Victims of Soviet Psychiatry continue to pay a heavy price
Rich Winkel
http://www.i1.net/~juli
Mad Russians by Victoria Pope
U.S. News & World Report
12-16-1996 pp. 38-43
Victims of Soviet 'punitive psychiatry' continue to pay a heavy price
Pyotr Starchik can't drive a car, buy a house, travel abroad or get married.
Like thousands of former anti-Soviet dissidents, Starchik was stripped of
those rights when he was declared insane by a state psychiatric panel. And
like all whose political dissent was dealt with in this Kafkaesque fashion,
Starchik found that the end of the Soviet state has not brought an end to
his legal nightmare. Russia has yet to come clean on its history of punitive
psychiatry, and many of the doctors who carried out the campaign, though now
elderly, retain lofty positions. And so Starchik remains in the limbo he
entered after his arrest for anti-Soviet activities in 1972. "I can do
anything I want--kill a person and not be responsible," he says in a
fleeting stab at humor. "At the same time, I can't get a job that requires
certification. "
Starchik could try to overturn his diagnosis through a cumbersome process
that would begin with a request to the security services-- his old KGB
tormentors--to "declassify" his case. "Why should I?" he asks. "[The
authorities] put the wrong diagnosis. It is their guilt. It is up to them to
apologize." The 58-year-old former dissident and onetime psychology student
works as a night watchman and contents himself with writing music, drawing
colorful visions of God in the style of William Blake and caring for his
triplet babies.
Closed files. Over seven decades of Soviet communism, an estimated 40
million people were sent to the gulag, the vast network of labor camps,
prisons and special psychiatric hospitals. During the glasnost of the late
1980s, former camp inmates gave vent to memories of their repression. Their
pressure led to a government decree offering material compensation to
victims, but the state stopped short of opening period files.
Today, Russia's state center for forensic psychiatry is still the Serbsky
Institute, where psychiatrists once examined thousands of political
dissidents whom they deemed mentally unfit. One favorite diagnosis:
vyalotekushchaya, or "sluggish schizophrenia," a clinical term coined at
Serbsky to explain why someone with such a disorder might appear normal most
of the time. One manifestation of this novel ailment was "stubbornness and
inflexibility of convictions"; the usual treatment consisted of megadoses of
powerful tranquilizers like Thorazine for "prophylactic" purposes.
"Reformist delusions" were an indication of "paranoid development," the
other blanket diagnosis used for dissenters.
A year ago, President Boris Yeltsin created a blue-ribbon commission to
delve into the fate of political prisoners. But while investigating
psychiatric malpractice, several of its members say, they were refused
access to many key medical files. Despite these obstacles, the commissioners
found the first official documentary evidence of cruel and systematic
mistreatment of patients in the psychiatric hospitals.
A review of these top-secret documents was undertaken by Anatoli Prokopenko,
former head of the Soviet central archives, who decided to tell his story
only after the recently completed study was shelved and ignored by top
officials. Combing the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist
Party, Prokopenko says, he found evidence of a rigorous internal probe into
the hospitals, which culminated in an official party delegation making the
rounds of several facilities in 1956. The visiting Communist dignitaries
found healthy people who were " beaten and humiliated" and noted that
raving-mad inmates shared space with the perfectly sane. The delegation
detailed other abuses, like the practice of putting patients in wet robes.
"Apparently the people working at these hospitals got really scared after
the visit," Prokopenko says, citing the massive release of prisoners from
the facilities that immediately followed the inquiry. But the party report
never made waves. It was suppressed, and the party members who wrote it were
punished.
Paper trail. Such documents are crucially important because, in the past,
Soviet psychiatrists were always able to brush off reports of abuse by
terming the testimony of survivors anecdotal and subjective. Individuals
brought in for anti-Soviet activities were, "after all, mostly people with
psychological disorders at different levels," the newly appointed minister
of health, Tatiana Dmitrieva, told the Russian daily Argumenty i Fakty.
Dmitrieva, the former director of Serbsky, blocked commission access to the
files at Kazan--a special psychiatric hospital in eastern Russia notorious
for its merciless treatment of inmates.
Once in the hospitals, many prisoners say, they were forced to admit they
were mentally ill to avoid hellishly painful injections that at times were
so potent a patient would faint and need reviving with an oxygen mask.
Mikhail Kukobaka, a Belarussian worker arrested for organizing an election
boycott, recalls how the pressure to give in was particularly fierce when he
was held in the 1970s at Sychyovka, a special hospital near the Russian city
of Smolensk. "The nurses were criminals from the neighboring prison," he
says, sucking in his breath. "There were injections. Murders. They beat
people to death. " Kukobaka attributes his heart problems to the unrelieved
tension of incarceration. He is stuck with the diagnosis of schizophrenia
but says he will never ask for official rehabilitation. To prove he has full
command of his faculties, he has chronicled his prison experiences in
several essays. That is vindication enough, he says.
Prisoners who repeatedly refused to recant paid dearly. "They would take
this canvas material, 20 meters of it on a roll, and you were bandaged, and
water was poured on you," says Antonas Bagdonas, recollecting Kazan in the
1950s. The swaddling would then dry and constrict. "The circulation would
stop and the person lost consciousness," he adds. The old man's body is
evidence enough of the torture: It is crisscrossed with scars. He survived,
he said, only because other prisoners massaged his wounds with oil. The past
bleeds into the present, and he lives in fear that his old captors will
trace him.
Encore. The last political prisoners left these dreaded facilities in 1988.
But, warns Emanuel Guschansky, a psychiatrist and commission member, "the
structure that brought psychiatric abuse still exists. If there are certain
political changes in the country, or dictatorship, it could all be revived
immediately." Indeed, the psychiatric system remains such a potentially
powerful weapon of repression in part because the mentally ill have such
meager rights of recourse under Russian law.
Prokopenko and Guschansky still hope to compile a white paper on punitive
psychiatry documenting its scope. But many disturbing reports that have
surfaced--for example, that one hospital's post-mortems showed that huge
doses of the blood-pressure drug reserpine had damaged patients' brains--may
never be confirmed as long as hospital files and archives remain closed. And
many of the former political prisoners who might fill in the blanks have
moved abroad. "They wouldn't like to live in this country anymore," says
Alexander Podrabinek, jailed for publishing the first reports of psychiatric
wrongdoing in the early 1970s in the illegal samizdat press.
However restorative a true accounting of these horrors might be, few even
bother to agitate for it. Russia's de-Stalinization has been fitful at best.
The country hasn't addressed its totalitarian past in the way that Germany
did when the Allied victors forced justice on that defeated nation. Former
Communists like Yeltsin still run Russia and are hardly eager for an
apportioning of guilt.
For Guschansky, a practicing therapist at Clinic No. 21 in Moscow, there is
simply no going forward for his profession without an acknowledgment of
guilt. Overshadowed by the past, Russian psychiatry remains atrophied at its
core, he says, and lags many decades behind psychiatry in the West.
Clinicians can read works published abroad about how repression and torture
affect the psyche, but no such literature is home grown. Not surprisingly,
Russians still view psychiatrists as aggressors out to harm them. This
legacy makes it hard to treat patients successfully, Guschansky says,
especially one distinct group: the men and women traumatized while
imprisoned in Soviet psychiatric facilities.
Copyright © 1996, by U.S. News & World Report, Inc.