Leonid Plyushch is still being kept in an observation ward; he is still being given triftazin (nine tablets a day). His condition remains serious.
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In March Tatyana Khodorovich published the article ‘Escalation of Despair’. This article ends in the following manner:
‘How will this prolonged crime, sanctioned and inspired by the State, come to an end? It is not difficult to imagine!
‘Either Leonid Ivanovich’s physical health will fail to hold out — and physical death will follow … or the barriers of mind and will-power, which he has built up in his desperate struggle with his executioners, will collapse — and spiritual death will ensue, I take full responsibility for stating that the two possibilities have the same meaning, that there is very little time left, perhaps none at all. A man is not sent into the world in order to demonstrate his superiority over the products of the chemical industry … Leonid Plyushch’s wife awaits the inevitable disaster. There is not one department left in the Soviet State machinery to which she can turn or from which she can expect any support.’
*
On 4 April M. S. Oberemok, the procurator of Dnepropetrovsk Region, told Tatyana Zhitnikova, L. Plyushch’s wife, that her application for criminal proceedings to be instituted against the doctors at the Dnepropetrovsk Special Psychiatric Hospital (CCE 35.1) had been turned down, because at the end of March a medical commission headed by Professor Blokhina (from Dnepropetrovsk) had examined Plyushch’s treatment and living conditions and had not discovered any violations of the rules. (It was later discovered that no such commission had taken place in March.)
The procurator told Zhitnikova of the diagnosis made by the commission: schizophrenia in its paranoid form. Declaring that he knew of the appearance of articles on Plyushch in the French press, the procurator advised Zhitnikova not to turn to ‘foreign papers, but to Soviet authorities. You could be prosecuted for slander!’
On 7 April Zhitnikova sent a letter to Academician A. V. Snezhnevsky who had chaired one of the three pre-trial medical examinations of Plyushch (CCE 29.6). The letter ends as follows:
“I am applying to the Kiev Regional Court to end this compulsory treatment and I request your immediate intervention. You, as the acknowledged head of Soviet psychiatry and one of those responsible for the medical diagnosis that condemned my husband to be detained indefinitely in a psychiatric prison-hospital, must bear full moral and professional responsibility for everything that has happened.
“I demand that until the court reaches its decision you should cease injecting Leonid Ivanovich with neuroleptic drugs: the appointed medical commission should see before it a man and not the effects on a man of medical preparations which have been barbarously and inhumanly used on him.”
On 9 April Tatyana Zhitnikova and Yury Orlov, a corresponding-member of the Armenian SSR Academy of Sciences, visited the medical department of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD).
In the course of a long conversation, an official of the department remarked: ‘You are behaving badly, above all towards Plyushch himself. Would it really have been better for him to go to a camp?’ Zhitnikova then applied to the medical department of the USSR MVD, asking for the treatment of her husband by means of neuroleptic drugs to be stopped until the Kiev Regional Court investigated the question of ending his compulsory treatment, and for him to be transferred to another hospital. On the same day, in the evening, Zhitnikova and Orlov visited A. V. Snezhnevsky at his flat. In the course of a highly charged conversation, Snezhnevsky asked the same question: “Would it really have been better for Plyushch if he had got seven years of strict regime?” Snezhnevsky promised that he would ask G. V. Morozov, the Director of the Serbsky Institute, to send some experts at once to the Dnepropetrovsk Special Psychiatric Hospital.
On 10 April Zhitnikova sent a declaration to the chairman of the Kiev Regional Court, demanding an end to the compulsory treatment.
Zhitnikova has not so far received any answer to her letters and declarations. The commission of experts from the Serbsky Institute promised by Snezhnevsky has also not appeared yet.
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INTERNATIONAL
23 April was declared an international day in defence of Plyushch. On this day a delegation of five people — two members of the ‘Academy of Immortals’, the internationally famous mathematicians Henri Cartan and Laurant Schwartz, the lawyer de Felice, and two members of Amnesty International — visited the Soviet Embassy in France. At the embassy the members of the delegation were told that ‘Moscow will be asked’.
