Psychiatry in Russia now going on trial

Press, 24 June 1981, Page 21

Psychiatry in Russia now going on trial

By

PETER REDDAWAY

“Observer.” London

Soviet abuse of psychiatry seems certain to be condemned at a series of international medical conferences this year after the jailing of Dr Anatoly Koryagin. The first serious clash is expected at the congress of the World Federation of Biological Psychiatn r , due to open in Stockholm on June 28.

Koryagin, a 42-year-old psychiatrist, has been sentenced to 12 years for his role in the Soviet group which has been monitoring “K.G.B psychiatry.” The row will be intensified if his colleague in the group is also put on trial before the congress takes place. Miss Irina Grivnina, a 35-year-old computer scientist, was arrested in September and faces charges of “slandering the Soviet system.” Moreover, the trial of another member of the group. Felix Serebrov, aged 50, is also expected soon; The authorities have charged him with the more serious offence of “anti-Soviet propaganda.”

Hostile resolutions are already being framed.for the World Medical Association which assembles in the (northern hemisphere) autumn, and many Western doctors want the World Psychiatric Association to expel Russia for the political abuse of psychiatry. The Stockholm congress is bound to be sharply divided. A Soviet delegation will be there and its leader, Professor Marat Vartanyan, is scheduled to play a prominent part.

For the last 10 years Vartanyan has flatly denied all evidence of K.G.B.' political psychiatry and on several occasions his efforts to manipulate the World Psychiatric Association into a position of apparent support for the Soviet Union have been publicly exposed. The congress president is the Swedish psychiatrist, Carlo Perris, a close associate of Vartanyan and one of only two Western psychiatrists who have frequently acted as public apologists for Soviet psychiatry. In Stockholm, the recently

formed International Association on Political Use of Psychiatry will be active on behalf of Dr Koryagin, the Moscow group, and the psy-chiatrically-interned victims of K.G.B. psychiatry. A further factor exerting pressure on the Soviet Union is the mounting Western campaign for the. Soviet miner, Alexei Nikitin, and the recent arrival in the West of a 400-page book which gives a vivid and shocking picture of the prison hospital where he is held.

Nikitin was arrested in December after calling on British trade unions to help him and his comrades form a free union, and after Dr Koryagin had examined him and found him completely healthy.

Now the Dnepropetrovsk mental institution in which he has been receiving intensive drug treatment is described in minute detail by a former inmate, Alexander Shatravka.

Shatravka is a 31-year-old sailor who crossed the Finnish border in 1974 but was caught, handed back by the Finns, then interned for five years in psychiatric hospitals as a “schizophrenic.” Since the K.G.B. confiscated a copy of his book last year he has twice been reinterned for short periods. At present he is free and living at Krivoi Rog in the Ukraine. In February, he was examined by Dr Koryagin, who concluded that his mental health was excellent. Shatravka's book describes the sadism of the hospital staff in Dnepropetrovsk as worse than in any other institution he has been in. He details the drug methods used to “cure” dissenters of their political or religious beliefs.

Underlying reactions to the suppression of Dr Koryagin and his colleagues is the fear expressed by the Moscow Helsinki Group, in a document which has just reached the West, that these developments herald an even wider use of K.G.B. political! psychiatry in the near future—Copyright, London Observer Service.