In the course of July 1969, three court hearings (CCE 9.3) are expected to take place, which will involve compulsory measures of a medical nature.
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The special diagnosis department
A panel of forensic psychiatry experts from the Serbsky Institute (Moscow) has pronounced Victor Kuznetsov insane; his arrest has already been reported by the Chronicle (CCE 7.3).
Kuznetsov was charged under Article 70 (RSFSR Criminal Code), and the inquiry into his case is being conducted by KGB agencies. The panel of experts was headed by Professor D.R. Lunts.
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Lunts is known to have headed the department of the Serbsky Institute dealing with “politicals” as far back as the early 1950s. The department is now called the “special diagnosis department”, and Lunts has retained his post as director of all diagnoses connected with political cases.
Lunts was the expert who, in 1963, declared Vladimir BUKOVSKY insane and, four years later, sane.
Lunts once also declared Alexei Dobrovolsky insane. In 1967, however, Dobrovolsky, the only person whose testimony was used to build a case against Yury GALANSKOV (CCE 1.1), was pronounced psychologically normal. (The charges against Alexander Ginzburg were not supported, even by Dobrovolsky’s testimony.)
Under the direction of this same Professor Lunts, Pyotr GRIGORENKO was declared insane.
It was Lunts, too, who was the expert who “established” the insanity of Natalya GORBANEVSKAYA and Victor FAINBERG, participants in the 25 August 1968 demonstration (CCE 4.1).
It is difficult to point to a single one of these cases in which the results of the diagnosis could be said to be justified on scientific and medical grounds. Experience makes it clear that each decision was taken by the KGB: Professor Lunts only had to wrap it up in the form of a medical conclusion.
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RIGA
In Riga Ivan YAKHIMOVICH and Ilja RIPSS (who tried to burn himself to death) have both been declared insane.
The Chronicle has so far given only scanty and, in some respects, inaccurate information about Ripps [CCE 7.13, item 1]. Ilja Ripss is 20, and will not be 21 until December 1969. Before his 15th birthday he was one of the winners of the International Schoolchildren’s Mathematics Olympiad; while still 16 he finished school and became a student in the Faculty of Mechanics & Mathematics at Riga University.
Ilja (Eliyahu) Ripss (b. 1948)
Throughout his years of study he was the holder of a Lenin scholarship, and was the pride of the University. His diploma thesis, according to his teachers, could have served, as it stood, as the basis of a higher Doctoral dissertation. On 10 April 1968/// he was assigned to a very good post in the Physics Institute (Latvian SSR Academy of Sciences).
On 13 April 1969, he went out onto Freedom Square with a placard saying I PROTEST AGAINST THE OCCUPATION OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA, and set fire to his clothes, which he had previously soaked in petrol. Some sailors who happened to be passing quickly put out the flames, but gave the young man a vicious beating.
Fortunately his burns were only slight.
Ripss’ university friends came to the hospital where he had been taken and offered themselves as blood donors. According to unconfirmed rumours, repressive measures were taken by the University against these students.
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Charges were brought against Ripss under Article 65 (Latvian SSR Criminal Code = Article 70, RSFSR Criminal Code). It is extremely difficult to classify Ripss’s actions under any Article of the Criminal Code. That is probably why the Article about “anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation” was chosen. One, its formulation is vaguely-worded; two, it ensures the minimum publicity — for a start, it requires a defence lawyer with a security pass. Apart from his attempt to burn himself to death, Ilja Ripss is not accused of anything else.
On the contrary, the inquiry established that the sole point of disagreement with Soviet policy was over a single action of the government: the sending of troops into Czechoslovakia. In these circumstances, to prove his guilt under Article 65 (Latvian SSR Criminal Code) viz. to prove his intent to undermine the existing system would be too difficult.
It is far easier to have Ilja Ripss isolated as “insane”. Following established practice, the judges will regard compulsory measures of a medical nature as a pure formality, without examining either the essence of the case or the essence of the diagnosis.
Following this model the conclusion of the diagnostic team (“he must be considered insane and put in a special psychiatric hospital for compulsory treatment”) almost certainly means that Victor Kuznetsov, Ivan Yakhimovich and Ilja Ripss will find their way into a prison psychiatric hospital.
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The Special Psychiatric Hospitals
The Special Psychiatric Hospitals admit persons who have committed serious crimes (brutal murder, rape, banditry) and are not answerable for their actions, being in a mentally disturbed state. They are therefore exempt from trial.
Apart from this, it often happens that in order to isolate a person from society, he is declared insane, even if the investigators cannot prove him guilty of committing a serious crime but are nevertheless convinced of his guilt. His period of internment in the hospital is not determined by a court, and may drag on for any length of time at all.
