Psychiatry, KGB Style

Detente has caused something of a Credulity Gap: the Soviets have not given up an ounce of their customary cynicism in dealing with the West, while American officials seem to have lost not only their skepticism but their basic sense of irony as well. Thus President Nixon, praising the Kremlin for allowing the Panovs to leave, ignored its rounding up all Jewish activists in preparation for his visit. And thus HEW. Secretary Caspar Weinberger went to Moscow last fall to arrange for the U.S. and USSR to “foster joint activities in the field of mental illness.” If he has had second thoughts since, he has not made them public; not even after Minister of Public Health Boris Petrovsky, at the press conference following their meetings, denounced the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee as an “enemy of detente.” What should have given Mr. Weinberger pause was the reason for Petrovsky’s wrath: the SISC had published, a year before, a volume called Abuse of Psychiatry for Political Repression in the Soviet Union, the most comprehensive collection of original documents on this subject ever published in the West. This volume, said Dr. Petrovsky, “cannot be viewed as conducive to enhancing cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union.” Indeed it cannot, since it tells in chilling detail just what sort of “activities in the field of mental illness” the Soviet Union fosters, and it makes the Soviet Union a little less (in Andrei Sakharov’s phrase) “a country where anything that happens may be shielded from outside eyes—a masked country that hides its real face.”

Although any disagreement with the Soviet government (political dissidence, as in the cases of Vladimir Bukovsky, Leonid Plyushch, Nataliya Gorbanevskaya, and most of the others quoted in Abuse of Psychiatry, religious belief, as with Gennady Shimanov; or nationalism, as with Pyotr Grigorenko, who was arrested for his support of Crimean Tartars) may be diagnosed as schizophrenia, it is not unheard of that codefendants on trial for the very same act will be split up, some tried and sentenced to prison, others remanded to psychiatric care. But once the KGB has decided that a particular person must be sent to an asylum—either because there is insufficient evidence to make a convincing case against him even by Soviet standards, or because a trial might cause too much international publicity, or because the KGB wants to put him away indefinitely rather than for a specific term—an asylum is where he is sent. Once in a great while the local psychiatric board does not understand the KGB’s hints, or is simply stubbornly ethical; but then the KGB has only to take the victim to the Serbsky Forensic Psychiatry Institute in Moscow, where rulings of schizophrenia against dissidents are automatic. The official guidelines for diagnosing schizophrenia are loose enough to include almost any kind of “incorrect behavior.”

About the Author

Linda Bridges

Ms. Bridges is the former editor-at-large of National Review.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Detente has caused something of a Credulity Gap: the Soviets have not given up an ounce of their customary cynicism in dealing with the West, while American officials seem to have lost not only their skepticism but their basic sense of irony as well. Thus President Nixon, praising the Kremlin for allowing the Panovs to leave, ignored its rounding up all Jewish activists in preparation for his visit. And thus HEW. Secretary Caspar Weinberger went to Moscow last fall to arrange for the U.S. and USSR to “foster joint activities in the field of mental illness.” If he has had second thoughts since, he has not made them public; not even after Minister of Public Health Boris Petrovsky, at the press conference following their meetings, denounced the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee as an “enemy of detente.” What should have given Mr. Weinberger pause was the reason for Petrovsky’s wrath: the SISC had published, a year before, a volume called Abuse of Psychiatry for Political Repression in the Soviet Union, the most comprehensive collection of original documents on this subject ever published in the West. This volume, said Dr. Petrovsky, “cannot be viewed as conducive to enhancing cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union.” Indeed it cannot, since it tells in chilling detail just what sort of “activities in the field of mental illness” the Soviet Union fosters, and it makes the Soviet Union a little less (in Andrei Sakharov’s phrase) “a country where anything that happens may be shielded from outside eyes—a masked country that hides its real face.”

Although any disagreement with the Soviet government (political dissidence, as in the cases of Vladimir Bukovsky, Leonid Plyushch, Nataliya Gorbanevskaya, and most of the others quoted in Abuse of Psychiatry, religious belief, as with Gennady Shimanov; or nationalism, as with Pyotr Grigorenko, who was arrested for his support of Crimean Tartars) may be diagnosed as schizophrenia, it is not unheard of that codefendants on trial for the very same act will be split up, some tried and sentenced to prison, others remanded to psychiatric care. But once the KGB has decided that a particular person must be sent to an asylum—either because there is insufficient evidence to make a convincing case against him even by Soviet standards, or because a trial might cause too much international publicity, or because the KGB wants to put him away indefinitely rather than for a specific term—an asylum is where he is sent. Once in a great while the local psychiatric board does not understand the KGB’s hints, or is simply stubbornly ethical; but then the KGB has only to take the victim to the Serbsky Forensic Psychiatry Institute in Moscow, where rulings of schizophrenia against dissidents are automatic. The official guidelines for diagnosing schizophrenia are loose enough to include almost any kind of “incorrect behavior.”