Gulag (80 page)

Prisoners could also be thrown in punishment cells—the “cooler”—a form of punishment which was ideal, from the authorities’ point of view. It was completely legal, and could not technically be described as torture. Its effects on prisoners were slow and cumulative, but since no one was rushing to complete a road across the tundra, that did not worry the prison authorities. These cells were comparable to anything invented by Stalin’s NKVD. A 1976 document, published by the Moscow Helsinki group, described with great precision the punishment cells of Vladimir prison, of which there were about fifty. The walls of the cells were covered with cement “fur,” bumps, and spikes. The floors were dirty and wet. In one cell, the window had been broken and replaced with newspapers, in others, the windows were blocked with bricks. The only thing to sit on was a cylinder of cement, about 25 centimeters across, ringed with iron. At night, a wooden bunk was brought in, but without sheets or pillows. The prisoner was expected to lie on bare boards and iron. Cells were kept so cold that prisoners found it difficult to sleep, even to lie down. In some cells, the “ventilation” brought in air from the sewers.
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Worst of all, for people accustomed to active lives, was the boredom, described by Yuli Daniel:

Week after week Dissolves in smoke from cigarettes In this curious establishment Everything’s dream or else delirium . . .

In here the light doesn’t go off at night In here the light isn’t too strong by day In here silence, the managing director, Has taken me over.

You can choke with nothing to do, Or beat your head against the wall, Week after week Dissolves in blue smoke...
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Punishment-cell terms could last indefinitely. Technically, prisoners could only be confined for fifteen-day periods, but the authorities got around this by putting prisoners in, letting them out for a day, and then throwing them back in again. Marchenko was once kept in a cell for forty-eight days. Each time the fifteen-day limit was reached, his guards let him out for a few minutes—long enough to be read a directive confining him, again, to a punishment cell.
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In the camp Perm-35, one prisoner was held for nearly two months before being taken to hospital, while another was held for forty-five days, after refusing to work in any job except his speciality, which was metalworking.
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Many of those sent to the cells were being punished for crimes even more insubstantial than that: when the authorities truly wanted to break someone, they deliberately doled out harsh punishments for very minor infractions. In 1973 and 1974, in the Perm camps, two prisoners were deprived of the right to relatives’ visits for “sitting on beds in daytime.” Another was punished because some jam in a parcel he received was found to have been cooked with alcohol as a flavoring. Other prisoners were punished or reprimanded for walking too slowly, or for not wearing socks.
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Sometimes, the prolonged pressure succeeded. Aleksei Dobrovolsky, one of the co-defendants in the trial of Aleksandr Ginzburg, “broke” very early on, requesting in writing that he be allowed to testify on the radio and tell the whole story of his “criminal” dissident activity, the better to caution young people against following his own dangerous path.
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Pyotr Yakir also broke down under investigation, and “confessed” to having invented what he wrote.
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Others died. Yuri Galanskov, another of Ginzburg’s co-defendants, died in 1972. He had developed ulcers in prison. They went untreated, and eventually killed him.
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Marchenko also died, in 1986, probably from drugs he was given while on hunger strike.
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Several more prisoners died—one killed himself—during a monthlong hunger strike in Perm-35 in 1974.
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Later, Vasil Stus, a Ukrainian poet and human rights activist, died in Perm in 1985.
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But prisoners also fought back. In 1977, the political prisoners of Perm-35 described their form of defiance:

We often go on hunger strike. In the punishment cells, in transport wagons. On ordinary, insignificant days, on the days of the death of our comrades. On days of unusual activities in the
zona
, on the 8th of March and the 10th of December, on the 1st of August and the 8th of May, on the 5th of September. We go on hunger strike too often. Diplomats, civil servants sign new agreements on human rights, on the freedom of information, on the banning of torture—and we go on hunger strike, since in the USSR these things are not observed.
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Thanks to their efforts, knowledge of the dissident movement was growing all the time in the West—and protests were growing louder. As a result, the treatment of some prisoners took on a new form.

