The Brothers Medvedev

By R.Z. Sheppard

A QUESTION OF MADNESS by Zhores and Roy Medvedev. 223 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

The Medvedev twins have punched some embarrassing small holes in their country's bureaucracy. Zhores, a biochemist and sociologist of science, made influential enemies with his book The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko (Columbia University Press, 1969). Drawing upon his personal experience as a devoted Marxist working within the Soviet scientific establishment, he fashioned a dispassionate piece of scholarship about Stalin's quack biologist and agronomist, whose theories hobbled Russia's economy for more than a generation.

Roy Medvedev, 46, a historian of the humanities, takes a more sweeping view of the Soviet past. He also takes as many risks as his brother. Earlier this fall (TIME, Nov. 1), KGB agents searched Roy's apartment and confiscated his bulky manuscript Let History Judge: The Origin and Consequences of Stalinism. But not before a copy had reached the West, where it will be published early next year in the U.S.

In A Question of Madness, Zhores describes his 19 days of illegal confinement in a psychiatric clinic, and Roy tells of his successful publicity campaign to enlist the protests of some of Russia's leading scientists and artists.

An aggressive interest in "mental health" is not new to Russia. Czars Alexander I and Nicholas I regularly branded as insane men who wrote and spoke out for individual liberties. Politically bent mental clinics have been operating widely in the U.S.S.R. since the early '20s. Today, compulsory outpatient care for persons who do not fit the official mold often includes heavy doses of tranquilizing drugs. The Soviets have no corner on abusive psychiatry, however. As Dr. Thomas Szasz pointed out in his book The Manufacture of Madness (Harper & Row, 1970), unnecessary incarceration, forced therapy and denial of legal rights are common in the United States. The enormous difference, constitutional rights and traditions aside, is that in the Soviet Union punitive psychiatry appears to be an instrument of policy. With expedient blindness to the Hippocratic oath, Meditsinskaya Gazeta, a leading Russian medical journal, has asserted that physicians "can have no secrets from the state."

In Zhores Medvedev's case, that directive was followed so literally that the precise nature of events--not to say Medvedev's "malady"--was a secret from everybody but the state. In May 1970, he was summoned to the Obninsk Psychiatric Clinic, not far from Moscow, under the pretext of attending a consultation about his son, a teenager with hippie tendencies. While waiting in a small room at a nurse's request, Medvedev looked out of a window and saw his son leaving the hospital grounds. When he turned to go, Medvedev found the door of the room locked. He forced the spring with a pocket knife and sauntered out of the building. For the next few weeks, officials attempted unsuccessfully to wheedle him back to the clinic. At the end of May, a psychiatrist accompanied by police came to Medvedev's home and muscled him off to the clinic for observation.

In Stalinist days, Medvedev would have probably disappeared without a trace behind the walls of Lubianka prison. It is a measure of progress that Medvedev had only to endure obscene absurdities. Committees of psychiatrists tried to discredit his mind with such limp diagnoses as "poor adaptation to the social environment," and "obsessive reformist delusions." Such labels, as the Medvedevs note, could have also been pasted on Marx and Lenin.

False hopes, blackmail and red tape were used as well. Yet to read the Medvedevs' unruffled testimony is to believe --perhaps a bit too easily--that demolishing their inquisitors' tangled logic was child's play. It undoubtedly took a very clear mind and great emotional stability to stand up to such harassment. On the other hand, most of the psychiatrists appear to suffer from unresolved authority conflicts. Take the exasperated analysis of Medvedev bv one Dr. Lifshits, the book's most visible villain: "Another person with his intellect would be able in time to adjust and adapt--this is the normal thing--but Zhores Alexandrovich is unable to do this. He just forges ahead, ignoring the reality situation."

The medical bureaucrats obviously misjudged the national reputations of both Medvedevs and the courage of their eminent friends, who besieged officials up and down the Soviet power pyramid. The fiercest outcry came from Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who condemned punitive psychiatry as "spiritual murder."

In the end, "the reality situation" must have expanded to include the specter of a dissatisfied and possibly defecting elite. After annoying delays, Zhores was released and given a loose assurance of scientific employment. He was obviously too hot to handle on the inside while his brother proved such an excellent publicist on the outside.

It is this fact that gives A Question of Madness an importance far beyond its significance as a historical document that had to be smuggled out of Russia. To read it is to assume a moral responsibility toward the Medvedevs. For to ignore them or tire of their plight --as many have already done with the political prisoners in Greece and elsewhere--would be to abandon them to obscurity, where they would be easy pickings for their enemies. . R.Z. Sheppard

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