled working commission to investigate the use or psychiatry for political purposes.

.Without belonging to the Helsinki group, he was closely associated with its • activities and worked on the commission with two of its members — the former Major-General Pyotr Grigorenki, now in exile abroad, and a lawyer, Sofia Kalistra- ■ tova. In all, 18 members of ; various Helsinki groups and the working commissions have now been sentenced on ■ various charges since the ; first such panel was formed 'in 1976 to assess Soviet ■ compliance with human- ! rights provisions of the 1975 European security accords. t Three more are reported to ' be awaiting trial*