Although I have noted that few archival documents from the 1970s and the 1980s have appeared in public, there are, in fact, some exceptions. In 1991, Vladimir Bukovsky was invited back to Russia from Britain, where he had been living ever since he had been expelled from the country (in exchange for an imprisoned Chilean communist) fifteen years earlier. Bukovsky had been designated a “court expert” in the “trial” of the Communist Party, which took place after the Party had challenged President Yeltsin’s attempt to ban it. He arrived at the Constitutional Court building in Moscow carrying a laptop computer with a hand scanner. Confident that no one in Russia had ever seen either machine before, he sat down and calmly began copying all of the documents that had been brought as evidence. Only as he approached the end of his task did those around him suddenly realize what he was doing. Someone said aloud, “He’s going to publish them,
there
!” The room fell silent. At that point—“like in a film,” Bukovsky said later—he simply closed his computer, walked to the exit, went straight to the airport, and flew out of Russia.
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Thanks to Bukovsky’s efforts, we know, among other things, what happened at the 1967 Politburo meeting which took place just before his own arrest. Bukovsky in particular was struck by how many of those present felt that bringing criminal charges against him would “cause a certain reaction inside the country and abroad.” It would be a mistake, they concluded, simply to arrest Bukovsky—so they proposed to put him in a psychiatric hospital instead.
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The era of the psikhushka—the “special mental hospital”—had begun.

The use of psychiatric hospitals for the imprisonment of dissidents had a prehistory. Returning from Western Europe to St. Petersburg in 1836, the Russian philosopher Pyotr Chadaev wrote an essay critical of the regime of Czar Nicholas I: “Contrary to all the laws of the human community,” he declared, at the height of the Russian imperial regime, “Russia moves only in the direction of her own enslavement and the enslavement of all neighboring peoples.” In response, Nicholas had Chadaev detained in his home. The Czar was certain, he declared, that once the Russians learned that their compatriot “suffers from derangement and insanity,” they would forgive him.
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In the aftermath of the Thaw, the authorities began once again to use psychiatric hospitals to incarcerate dissidents—a policy which had many advantages for the KGB. Above all, it helped discredit the dissidents, both in the West and in the USSR, and deflected attention away from them. If these were not serious political opponents of the regime, but merely crazy people, who could object to their hospitalization?

With great enthusiasm, the Soviet psychiatric establishment participated in the farce. To explain the phenomenon of dissidence, they came up with the definition of “sluggish schizophrenia” or “creeping schizophrenia.” This, scientists explained, was a form of schizophrenia which left no mark on the intellect or outward behavior, yet could encompass nearly any form of behavior deemed asocial or abnormal. “Most frequently, ideas about a ‘struggle for truth and justice’ are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure,” wrote two Soviet professers, both of the Serbsky Institute:

A characteristic feature of overvalued ideas is the patient’s conviction of his own rectitude, an obsession with asserting his trampled “rights,” and the significance of these feelings for the patient’s personality. They tend to exploit judicial proceedings as a platform for making speeches and appeals.
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And, by this definition, just about all of the dissidents qualified as crazy. The writer and scientist Zhores Medvedev was diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia” accompanied by “paranoid delusions of reforming society.” His symptoms included that of a “split personality”—meaning he worked both as a scientist and as a writer. Natalya Gorbanevskaya, the first editor of the
Chronicle
, was diagnosed with sluggish schizophrenia with “no clear symptoms,” but which resulted in “abnormal changes in emotions, wills and thought patterns.” The dissident Red Army General Pyotr Grigorenko was diagnosed with a psychological condition “characterized by the presence of reformist ideas, in particular for the reorganization of the state apparatus; and this was linked with ideas of overestimation of his own personality that reached messianic proportions. ”
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In one report sent up to the Central Committee, a local KGB commander also complained that he had on his hands a group of citizens with a very particular form of mental illness: they “try to found new ‘parties,’ organizations, and councils, preparing and distributing plans for new laws and programs.”
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Depending on the circumstances of their arrest—or non-arrest—prisoners deemed mentally ill could be sent to a variety of institutions. Some were assessed by prison doctors, others by clinics. In a category of its own was the Serbsky Institute, whose special diagnostic section, headed in the 1960s and 1970s by Doctor Danil Lunts, was responsible for assessing political offenders. Dr. Lunts personally examined Sinyavsky, Bukovsky, Gorbanevskaya, Grigorenko, and Viktor Nekipelov, among many others, and clearly had high status.
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Nekipelov reported that he wore a blue uniform with two stars, “the insignia of a general in the MVD troops.”
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Some Soviet émigré psychiatrists would claim that Lunts, and the others at the institute, were sincere in their belief that their patients were mentally ill. Most of the political prisoners who met him, however, have characterized him as an opportunist, carrying out the work of his MVD bosses, “no better than the criminal doctors who performed inhuman experiments on the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.”
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If diagnosed as mentally ill, patients were condemned to a term in a hospital, sometimes for a few months, sometimes for many years. The luckier ones were sent on to one of the several hundred ordinary Soviet psychiatric hospitals. These were unhygienic and overcrowded, and often staffed by drunks and sadists. Still, the drunks and sadists were civilians, and the ordinary hospitals were generally less secretive than prisons and camps. Patients were allowed to write letters with greater freedom, and could receive visit from people other than relatives.

