Moves against Soviet ‘political psychiatry’

Press, 31 October 1979, Page 20

Moves against Soviet ‘political psychiatry’

By

PETER REDDAWAY

in London

Despite Western protests, the Soviet practice of interning dissidents in mpntal hospitals and giving them drug treatment continues. Officials are highly defensive about it, and grassroots resistance is growing. The victims are not usually known abroad, as they were some years ago, but the human suffering involved is no less. These are the conclusions to be drawn from the two latest information bulletins of Moscow’s unofficial Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes. The bulletins .have just reached the W'est, and their 65 pages contain new information on about 60 Soviet men and women. Some have been interned, others released, others transferred, and yet others threatened with internment. The information comes from relatives, friends, the victims themselves, and — most significantly — medical staff within the various institutions who secretly sympathise with the victims. The commission and its

friends have been coming under increasing pressure from the authorities. Dr Leonard Ternovsky, a medical research doctor, has been threatened with the loss of his job and his telephone has been disconnected. More seriously, Vyacheslav Bakhmin. a computer scientist, was dismissed from his job in July and has been prevented from getting a new post. If he is unemployed for more than four months he is liable to criminal prosecution as a “parasite.” A third member of the commissiion, Alexander Podrabinek, was arrested last year and exiled for five years to Ust-Nera in northeast Siberia. Now he has issued an “Appeal to Soviet and Foreign Human Rights Organisations,” calling on them to save his friend Natalya Ostrovskaya from arrest. Natalya Ostrovskaya let a room to Podrabinek on his arrival in Ust-Nera. Soon she was summoned to see the local K.G.B. chief, whose name is Gerasimov. He demanded that she stop talking

to her neighbours about Podrabinek and his trial, otherwise she would be arrested for “defaming the Soviet system.” When she refused, he threatened to break up her marriage by revealing private information about her. Prodrabinek then filed a demand that Gerasimov be prosecuted for using illegal methods of interrogation, an offence subject to three years in prison. Notable among the internment cases reported in the commission’s bulletins is that of the 50-year-old Orthodox nun, Valeria Makeyeva. Arrested last year and charged with making and selling prayer belts, she was ruled by Moscow’s Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry to be suffering from “psychopathy with significant changes in the personality.” Her relatives regard her as mentally normal. At her trial in April, from which she herself was barred, her lawyer’s objections to the charges were not answered, and she was went for indefinite internment to the prison psychiatric hospi-

tai in Kazan. Here she was given forcible drug treatment, with the result that she has partly lost the use of her right arm. When visited recently by a relative, she seemed not to recognise him. Another notable case is that of a 37-year-old carpenter, losyp Terelya. As an active Roman Catholic and Ukrainian nationalist, he has spent over 1 years in captivity. He was last arrested in 1977 for writing a detailed, insider’s expose of the Sychyovka special psychiatric hospital, and is now held in the similar institution in Dnepropetrovsk. Before his arrest he had been ruled fit both for work and for military service. His wife, a doctor, reports that his letters are few and apparently written in a drugged state. Terelya’s situation closely resembles that of Leonid Plyushch, the Kiev dissenter held in the same institution until freed in 1976 by a powerful Western campaign of protest. Britain’s Royal College of Psychiatrists recently submitted to the World Psychiatric Association (W.P.A.) a formal complaint that poli-

tical abuse ol psychiatry is apparently being practised on Terelv’a. The W.P.A. has also received an appeal from the Moscow commission regarding a third case, that oi Nikolai Demyanov. Demyanov, aged 39. was arrested in 1971 and charged with "antiSoviet propaganda" and possession of explosive material. Ruled not responsible, he spent seven years in prison psvehiatric hospitals before being transferred last year to an ordinary mental hospital in Perm — a usual preliminary to release. There he was reprimanded for not dispatching his letters via the doctors (in one of them he had strongly criticised conditions in the hospital) and for refusing to accept the doctors’ statements that he had in the past been mentally ill. When he persisted, the psychiatrists administered powerful drugs, not concealing that this was punishment for his independent behaviour. In July, as further punishment, he was transferred back to a prison hospital, this time in Tashkent. The Moscow comission calls on the W.P.A. to inter-

vene on Demyanov’s behalf as his case “shows that it is not the mental health but the inconvenient behaviour of a patient which is often the reason for intensified treatment, and also for indefinite internment in a, special psychiatric hospital. The Moscow commission also reports on the psychiatric examination in New York of a former Soviet general. Pyotr Grigorenko, a dissident who was held in Russian menu! institutions for six years as a paranoiac. The examination found no evidence of mental illness, past or present. The findings have been welcomed by the Moscow commission and its parent body, the Moscow Helsinki monitoring group, which criticises the use of political psychiatrv "to crush hundreds of dissenters and people who believe in God." “Although.” it says, “this criminal system has suffered certain setbacks — thanks to the efforts of people like Bukovsky, Gluzman and Podrabinek, and to broad campaigns of protest in the West — it nonetheless continues to operate." — O.F.N.S. Copyright.