The Doctor Will See You Now

Medical History

"A group of policemen led by a major, the head doctor of the Kaluga psychiatric hospital Livshits and the Obninsk psychiatrist Kiryushin entered the flat, and without producing either documents or medical findings demanded that Zh. Medvedev should accompany them to Kaluga for psychiatric diagnosis."

Zhores Medvedev was a Georgian born biologist who would be known for his dissent in matters of science. His work would criticize work of those biologists closest to Stalin. He claimed their works were peusodo science and the biologists charlatans. Even after the death of Stalin, Medvedev in May of 1970, would be confined a mental health institution as he needed to be "diagnosed."

Intake

Medvedev would try and resist the demands of the KGB agents at his door. Their only responses to his dissent was, "'We are an organ of coercion, and you can complain to whoever you like.'” They would forcefully arrest Medvedev and upon his arrival was placed in the general ward with inmates who were actually ill. Medvedev would never get a formal diagnosis. On May 31st, a committee of Kaluga physiatrists would meet and formally declare Medvedev as having "'no obvious deviations from the mental norm. It found, however, that Medvedev was exhibiting abnormal nervousness and would therefore need some further observation in hospital conditions.”

His case was hotly debated as will be seen later, however, he is just one example of how the Soviet system would attack the dissenters.

Zhores Medvedev and his twin brother Roy Medvedev

Triage

In cases like Medvedev, dissenters would either not have their diagnosis released for friends and family of the incarcerated, or they would be branded with many so called mental diseases. Cheif amoung the diagnoses was Schizophrenia or if a bolt of creativity struck the doctor they would label the patient as a Sluggish Schizophrenic. However, as scholars like, Dr. Sasha Shapiro who discuss this kind of Schizophrenia was a made up disease by a one Dr. Andrei Snezhnevsky. Shapiro agrees with other historians and scholars of Soviet Psychiatry, that the lllness was made up by Snezhnevsky on the behest of the Soviet government and the KGB. However, other illnesses that would land a dissenter in a psychiatric hold were nervousness like that of Medvedev, Psychological Automatism, Delusions, and any acts seen as dangerous to the public well-being.

Call the Roll

Below is a report of the US Helsinki Watch. The group aimed to stay up to date on the Soviet movements in terms of human rights violations. This report is on that was frequent. The report names those whom were arrested for their dissent of the Soviet government and their placement within a psychiatric hospital.

List of Political Prisoners in Soviet Psychiatric Hospitals

Total: 95

SPH = Special Psychiatric Hospital, under the aegis of the Ministry of

Internal Affairs; PH = Ordinary Psychiatric Hospital, under the

Ministry of Health.

BAKUNIN, Yury

Arrested 1979

Border-crossing

Leningrad SPH

BELOV, Sergei

Art. 190-1, seeking to emigrate, protesting Soviet court system

Volgograd SPH

BENZO, Valery Georgievich

Arrested before 1979

Writing books critical of Soviet regime, attempting to give them to U.S. Embassy

Alma-Ata SPH

BORODIN, Nikolai Ivanovich

Arrested May 8, 1980

Art. 206, P. 2, organizing a meeting

Blagoveshchensk SPH

BOROVIKOV, Vladimir Afanasyevich

Arrested before 1982

Writing books critical of Soviet regime

Alma-Ata SPH

BOROVSKY, Aleksei N.

Arrested in 1970

Art. 83, attempt to cross Romanian border

Kemerovo PH

.....

MUSATOV Aleksei Arturovich

Arrested April 1983

Member of Hare Krishna

Smolensk SPH

(?) NABOKIN

Arrested before 1982

Distributed about 1,000 letters of a political nature

Arrested in 1980

Mikhail Danilovich

Criticism of the economic system

Alma-Ata

SPHNEDELIN, E.

Arrested 1983

Art. 70 Chernyakhovsk SPH

(?) NEKRETIN, Yury

Attempt to get into US Embassy

Chernyakhovsk SPH

NIKITENKOV, Vasily Nikolayevich

Arrested September 30, 1979

Art. 190-1 (?)

Kazan SPH

NURMSAAR,Erik

Arrested 1963 (?)

Estonian nationalist

SPH

OLEYNIKOV, Yury

Arrested c. 1983

Art. 64, attempt to cross the Soviet-Turkish border Sentenced to 10 years strict-regimen labor camp Became mentally ill in labor camp Kazan SPH (?)

OZHEGOV, Rail Nigmatovich

Arrested 1973

Arts. 109, 190-1, 206, 70, leafletting

Kazan SPH

(?) PARASENKOV, Fyodor

Arrested before 1974

Art. 190-1, letters to officials proposing free enterprise

Chernyakhovsk SPH

U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee; January 8, 1988.

Solzhenitsyn's Plea and Omen

“This is how we live: without any arrest warrant or any medical justification four policemen and two doctors come to a healthy man’s house. The doctors declare that he is crazy, the police Major shouts: ‘We are an ORGAN OF COERCION! Get up!’, they twist his arms and drive him off to the madhouse.

This can happen tomorrow to anyone of us. It has just happened to Zhores Medvedev, a geneticist and publicist, a man of subtle, precise and brilliant intellect and of warm heart. It is precisely for the DIVERSITY of his fertile gifts that he is charged with abnormality: ‘a split personality’! It is precisely his sensitivity to injustice, to stupidity, which is presented as a sick deviation: ‘poor adaptation to the social environment’! Once you think in other ways that is PRESCRIBED – that means you’re abnormal! As for well adapted people, they must all think alike. And there is no means of redress: even the appeals of our best scientists and writers bounce back like peas off a wall.

If only this were the first case! But this devious suppression of people without searching for any guilt, when the real reason is too shameful to state, is becoming a fashion. Some of the victims are widely known, many more are unknown. Servile psychiatrists, breakers of their [Hippocratic] oath, define as ‘mental illness’: concern about social problems, and superfluous enthusiasm, and superfluous coldness, and excessively brilliant gifts, and the lack of them.

Yet even simple common sense ought to have acted as a restraint. After all, Chaadayev did not even have a finger laid on him, but we have now been cursing his persecutors for over a century. It is time to think clearly: the incarceration of free-thinking healthy people in madhouses is SPIRITUAL MURDER, it is a variation on the GAS CHAMBER, but is even more cruel: the torture of the people being killed is more malicious and more prolonged. Like the gas chambers these crimes will NEVER be forgotten, and all those involved in them will be condemned for all time, during their life and after their death.

“In lawlessness, in the committing of crimes, the point must be remembered at which a in the committing of crimes, the point must be remembered at which a man becomes a cannibal!

It is short-sighted to think that one can live by constantly relying on force alone, constantly ignoring the objections of conscience.”

-Solzhenitsyn; June 15th, 1980

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