Those deemed “especially dangerous,” on the other hand, were sent to the “special psychiatric hospitals,” of which there were only a handful. These were run directly by the MVD. The doctors in them had, like Lunts, MVD ranks. These hospitals looked and felt like prisons, and were surrounded by watchtowers, barbed wire, guards, and dogs. A photograph of the Oryol special psychiatric hospital taken in the 1970s shows patients exercising in an internal courtyard, indistinguishable from a prison exercise yard.
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In both the ordinary and the special hospitals, the doctors aimed, again, at recantation.
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Patients who agreed to renounce their convictions, who admitted that mental illness had caused them to criticize the Soviet system, could be declared healthy and set free. Those who did not recant were considered still ill, and could be given “treatment.” As Soviet psychiatrists did not believe in psychoanalysis, this treatment consisted largely of drugs, electric shocks, and various forms of restraint. Drugs abandoned by the West in the 1930s were administered routinely forcing patients’ body temperatures above 40 degrees centigrade, causing pain and discomfort. Prison doctors also prescribed tranquilizers which caused a range of side effects, including physical rigidity, slowness, and involuntary tics and movements, not to mention apathy and indifference.
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Other treatments included straightforward beating; the injection of insulin, which sends nondiabetics into hypoglycemic shock; and a punishment called the “roll-up,” which Bukovsky described in a 1976 interview: “It involved the use of wet canvas—long pieces of it—in which the patient is rolled up from head to foot, so tightly that it was difficult for him to breathe, and as the canvas began to dry out it would get tighter and tighter and make the patient feel even worse.”
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Another treatment, which Nekipelov witnessed at the Serbsky Institute, was the “lumbar puncture,” the thrusting of a needle into the patient’s spine. Those who returned from a lumbar puncture were put on their sides, where they lay, immobile, their backs smeared with iodine, for several days.
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Many people were affected. In 1977, the year Peter Reddaway and Sidney Bloch published their extensive survey of Soviet psychiatric abuse, at least 365 sane people were known to have undergone treatment for politically defined madness, and there were surely hundreds more.
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Nevertheless, the incarceration of dissidents in hospitals did not, in the end, achieve everything that the Soviet regime had hoped it would. Most of all, it did not deflect the attention of the West. For one, the horrors of psychiatric abuse probably inflamed Western imaginations far more than had more familiar tales of camps and prisons. Anyone who had seen the film
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
could imagine a Soviet psychiatric hospital all too well. More important, though, the issue of psychiatric abuse had a direct appeal to a defined, articulate group that had a professional interest in the subject: Western psychiatrists. From 1971, the year that Bukovsky smuggled out over 150 pages documenting such abuse in the USSR, the issue became a perennial topic for bodies such as the World Psychiatric Association, the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Britain, and other national and international psychiatric associations. The braver groups issued statements. Others did not, but were then condemned for their cowardice, generating more bad publicity for the USSR.
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