The Guardian of Liberty - Nemzetőr, 1982 (5. évfolyam, 4-6. szám)

1982-07-01 / 4. szám

Psychiatric Centre To Have Sinister Role? O everal delegates to next year’s World ^ Psychiatric Congress plan to ask for authori­tative confirmation or denial of recent reports claiming that all or part of a new Moscow build­ing project will be used to extend the Soviet communist authorities’ already widespread abuse of psychiatry for political purposes. The project, on the Kashira causeway, is called the Centre for Psychic Health of the USSR Acade­my of Medical Sciences. It will comprise three buildings, one of which, with 400 beds, is nearing completion. There will be institutes of clinical and preventive psychiatry and the „Institute of the Brain.“ The possibility that one or more of the institutes will play a key role in the abuse of psychiatry has been a subject of professional debate inter­nationally since May 8. On that day Pravda, the Soviet Communist Party daily, quoted Professor Marat Vartanyan, a corresponding member of the Academy of Medical Sciences, as saying that Academician A. V. Snezhnevsky „has done much work for the organisation of the Centre.“ According to the standard work on this abuse, Psychiatric Terror (by Dr. Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway, published in New York; British edition entitled Russia’s Political Hospitals), Professor Vartanyan „undoubtedly liaises closely“ with Dr. Snezhnevsky and other so-called „core psychiatrists“ in the USSR. from 1950 to 1951 and Head of the Chair of Psychiatry at the Central Doctors’ Training Insti­tute from 1951 to 1964. On his 70th birthday in May, 1974, he received the highest Soviet State awaird, the Order of Lenin, together with the Gold Hammer and Sickle medal CALL TO AID PERSECUTED SCIENTISTS Physicists at CERN, the European centre for nuclear -research, have appealed to scientists in non-communist countries to use their influence to help those of their Soviet colleagues who are being perse­cuted because of their stand on human rights. The CERN scientists are particularly concerned about the Soviet labour-camp authorities' treatment of nuclear physicist Dr. Yuri Orlov, the seriously ill founder of the „Helsinki movement" in the USSR. He formed the Public Group for Further­ing the Implementation of the Helsinki Agreement in the USSR In May, 1976. It soon became known worldwide as the Moscow Helsinki Monitoring Group, and within the Soviet Union it inspired the formation of similar groups in the Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia and Arme­nia, as well as the setting up in Moscow of the Working Commission to Investi­gate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes. The CERN scientists have a Yuri Orlov Committee. Dr. Orlov was arrested in February, 1977, and detained by the KGB until May, 1978, when he was tried and sen­tenced to seven years in prison camps and five years in „internal exile". Since then almost all the other mem­bers of the Soviet Helsinki movement, including several scientists, have been put in labour camps or otherwise isolet­­ed from the general public. Dr. Orlov, aged 57, is in one of the camps in Perm complex of corrective labour colonies in the Urals. He was recently reported to be coughing and spitting blood. His wife fears that he may be fatally ill with tuberculosis. His health has been wrecked by the camp regime: overwork, undernourish­ment, and several long spells of solitary confinement in punishment cells. The latest was for six months - a penalty imposed because he and 20 other pris­oners went on strike -in protest against their being spied upon by a KÇB agent mixing among the inmates. Other seriously ill Soviet Drisoners of conscience include Anatoly Shcharanskv, a young computer scientist and a Jewish member of the Moscow Helsniki Monitor­ing Group. In July, 1978, he was tried and sentenced to 13 years’ imprison­ment: three in prison and ten in camps. According to recent samizdat reports, he is emaciated and has been greatly weakened by his carrvo’s „starvation diet* and several spells in punishment cells. and the title, „Hero of Socialist Labour.“ He has been a Communist Party member since 1945. A hint of some of the work which will be done at the Centre for Psychic Health wais given in Professor Vartanyan’s Pravda interview. He mentioned experiments on cells that would „cast light on the true causes“ of mental illness. There would also be investigations into „hidden forms of depression.“ His reference to the experiments on cells is thought to relate to the Snezhnevsky school’s assertion that schizophrenia may be genetically caused. It is believed that such work will be done at the Institute of the Brain. Professor Vartanyan ended the interview by saying that he looked forward to conducting, joint research with specialists from foreign countries. In recent years it has been reported in samizdat from time to time that Soviet-style abuse of psychiatry has been practised on a small scale in some of the East European satellite countries. It is expected that the thorny question of this abuse will be debated at length at the World Psychiatric Congress, to be held in Vienna in July, 19S3. Perhaps with this debate in mind, the controlled Soviet Press has recently been discussing „com­munist morality“ in relation to medical ethics. For example, Izvestiya, the Soviet Government daily, on June 28 quoted Academician E. I. Chazov a's asserting at the Ninth World Congress of cardiologists two days earlier: „... attempts to infringe friendship and collaboration are incom­patible with the Hippocratic Oath and the very character of a doctor’s activity.“ PRIEST IN PSYCHO-PRISON Father Kirill Glebov, a Russian Ortho­dox priest with no known history of men­tal illness, is being detained in the Number Five Psychiatric Hospital at Stolbovaya, a Moscow suburb, accord­ing to a recent samizdat report. He was arrested by the KGB a few months ago and initially interned in Moscow Psy­chiatric Hospital Number 15. Six Russian Orthodox laymen, believ­ed to be from the Moscow area, have been arrested and charged with photo­copying religious literature. The KGB confiscated equipment and materials for binding and large quantities of the pho­tocopied literature. Alexander Skubilin (religious denomi­nation unknown) was sentenced on June 10 in Zagorsk to five years' camp im­prisonment for producing and distribut­ing religious literature. He was arrested on April 21. It was Dr. Snezhnevsky who first publicly referred to „sluggish schizophrenia,“ a diagnosis used to send large numbers of mentally healthy Soviet citizens to psychiatric hospitals. These people are religious believers, would-be emigrants, non- Russian nationalists or others actively concerned about human rights. According to Dr. Snezhnevsky and his followers, „sluggish schizophrenia“ may make its appearance at any time in, say, 30 years. In practice, however, it has no symptoms except disagreement with the current policies and declarations of the Soviet leadership. Aged 78, Dr. Snezhnevsky has been Director of the Institute of Psychiatry of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences since 1962. He was Director of the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry 4 STERN UNCLE Life inside -a Soviet police detention centre for children was described in a recent samizdat report entitled „First Acquaintance". Its author, a^ 11-year-old boy, said that the inmates of the centre, on Moscow's Danilovsky Rampart, were aged between six and 16. Most of them had run away from home. He claimed that one of the resident police officers, known as Uncle Petya, punched children who committed minor „offences" such as scratching themselves or inclining their heads to left or right. The boy also alleged that he was put in a punishment cell where the only place to sleep was the cement floor. Academician Chazov, the outgoing President of the Congress, is also a prominent participant in the Soviet Government’s „peace movement“ which instigates anti-defence lobbies in Western countries. Since June 1, 1971, Soviet doctors have been obliged, by a decree of the USSR Supreme Soviet, to swear an oath commitring themselves in all their actions to „be guided by the principles of communist morality, ever to bear in mind. . . (thrirl responsibility to... the Soviet State.“ This oath, quoted in the April 20, 1971, issue of the Moscow medical journal, Meditsinskaya Gazeta, seems to indicate that the Kremlin regards a doctor’s adherence to „communist morality“ as being more important than his obligations to his patients under the Hippocratic Oath. Well over two thousand years old, this oath (continued on page 5) JULY-AUGUST, 1982

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