The Doctor's Story

For hour after hour in Rome the Italian security police questioned their prize Rumanian refugee--an army colonel who was also a distinguished psychiatrist. They questioned him not because they doubted his story (which they did not for long) but because of what he had to tell. Rumania, Czar Nicholas II once said, is not a nationality but a profession. To judge by the doctor's story, being a Rumanian Communist leader today is getting close to being the oldest of professions.

A medical officer in the Rumanian air force, Dr. Alexander Cohen, graduate of Paris and London medical schools, had news of the moral and physical health of many top Rumanians. Porcine Ana Pauker, onetime Communist boss, had a secret cancer operation at a Vienna hospital in 1951. Now 63, Ana Pauker ("who frequented all the right beds in her time and once had a direct phone line to Stalin") still lives in her luxurious apartment in Bucharest, comforted by large doses of tranquilizers (evipan) and morphine (regular 1 1/2-grain doses administered by state doctors). Ana Pauker lost power in Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign, but, unlike 250 Zionist leaders still in Rumanian jails, says Dr. Cohen, escaped prison because she placed diaries full of compromising details in a place of safekeeping in Switzerland with instructions that they be published on her arrest or sudden death.

Ljuba. Rumania's new secret power, says Dr. Cohen, is another woman: Ljuba, brunette Bessarabian wife of Vice Premier Iosif Chisinevschi. No prude where Soviet officers were concerned, Ljuba got her husband the fat job of food-procurement officer for the Soviet army of occupation in 1946. Chisinevschi quickly moved up the power line and today, by virtue of his wife's cozy relations with the Soviet embassy, bosses the government. In a beautiful pavilion near Bucharest, in the formal royal park where King Carol's Magda Lupescu once frolicked, attractive, dark-eyed Ljuba holds brilliant Thursday night soirees, splicing her champagne with politics.

A sadder Thursday night salon but no less alcoholic is that of the Patriarch Justinian. Once defrocked for adultery and alcoholism, the 56-year-old Patriarch was appointed by the Russian Patriarch Alexei. Justinian's function: to help the Communists control Rumania's staunchly religious peasantry. Called in during one of the bearded Patriarch's vice-and-vodka loops, Dr. Cohen prescribed six months' psychoanalysis and electroshock therapy, but achieved no result. Says he: "The Patriarch's conflicts are insoluble."

Quiet as a Cesspool. Like all Soviet states, says Dr. Cohen, Rumania is coated with a shiny top scum. Underneath it is "rotting and fermenting, quiet as a cesspool." In his capacity as psychoanalyst Dr. Cohen treated some highly placed party members. Says he: "Tense, tormented, they are difficult patients, reluctant to talk freely. They try to hide the truth even from themselves." The truth is that fertile, oil-rich Rumania is being drained dry by her Soviet overlords. Currency devaluations have repeatedly wiped out the people's savings, and galloping inflation has put the cost of consumer goods (except bread) beyond the reach of the workers. Common antibiotics such as penicillin and streptomycin are expensive black-market items, and disease rates have jumped sharply. Tuberculosis, declining in the West, is up 40%. For health reasons the Rumanian army last year rejected 54% of all conscripts ("a fantastic figure, considering its low standards"). A 180,000-man security police force, backed by 15 Soviet army divisions, keeps the country on the Moscow line.

After Stalin's death the Russians relaxed their controls a little, withdrew their "advisers" from Rumania's government and army, gave some leeway to dissident intellectuals and freed some 10,000 political prisoners.

But when the news of Hungary's revolt reached Bucharest last October, and students and intellectuals paraded with banners: LONG LIVE THE HUNGARIAN

PATRIOTS--DOWN WITH COMMUNISM !, the Communist security police quickly grabbed 40,000 suspects, who are still held in improvised camps. Russians wanted Rumanian army units to help quell the rebellion in Hungary, but soon learned it could not trust them and had the entire Rumanian army confined to barracks.

In the Icebox. Now Rumania plays host to hapless ex-Hungarian Premier Imre Nagy and his party of 26 errant Hungarians in Transylvania's ex-royal

Castle of Sinaia, undergoing merciless interrogation by Soviet and Rumanian police ("The Russians will never forgive him").

Burly Dr. Cohen, a veteran of the Nazi concentration camps, has more than an inkling of Nagy's sufferings. In 1950, when the security police found that he had inherited some money from his father in Switzerland, Cohen was arrested and charged with "espionage in the pay of imperialist powers." For six weeks he was kept in solitary, then put in a small, white-walled, refrigerated room ("the icebox"), removed numb, dumb and dazed for periodic questioning. "I thought I was going mad," he says. "I tried to analyze myself, but my mind was an icy mist." He was lashed to a barrel and spun around, his thumb was cracked in a vise, his will weakened with sodium pentothal injections.. "I was sure a confession meant death, but after three months I confessed. I don't know what I signed. I could take no more." Sentenced to five years, he volunteered for labor on a canal project, worked 2 1/2 years in malarial marshes. "Then everything changed," he says. The government needed psychiatrists. He got a top job ($1,000 a month) and his own Jaguar.

Dr. Cohen believes that--unless U.N. disapproval is stronger than it has been--the Russians may stage a huge show trial of Nagy. He believes the Russians are being forced to show their strength in this case because another satellite explosion is inevitable sooner or later. The satellite peoples, he says, are taking the unending Soviet occupation with surprising balance and mental strength. It is the satellite leaders who are showing the strain.

Several months ago the Rumanian security police demanded three times, in the space of a few weeks, that Dr. Cohen write an "autocriticism" of his attitudes. "You know what that means for officers and officials in Communist countries," he says. "After the third autocriticism comes the autopsy." An urgent order to help treat Hungarian wounded in Budapest was Psychiatrist Cohen's way out (via Austria and Italy) of attending the autopsy of Rumania itself.

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