[The following article has been translated by Intercontinental Press from the December 31, 1971, issue of Rouge, the weekly newspaper of the Ligue Communiste, French section of the Fourth International.]
"For a man of sound mind there is no fate more appalling than an unlimited stay in a psychiatric asylum," wrote Vladimir Bukovsky in a January 21, 1971, letter to the World Mental Health Society and eminent psychiatrists of various countries. The letter serves as preface for an anthology he has compiled, published by Le Seuil under the title Une nouvelle maladie mentale en URSS: l'opposition (A New Mental Illness in the USSR: Opposition).
The letter was, to be sure, an act of insanity for a man who just finished serving three years in a concentration camp (for a silent demonstration, with banners, against the arrests of Ginzburg-Galanskov, dispersed almost without resistance from the demonstrators, despite the brutality of the militia dressed in civilian clothing)! It was an act of insanity for a man who earlier (1963-65) had already undergone incarceration in a special psychiatric asylum for organizing an exposition of abstract art and the distribution of Djilas's book The New Class. At least, that's what the "special" psychiatrists (members, or flunkeys, of the KGB, the all-powerful political police) judged such an unreasonable affront to domestic tranquility to be. So Bukovsky was thrown back into a psychiatric asylum.
These internments have already been denounced, but it is only with
1. The story of the Bukovsky, Delaunay, etc., affair is in Russie contestataire, ed Fayard. It was compiled by P. Litvinov, grandson of the Soviet diplomat.
Bukovsky's story that their appalling reality has been exposed to the full light of day. The book includes both the psychiatrists' "expert evaluations"
and the testimony of those interned.
If the "expert evaluations" truly suggest insanity, it is on the part of the doctors. Off and on, while reading them, one has the impression of having been transported to some sciencefiction universe, a counterutopia inspired by Kaika, where reason is derangement, and the subject's conviction that he is right, his desire to reform the state, his voluntary sacrifice of personal and family life to political duty are interpreted as schizophrenia and paranoia. (Such logic would place Marx, and all the great revolutionists, among the mentally ill. )
These "analyses" lead to conclusions like: "conduct outwardly normal"; "... correctly oriented. He manifestly overestimates his own personality, addresses the doctors in a condescending and mocking tone. Declares that nothing can shake his political beliefs, but is unable to define what they consist of. Has not the slightest critical attitude toward the anti-Soviet declarations of the mental patients with whom he finds himself in forced treatment; he is convinced that he is under police surveillance because of his association with them, but carries this idea of persecution no further. ... Considering his active and repeated inclination to spread anti-Soviet allegations, as well as his lack of critical attitude toward his state of illness, Borisov must be subjected to forced treatment at a special psychiatric hospital."
But the impression of strangeness ebbs away under the repeated examinations and "expert evaluations," for in every respect they smell of crass trickery and the system - pathological interpretation of every shortcoming, no matter how harmless; negation of positive evidence with the formula "appreciation formally positive"; ruthless determination to make the patient say that he considers his role important, that his convictions contain the solution to all social problems (it a patient's opposition is religious, that he considers himself, or is considered, a saint, etc.).
Victims of this kind of repression come to know the game and take care not to fall into the traps: "You have to be on the alert with them ... or else you let out one or two secrets and boom! They get you... Ah! Ah! You've had it! It is noted on a piece of paper. They will paint such a picture of you that your own mother wouldn't recognize you." (Shimanov, p. 194.)
But the coolest ones are even able to turn the interrogation against their persecutors. For example, the examination of Soldatov:
"Don't you feel yourself capable of transforming the Soviet political regime?"
"The masses make history."
"Why are we sitting here talking?"
"Because the KGB is concerned about my health."
"Why should the KGB be interested in you?"
"Because of my undesirable opinions and the bad company I keep."
"Doesn't your present situation bother you?"
"At the moment I am ashamed for the science of medicine."
"Have you ever had any head injuries?"
"Sure, lots of them."
"Why your constant ironic smile?" "Because this whole ceremony delights me.
It's the product of your impotence."
Faced with such patients, the doctors must resort to the basest cynicism, like the one who declared, "He [a "patient"] took the hospital for a concentration camp, and the doctors for sadists."
What is the truth of the matter? Let's look at the evidence, basing ourselves only on the facts.
