Mr. YATRON. Thank you, Professor Fireside, for your testimony and for your recommendations. Dr. Karlavage, the strength of the human rights movement depends on the active involvement of citizens like yourself who are willing to deeply involve yourselves in dealing with abuses on a case-by-case basis. Based on your contacts and experience, does it appear that the Soviet labor leaders are a target of psychiatric treatment? Dr. KARLAVAGE. There is no question. There are, of course, two forms of labor unions in the Soviet Union at this time, the official trade unions, which as you know, are an arm of the Communist Party, and then there are individuals who recognize that there are major problems in the Soviet Union in reference to labor practices. Certainly, the Communist Party does not have the leadership of the working man in the Soviet Union. There are many workers who recognize that their interests are not being led by the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. When they bring up their complaints in reference to wages, in reference to conditions, particularly in the coal mining industry, there is really great response from the head of enterprise, of the mine, or the trade union. Certainly, the Soviet coal mines that I visited were, indeed, quite good, though certainly not as good as American coal mines. Indeed, there are many coal mines in the Soviet Union that are not safe, that indeed have problems in reference to gas problems, cave-ins. When individual workers pursue their problems with their trade union leaders, they are basically sold down the river because the most important thing as far as the Soviet Union is concerned is production of coal, and not necessarily the health and welfare of Soviet workers. Mr. YATRON. Did Alexei Nikitin's sister mention when she had last heard from her brother as to what kind of treatment he is presently receiving? Dr. KARLAVAGE. Through the contact and translator that I utilized, I do not speak Russian but my translator did, she did say that Nikitin's health was poor. There was no problem in reference to his mental health per se. She said that he was having difficulty with his vision. I think that one of the most extreme situation is that here is an individual who was born and raised in the Ukraine, who when he was in supposedly poor health as far as the Soviet Government is concerned, and he had to be transported thousands upon thousands of miles away from his family. This man is a single individual who lived with his sister in the town of Donetsk. The sister has great difficulty, and has never seen him in Alma Ata. The only way she can communicate with him is through letters, which is not frequent. Here again is a way in which they tend to break individuals, it is transporting them far away from their home. The same thing with Dr. Koryagin. He is a prisoner in Christopol Prison, which is hundreds of miles from his home, which again, not having contact with his family and children, he has essentially given up on his own particular plight in order to, in a humanitarian way, give as good a life as possible to his wife and his children, he has urged them to leave him and to emigrate to the United States. Mr. YATRON. Would you recommend individual efforts by others such as yourself on behalf of the victims of psychiatric abuse in the Soviet Union? Dr. KARLAVAGE. I think certainly any citizen of the world. There is clearly nothing wrong under Soviet law, or under international law, for an individual, who is supposedly either in jail or in a hospital, to be given means of comfort, be it vitamin pills. He supposedly is being taken care of in a special psychiatric hospital, yet he is not even given vitamin pills to maintain his poor health. These legal methods in which citizens who are concerned, no matter what the ideology, should certainly be encouraged to do this as long as they do not break Soviet law and they act in a proper manner. Mr. YATRON. Thank you, Dr. Karlavage. Professor Fireside, does the misuse of drugs constitute torture as commonly understood by Amnesty? Mr. FIRESIDE. Certainly, Amnesty International material has mentioned that drugs were meted out to people who complained, to people whose families reported their imprisonment on unjust grounds to organizations such as Amnesty. So the punitive use of drugs, the mere giving of drugs to people who may have been sane, I think is a misuse. In addition to the misuse of drugs, Amnesty mentions the beatings in special psychiatric hospital by ordinary criminals who are routinely allowed to work off their probation terms, and they take very sadistic care of the patients that are under their charge. There are also some other refinements that seem to be clearly sadistic, such as wet rags of canvas that shrink and cause excrutiating pain, that are administered as punishment to people who persist in their so-called anti-Soviet ideas. Mr. YATRON. What has been the Soviet response to Amnesty International's intercessions on behalf of Soviet psychiatric abuse victims? Mr. FIRESIDE. It is hard for me to tell you, because I am speaking as a member of one of the Amnesty groups and as a coordinator for a U.S. group working specifically on the issue of the psychiatric abuse. I don't know whether the London office has ever had any response, but it would greatly surprise me. The general response of the Soviet authorities to Western allegations of abuse has been to stonewall it, to make claims that they have never made a mistake, that all this is part of an anti-Soviet slanderous conspiracy. I think Amnesty's effect is in keeping up the morale of prisoners by showing them that the outside world has learned of their plight. As Dr. Zoubok pointed out, news like your committee's activities, and the work of Amnesty is relayed by Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and it gives renewed courage to people who simply want to have the freedoms of speech, assembly and writing that are guaranteed to them under Soviet law. Amnesty, as such, is not an illegal organization in the U.S.S.R. There is a small group in Moscow that concerns itself with cases outside of the Soviet Union. What groups like ours in Ithaca, New York, do is to send parcels, which are perfectly legal, and to send letters of support to the families, and then letters of intercession to the Soviet authorities asking them to look into what seems to be violations of the Soviet's own procedures. Mr. YATRON. Thank you very much, Professor Fireside. I want to thank you and Dr. Karlavage for being here today to give us the benefit of your views. The Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Organizations and the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe stands adjourned subject to call of the Chair. Thank you very much for being here. [Whereupon, at 4:40 p.m., the subcommittee and the commission adjourned, subject to the call of the Chair.] APPENDIX 1 ARTICLE BY WALTER REICH ENTITLED "GRIGORENKO GETS A SECOND OPINION," PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, MAY 13, 1979 GRIGORENKO GETS Twice declared mentally ill, twice committed sting in Honolulu in late August 1977, the Sixth World Congress of Psychiatry passed a resolution that M added fuel to one of the profession's most fiery controversies. By a narrow margin, the congress condemned the abuse of psychiatry in Soviet political cases- the misdiagnosis of dissidents as mentally ill and their incarceration in institutions for the criminally insane. Just hours before the vote was taken, I sat in a motel room in Waikiki and listened to Andrei Snezhnevsky, the most important psychiatrist in the Soviet Union, a man who himself had been directly accused of politically inspired misdiagnoses. The Soviet diagnoses of dissidents had been accurate, he insisted; the campaign that had been waged against Soviet psychiatry for nearly a decade, and that was about to reach a climax at the congress, was nothing more than a "hysterical show." He suggested that if I, as a knowledgeable psychiatrist, were to examine the dissidents myself, I would see that the Soviet psychiatrists had been absolutely right. By Walter Reich Four months later, I received a call at my home outside Washington, D.C., from a friend of Pyotr Grigorievich Grigorenko. One of the most famous of the dissidents, Grigorenko, a muchhonored major general in the Red Army, a seminal contributor to Soviet military theory, had turned political protester and twice been declared mentally ill and committed to prison hospitals for the criminally insane. Now, in the United States on a six-month visa, Grigorenko wanted a second opinion as to his psychiatric condition. I consulted a specialist in psychiatry and the law, Alan A. Stone. He said he was himself planning to visit the Soviet Union and would raise the matter of Grigorenko's request directly with Dr. Snezhnevsky. He did so last summer, and the Soviet psychiatrist agreed that Grigorenko should be examined, and added that it was precisely such psychiatrists as Stone who should do the job. Back in the States, Stone and I talked with other colleagues. The psychiatric re-examination of a Soviet dissident was clearly a rare opportunity of some historical and professional significance; it had never been done before. But there (Continued on Page 39) were problems. Could we Walter Reich is a psychiatrist in Washington, D.C., and a lecturer in psychiatry at Yale University. In the preparation of this article, he collaborated with Alan A. Stone, professor of psychiatry and law at Harvard University and president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association, and Lawrence C. Kolb. professor emeritus of psychiatry at Columbia University. (97) 18 We Our answer in all cases was yes-even to the point of tilting in the direction of finding illness, and even at the risk of harming Grigorenko. would have to alter our usual hierarchy of values, placing our duty to our profession and to the project above our duty to the patient; and we knew that we would have to take steps that would demonstrate -to Grigorenko, to others and to ourselves that we had done so. Before anything, however, we would have to obtain from Grigorenko, in advance, his informed consent. We explained to him what we had in mind, and what the potential dangers were for him, since we were insisting that he grant us permission not only to carry out the examination, but also to publicize it in any way we wished. He acknowledged our warnings and accepted our conditions with complete approval. After all, he said, he had nothing more to lose. He had already been labeled insane. And so we prepared a document for Grigorenko's signature that embodied these conditions- a document that, under ordinary circumstances, none of us would have asited a patient to sign. In this case, however, we felt we had to forestall any future objection that we had been bound to Grigorenko by the usual medical oaths and obligations and that, in effect, we had proceeded under conditions of advance censorship. Grigorenko read the document in Russian and signed it with, he said, no regrets. The Man Pyotr Grigorievich Grigorenko was born in 1907 to a Russian Orthodox peasant family in the Ukraine. His mother died of typhus when he was 3. His father remarried in 1913, but the new wife abandoned the household within a year, soon after the father was called up to serve in World War I. Grigorenko was the first inhis village to join the Communist Youth League. At the age of 15, he went to the city of Donetsk, where he found work as a locksmith and machinist and continued