Alongside those who are genuinely ill, perfectly healthy people are sent to these hospitals on account of their beliefs. In this way they are deprived of the right to defend themselves in court and are held in conditions considerably more severe than those existing in today’s prisons and camps.
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The first “hospital” of this kind was already in existence before the war in Kazan, Tatarstan (CCE 10.10). There is still a special department for politicals there, dating from that time.
After, the war, a special colony was created in Sychovka (Smolensk Region, west-central Russia), and chronically disturbed persons are even now being sent there, among them those politicals, who, in the opinion of the KGB and the management of the special hospitals, are the most dangerous. People who land in this colony are reduced to a condition of complete mental collapse.
In 1952 a special hospital was opened in Leningrad: 9 Arsenal St, Post Box US-20, building 5.
In 1965 another SPH was opened in Chernyakhovsk (Kaliningrad Region, NW Russia) in a building which was formerly a German convict prison: Postbox 216, building 2.
In 1966 another SPH was opened in Minsk (Belorussia), and in 1968 one more was launched in Dnepropetrovsk (Central Ukraine).
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All these institutions have the following features in common.
Political prisoners, although of sound mind, are kept in the same cells as seriously disturbed psychiatric patients. If they will not renounce their convictions they are physically tortured on the pretext of treatment with injections of large doses of Aminazin and Sulfazin: these cause depressive shock reaction and serious physical disorders.
The SPH regime is the same as for closed prisons, with one hour’s exercise a day.
Sometimes sodium aminate, a strong narcotic, is administered by injection, to weaken the patient, and after the injection he is interrogated.
The staff consists of orderlies recruited from the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). Their uniforms are concealed by white overalls. (Male nurses, also in white overalls, are chosen from among the criminal prisoners, thieves and recidivist thugs). Lastly, the senior and junior medical personnel, many with officers shoulder-straps beneath their white overalls, are also recruited from the MVD.
The brick walls surrounding these prison hospitals are even more impressive than those of any other type of prison.
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The most terrifyingly arbitrary regimes prevail at the Sychovka and Chernyakhovsk hospitals.
There the sick patients, and the politicals with them, are the victims of daily beatings and sadistic humiliation by supervisory personnel and the nurses, whose rights are unlimited.
In spring 1969, for instance, a patient named Popov was beaten to death in the Chernyakhovsk hospital; the medical record states that he died of a brain haemorrhage.
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Leningrad SPH
From 1956 to the end of 1964, Nikolai I. Samsonov (Obituary, see CCE 18.12), a Stalin prize-winner and a geophysicist who worked in the Arctic, was interned in the Leningrad hospital. Prior to this, he had written a letter to the CPSU Central Committee criticising some of Stalin’s theoretical propositions.
The following politicals are at present in the same hospital: Nikolai DANILOV and Yevgeny SHASHENKOV (CCE 3.4) from Leningrad; the Moscow architect Oleg SMIRNOV (CCE 7.8); and many others.
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At present Victor FAINBERG (CCE 5.4 item 6) is being kept in the same hospital.
The authorities decided against putting him on trial, evidently because after he was beaten up on Red Square on 25 August 1968 he lost all his front teeth and suffered from concussion.
Fainberg has been given the diagnosis, cynical even for institutions of this sort, of “schizo-heterodoxy”. He was informed of this by the doctors who are “curing” him.
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Chernyakhovsk SPH
Former teacher G. Forpostov is being kept in the Chernyakhovsk hospital, for attempting to cross the Soviet-Polish border to live in his native Poland.
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Until July 1968, Ivankov, the radio operator of the tanker “Tuapse” who asked for political asylum in the United States (and was later tricked into returning to the Soviet Union) was held at the same hospital.
From the moment Ivankov returned to the USSR he has been shut up in prison psychiatric hospitals, and the doctors tell him quite openly that he will remain there for the rest of his life.
The most remarkable aspect of this case is that the repatriation office of the US State Department has a letter from the Second Secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, guaranteeing that when Ivankov returned home he would not be subjected to any repressive measures or persecution.
While in Chernyakhovsk hospital, Ivankov used to tell the other patients and politicals about his tragedy; for this he was punished with Aminazin and Sulfazin injections in gigantic doses.
In July 1968 he was transferred to a hospital of similar type in Dnepropetrovsk (Ukraine).
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Simulating madness
Prisoners in special or strict-regime camps who feel they can no linger bear the terrible conditions, sometimes try simulating madness — and some of them succeed.
When they get to a prison psychiatric hospital, however, they realise at once that it is far worse than the severest camps. Some even beg the doctors on bended knee to ”’let them out back to the camp”. People who manage to get out of these ‘hospitals’ are given a special type of identity document, like ex-prisoners.
Those who persistently refuse to admit they are ill, have little hope of regaining their liberty.
A Chronicle of Current Events 