Asylums or Prisons?

SOVIET UNION

One of the most chilling tactics used by Soviet authorities to suppress dissent is enforced confinement in a mental hospital. Selected rebel intellectuals are declared insane by obedient psychiatrists, and can be held indefinitely or punished at will--all under the aura of medical treatment and with no need for a public trial that could embarrass the state. The practice dates back to 1936, when the Soviet secret police first established prison hospitals. But only now, in the face of overwhelming evidence, are Western doctors raising a storm of protest against the misuse of their science by Russian colleagues.

The man who set off the protests is Author Vladimir Bukovsky, who has spent seven of his 29 years in various prisons and asylums; in January he was sentenced again, to seven years in a labor camp, plus five years in exile from Moscow. Last week 52 leading Soviet intellectuals, headed by Physicist Andrei Sakharov, asked the United Nations to seek amnesty for Bukovsky. That is unlikely, since his "crime" was passing to the West documentation of how psychiatry is used to suppress dissent--specifically, the case histories of six political protesters held in Soviet mental wards.

Last September a group of 44 British psychiatrists reported the conclusions of a Working Group on the Internment of Dissenters in Mental Hospitals, who had studied the material from Bukovsky. Their conclusion: four of the six "do not appear to have any symptoms at all that indicate a need for treatment"; two others had not shown symptoms for many years.

The World Federation of Mental Health has also protested the Soviet misuse of psychiatric treatment, as have the Canadian and American Psychiatric Associations, and French intellectuals and psychiatrists. One notable exception was the conference of the World Psychiatric Association in Mexico City last autumn. There, the Soviet Ministry of Health's chief psychiatrist Dr. Andrei Snezhnevsky argued that an appeal from Soviet dissidents was merely "a cold war maneuver," and managed to keep the item off the agenda.

American Report. One argument Snezhnevsky was able to use privately was a report by a group of American psychiatrists, mental health officials and one eminent jurist, Washington Judge David Bazelon. They had toured Soviet mental hospitals in 1967 without perceiving any political abuse of psychiatric methods. Writing in the current New York Review of Books, Gadfly Journalist I.F. Stone details some of the evidence that both the World Psychiatric Association and the touring American doctors overlooked.

The only surprise in the protest is that professionals in the West took so long to acknowledge the documented evidence of malpractice in the Soviet Union. The first extensive revelations were made in 1963 by Author Valery Tarsis, whose book Ward Seven described his internment in a Moscow psychiatric hospital. More recently, Geneticist Zhores Medvedev and his twin brother. Historian Roy Medvedev, published A Question of Madness (TIME, Sept. 27), which tells of their struggle to win Zhores' release from a mental hospital after he published an attack on the theories of Stalin's favorite scientist, Geneticist T.D. Lysenko.

Disgusting Thing. British Sovietologist Peter Reddaway estimates that about 150 political prisoners are held in KGB-controlled mental wards in otherwise ordinary psychiatric hospitals, or in special "institutes" directly under KGB authority.

On certain issues, the Soviets are acutely sensitive to foreign protest. Dr. Snezhnevsky found it necessary to insist in an interview in Izvestia that it is "absolutely impossible for healthy people to be committed to mental hospitals in the Soviet Union." As a sign of concern about their image at home and abroad, Soviet authorities released Zhores Medvedev, at least partly in response to a flurry of protesting telegrams from foreign scientists. Thus the questions raised by Western psychiatrists may yet have some effect on what Dissident Author Andrei Amalrik, last reported in ill health in a Siberian prison camp, calls "the most disgusting thing that this regime does."

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