his schooling at night; at age 20, he joined the Communist Party. And it was the party that sent him to a military engineering academy, from which he was graduated with distinction in 1934. Drafted into the Red Army, he saw his first military action in 1939 against the Japanese, and his back was injured in a grenade explosion. He was injured twice more in battle against the Germans. After the war, Grigorenko joined the staff of the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow; in 1949, he was appointed deputy chairman of the department of scientific research and then, in 1958, chairman of the department of cybernetics. Meanwhile he was winning the degree of Master of Military Sciences. In 1959, Grigorenko achieved his highest military rank, major general. By the end of his military career five years later, he was the author of more than 60 articles in military science, most of them classified, and possessed numerous decorations, including the Order of Lenin, two Orders of the Red Banner, the Order of the Red Star, the Order of the Second World War, as well as seven military medals. Grigorenko's first marriage in 1927 ended in divorce 15 years later. Three sons from that marriage now live in the Soviet Union. His second marriage, to his current wife, Zinaida, resulted in the birth of one son, Andrei, who emigrated to the United States several years ago. The Dissident Grigorenko had some small run-ins with Soviet authorities -he protested, for example, an instance of anti-Semitism in his academy-but his first serious clash resulted from a speech he delivered in 1961 as a delegate to a party conference in Moscow. He called for the democratization of party rules. He was promptly stripped of his delegate status. At about the same time, he wrote an open letter to Moscow voters criticizing the “unreasonable and often harmful activities of Khrushchev and his team." Grigorenko immediately lost his position at the military academy and, within a half year, was trans ferred to a lesser post in the Far East. There, Grigorenko founded a 13-member "Union for the Revival of Leninism" in 1963 and prepared and distributed leaflets calling for a return to Leninist tenets and principles. He was arrested and sent for his first psychiatric examination at the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow, where he was judged to be mentally ill. Hospitalized, he was not released until the spring of 1965, after Khrushchev's fall. Unable to obtain any position in his own field, having lost his officer's pension, be was forced to find work, at age 58, as a porter and longshoreman. He sent protest letters to Prime Minister Kosygin, Pravda and the K.G.B.; he openly complained about the loss of his position and his title, and he publicly demonstrated against the trials of prominent dissidents. In 1989, in response to an appeal, he flew to Tashkent to be a defense witness in a trial of dissident leaders. He was arrested and sent to a Tashkent psychiatric commission for examination. That commis sion found him to be without mental illness. However, in an unusual move, Grigorenko was transferred across the country to the Serbsky Institute in Moscow for a second examination, where he was, again, found to be mentally ill. Once more he was forcibly hospitalized, this time for more than four years. In 1974 he was released, and resumed his dissident activities. In 1977, he received the six-month visa to visit his son in New York, where he said he could obtain medical treatment that was unavailable to him at home. Three months later, the Supreme Soviet issued a decree, signed by Leonid Brezhnev, revoking his citizenship, and Grigorenko announced that he was seeking asylum in the United States. The Patient Two commissions of forensic 'psychiatrists, both from the Serbsky Institute in Moscow, had recommended that Grigorenko be committed. Their findings were virtually identical. In essence, they agreed that Grigorenko's dissent was the result not of rational conviction but, rather, of psychopathology. According to their theory of his mental illness, Grigorenko was suffering from a chronic paranoid condition that at times reached psy-.-chotic proportions and that caused him to act in ways that had brought him into conflict with Soviet law. Specifically, that illness caused in him a penchant for "reformism" a need to reform society, to speak out and act out against authority and to focus himself repeatedly and obstinately on dissident themes. In so acting and speaking, the theory held, Grigorenko was not in control of himself, was not responsible for the legal implications of his behavior and could be barred, as ill, from attending his own trial and testifying in his own defense. Grigorenko's illness, the Soviet psychiatrists also implied, may have been aggravated or partly caused by arteriosclerotic changes in the blood vessels supplying his brain. The Re-examination In order to evaluate Grigorenko's psychiatric status as accurately and fully as possible, we arranged for an unusually elaborate re-examination procedure. The interviews, totaling some eight hours, were carried out separately by each of the psychiatrists. One was held at Harvard University and two in the videotape studio at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in upper Manhattan. The questions asked of Grigorenko touched upon almost every dimension of his life, including his family, his early memories, his sexual, intellectual and moral development, his ideas, his impulses, his expectations, his feelings and the nature of his personal relationships. Inevitably, we paid particular attention to his political ideas and to the motivations for his dissident acts. All of the interviews were carried out through an interpreter, and all were recorded, two on videotape. |