Although the alleged irresponsibility of the "patients" would suggest that they should not be punished for their "crimes," and although psychiatric hospitals are supposed to treat people, not punish them, the regimen in these clinics is even harsher than in the prisons. If the food is better, there is no tobacco; "exercise periods" and visits are much shorter, the latter restricted to close relatives; correspondence is more limited; one is only allowed to write in pencil. (Sometimes not even that; a pencil, you see, could be used as a weapon.)?
Even worse: the healthy inmates are mixed in with those who are really insane. (Politicals are placed with the dangerously insane who have already committed murder; thus they are threatened with death.) Most frightening is the fear of really going mad. Naritsa (deported in 1935, rehabilitated by the "de-Stalinization" ) writes: "Sleep! It is here above all, on this bed, that I must win the battle."
But it's not so easy to sleep. Cellmates can sleep all day and scream all night, or assault you. It's the fourth circle of hell: the attendants are worse than the lunatics. Transferring the well-known methods of the concentration camps, the attendants are chosen from among the criminal inmates. Their sadism is tolerated, even encouraged, by the guards, nurses, and equally sadistic doctors. ("To work here you have to be a monster," said one normal supervisor. But such people must hold their tongues, or they might be thrown into concentration camps, or themselves become "crazy.")
For committing an act of mutilation or a murder, an attendant is transferred to another section. If he does it again, he risks-being sent back to the scene of his first exploits.
Running the gauntlet (mostly for the purpose of pilfering the inmates' pronerty) is still not the depnest circle. property) is still not the deepest circle. There are injections of medicine whose side effects may be torture, especially if the doses are forced or multiplied. And then there is the ultimate: putting an inmate in a wet straitjacket that shrinks when it dries, inflicting excruciating pain.
In a prison or a camp, there is some recourse, some limit on punishment. Nothing of the kind for the "politically sick." No possible appeal from the "medical" decision (in general wives cannot be guardians of the politicals, because they consider their husbands sane; they themselves can be threatened with internment, for the wife of a madman who does not recognize his madness is herself mad); and no fixed term of imprisonment. Forced treatment can last indefinitely; the uncertainty of the fate reserved for the inmate is in itself a daily torture.
There is only one way out: humble yourself, admit your illness, and seriously break with your convictions. You must abandon all dignity, kneel under the yoke. And then, if you have a "relapse," it will be that much easier to reintern you, because you have explicitly admitted to having already been mentally ill.
Such is the regime that does not hesitate to persecute Bukovsky for denouncing it;3 the regime that for the last three years has imprisoned Grigorenko, a sixty-five-year-old man, the most distinguished living Russian Leninist, whose essential characteristie is his lucidity, as is easy to see by reading his works (unfortunately scattered among too many books4), among them his open letter to the head of the KGB, published by Bukovsky and held — what sinister nonsense! - as proof of his insanity.
russe clandestine, ed. Albin terature Michel.
4. Documents by Grigorenko are included in Samizdat I (Le Seuil); in Russie con-
Of all those interned in the "special clinics" (the total number is unknown), Grigorenko is in the most danger. The Stalinist bureaucrats want this indomitable fighter dead, because he is a communist. The only thing that may save him is a huge worldwide campaign in his behalf against the agony to which he is being subjected; a campaign waged particularly among the medical profession, and in the first place among psychiatrists, who must boycott Soviet psychiatry as long as it does notsay "no" to this abuse of science.
A doctor told one of the "patients": "We will hold you until the advent of the second communism." Perhaps he meant by this, in the spirit of Stalinist dogmatism, another stage of the present Soviet regime. But the readers of samizdat can only take this statement as a recognition of defeat. You are perhaps much closer than you imagine, you executioners in white coats who should be in brown shirts (Naritsa), to the days of the second, or more exactly the real, communism!
testataire (Fayard), where some of the documents that complete the Bukovsky collection can be found; and, of course, in his book on Stalin and the Second World War, published by editions de l' Herne.
Notes
2. This information is not in Bukovsky's book, but in Volpin-Yessinin's letter to Solzhenitsyn, another document in Russie solzhenitsyn, another document in Russie contestataire.
3. Five beautiful, short pieces by Bukovsky can be found in the collection Lit-