On this day a letter from T. Zhitnikova was published in the West:
‘Three-and-a-half years have elapsed since the day my husband was arrested. Of these he has spent one year in prison and the remainder in the Dnepropetrovsk Special Psychiatric Hospital. He remembers prison as a lost paradise: there he could talk and read, and most important of all, he was not ‘treated’ there.
‘I wish to state that Leonid Ivanovich Plyushch, ‘the mathematician Plyushch’, as they call him in foreign radio broadcasts, about whom articles and books have been written, whose letters and works have been published, that Leonid Ivanovich whom I knew, whom his children, relatives and close friends knew — this Leonid Ivanovich no longer exists. What remains is a human being pushed to the limits of suffering, who is losing his memory, the ability to read or to think, a man who is extremely ill and exhausted.
‘And those who are directly responsible, who are killing him with their own hands, know this; they realize that they are committing a crime.
‘… It is not the ‘Plyushch case’ but the issues of human freedom and human dignity that are at stake.
If the world grows accustomed to the persecution of free and independent thought, to amoral and totally unlawful acts perpetrated by a State which is responsible for the fate of all humanity, what can we expect from the future? What can we place our hope in? What kind of tomorrow are we condemning our children to?
Don’t think of us — think of yourselves: my terrible ‘today’ could become the same kind of ‘tomorrow’ for a large majority of people if you let your hands fall helplessly, if it seems, even for a moment, that your efforts to save reason and conscience are of no avail.
‘I made every effort to prove his normality, his absolute psychological health, his spiritual well-being … But now I say; yes, he is ill. Terribly ill. He must be saved from something worse than illness — from death.
‘In my own country I can no longer hope for anything. Now all my efforts are directed towards getting my emigration documents accepted by the appropriate authorities.
‘… I am forever grateful to all the foreign mathematicians and to all those who have concerned themselves with the fate of Leonid Ivanovich. But I have also realized something else: L. Plyushch’s Soviet colleagues are silent. They are as deaf to injustice as if the drugs suffocating Leonid Ivanovich were affecting them as well.
‘… Let them give me back my husband — the sick man they have made him — and let them allow us to leave this country.
‘The right to emigrate is the only right that I now ask to exercise.’
*
COMMISSION
On the same day, 23 April, a routine commission talked with Plyushch (usually medical commissions take place in May or June). Nina Nikolayevna Bochkovskaya, head of the ninth department, told Zhitnikova that the commission had considered it necessary to continue Plyushch’s treatment at the special psychiatric hospital.
Bochkovskaya also said: ‘Don’t you worry — we’re treating him. He’s under constant observation. We’re satisfied with him: he’s very polite and friendly.’ However, when asked why Plyushch was being kept in a ‘ward for violent patients’, she offered no reply. The members of the commission only asked Plyushch two or three questions: What effect is the triftazin having on you? What are you reading? How do you imagine the future shape of society? (Plyushch’s answers: democratic, there must be freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and democratic elections.)
*
VISIT
At the end of April Leonid Plyushch had a visit from his wife and sister. Plyushch was again suffering from facial erysipelas. His nose had swollen and covered half his face; his temperature was 38.9°C. He was being given injections of penicillin. He had not been given triftazin for several days. He was in a very bad condition. With difficulty he forced himself to attend the meeting with his sister.
At the beginning of the visit he looked withdrawn and in another world. At such moments it seems to an onlooker that Plyushch sees nothing, hears nothing and understands nothing. After some time his eyes show signs of comprehension. Leonid begins to answer questions. He answers slowly in monosyllables. He does not recount anything and asks no questions. He looks weak, inert, and drained. He is in a depressed state: he has no hope of getting out of the hospital.
Through a third party, Tatyana Zhitnikova has once again been told by the KGB that the methods of compulsory treatment chosen to use on her husband are directly related to how she behaves.
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A Chronicle of Current Events 