The Government of Doctor Caligari

The following is based upon an address delivered on December 3, 1971 to a Conference on Literature and Politics in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, held at Stanford University, December 2-4, 1971, with the participation of experts on East European Literature and Politics from many countries.

AT THE SAME MOMENT that the address was being delivered, the same theme was being considered at a World Psychiatric Association Congress being held in Mexico City. The Congress was in receipt of appeals from such distinguished Soviet scientists as nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov and such literary figures as Dmitri von Mohrenschildt, editor of the Russian Review, as well as appeals from the World Federation of Mental Health (which concluded its congress in Hong Kong on November 25), the British Columbia Medical Association which asked for a resolution condemning the “unethical and anti-humanitarian activity” of police-dominated psychiatrists in the USSR, the Vancouver and the All-Canadian Psychiatric Associations, the British Psychiatric Journal, and a group of archbishops of the Russian Orthodox Church meeting outside the Soviet Union to adopt their appeal against “the corrupt use of psychiatric hospitals.” Despite this pressure from the members of their own profession, and shocked editorials in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the London Times, L’Express, the Swedish press and radio, and many other public and scientific bodies, a secret conference of the World Psychiatric Association leaders on December 2, from which the press was excluded, decided to refuse to show solidarity with the police-pressed Russian psychiatrists compelled to violate their Hippocratic Oath, and to leave the victims of the police psychiatric methods without support from the psychiatrists of the world—on the legalistic grounds that they might alienate the Russian delegation (which contained more than the usual quota of police psychiatrists) and on the further ground that their constitution did not “provide the mechanism” whereby attempts might be made to raise the stands ards of psychiatry among their sixty thousand members. They even prohibited debate or discussion of the practice complained against. How much cowardice, and how much knavery was involved one cannot know, but it is significant that around the conference in Mexico City, there were not lacking men to approach the reporters with the explanation that the sufferings of the KGB victims in insane asylums in Russia was nothing but a sinister myth of the American CIA. Indeed, Professor Andrei V. Snezhevsky, Chief Psychiatrist of the Soviet Ministry of Health and a reporter to the Congress, did not hesitate to call a press conference in defiance of the “no discussion” decision, in which he too charged that painfully detailed stories of such men as Jaurès A. Medvediev in his book, A Question of Madness, were nothing but “a maneuver of the cold war carried out by the hands of experts.”

BW

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Bertram D. Wolfe

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The following is based upon an address delivered on December 3, 1971 to a Conference on Literature and Politics in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, held at Stanford University, December 2-4, 1971, with the participation of experts on East European Literature and Politics from many countries.

AT THE SAME MOMENT that the address was being delivered, the same theme was being considered at a World Psychiatric Association Congress being held in Mexico City. The Congress was in receipt of appeals from such distinguished Soviet scientists as nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov and such literary figures as Dmitri von Mohrenschildt, editor of the Russian Review, as well as appeals from the World Federation of Mental Health (which concluded its congress in Hong Kong on November 25), the British Columbia Medical Association which asked for a resolution condemning the “unethical and anti-humanitarian activity” of police-dominated psychiatrists in the USSR, the Vancouver and the All-Canadian Psychiatric Associations, the British Psychiatric Journal, and a group of archbishops of the Russian Orthodox Church meeting outside the Soviet Union to adopt their appeal against “the corrupt use of psychiatric hospitals.” Despite this pressure from the members of their own profession, and shocked editorials in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the London Times, L’Express, the Swedish press and radio, and many other public and scientific bodies, a secret conference of the World Psychiatric Association leaders on December 2, from which the press was excluded, decided to refuse to show solidarity with the police-pressed Russian psychiatrists compelled to violate their Hippocratic Oath, and to leave the victims of the police psychiatric methods without support from the psychiatrists of the world—on the legalistic grounds that they might alienate the Russian delegation (which contained more than the usual quota of police psychiatrists) and on the further ground that their constitution did not “provide the mechanism” whereby attempts might be made to raise the stands ards of psychiatry among their sixty thousand members. They even prohibited debate or discussion of the practice complained against. How much cowardice, and how much knavery was involved one cannot know, but it is significant that around the conference in Mexico City, there were not lacking men to approach the reporters with the explanation that the sufferings of the KGB victims in insane asylums in Russia was nothing but a sinister myth of the American CIA. Indeed, Professor Andrei V. Snezhevsky, Chief Psychiatrist of the Soviet Ministry of Health and a reporter to the Congress, did not hesitate to call a press conference in defiance of the “no discussion” decision, in which he too charged that painfully detailed stories of such men as Jaurès A. Medvediev in his book, A Question of Madness, were nothing but “a maneuver of the cold war carried out by the hands of experts.”