Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 13 –
Unfortunately, there are many “banal dictatorships” around the world which
maintain themselves by force and violence and even total lies, Aleksandr
Podrabinek says. But most do not cross “a red line” separating these forms of
rule from those whose existence the rest of the world can’t tolerate.
Among regimes that have are Nazi
Germany with its gas chambers, Cambodia and Ruanda with its mass destruction of
the population, the Central African Empire with a cannibal as ruler, or today’s
North Korea, the human rights activist says (belsat.eu/ru/news/oleg-sofyanik-vozrozhdenie-karatelnoj-psihiatrii-v-krymu/).
The
USSR also fell into this category when it began to misuse psychiatry against
its opponents. People around the world could tolerate a lot. They could even
justify concentration camps because their countries had prisons and torture
because their own investigators were often “not angels.” But punitive
psychiatry was something else: it crossed a line.
Today,
Podrabinek continues, “punitive psychiatry does not have even distant analogues
in the free world.” And consequently, regimes like Vladimir Putin’s which
engage in it as did his Soviet predecessors put themselves “in the ranks of the
outcasts of humanity.” And thus it is appropriate to say that “’the evil empire’”
has returned.
Two
days ago, he reports, Oleg Sofyanik, a resident of Sevastopol in
Russian-occupied Crimea, received a call from the local psychiatric hospital
which asked him to come in. He asked in response what would happen if he didn’t
and was told that the police would come, bring him in and that as a result “he
would remain here forever.”
Sofyanik
had experience with the abuse of psychiatry in Soviet times and hasn’t had any
contact with that field in “more than 30 years.” In 1977, he wrote a letter to Deutsche Welle
about the need to struggle against the Soviet state. The KGB called in him for “a
prophylactic conversation.”
But
that didn’t help, and two years later, he and some friends created an underground
Committee of Fighters for Freedom which disseminated fliers in Sevastopol
calling on people to over throw ‘the blood regime of Brezhnev.’” Not surprisingly,
the KGB found him and handed him over to psychiatrists but they pronounced him
sane, perhaps because he was still a
minor.
After finishing school, he was again detained
by the KGB, this time in 1982 in Moscow for seeking to meeting with US embassy
personnel to tell them about his experiences and ask for help in emigrating. For that, he was exiled from Moscow. Then he
was drafted but ran away from military service before being confined in a
psychiatric hospital.
And
it was then, in 1984, that he was diagnosed as suffering from “’creeping
schizophrenia,’” the diagnosis of choice for Soviet doctors dealing with
dissidents. After his time in the hospital, he tried to escape from the USSR by
taking a cruise ship between Odessa and Batumi and then jumping overboard with
an inflatable boat.
Again,
he was caught, and again he was confined to a psychiatric hospital, this time
for 15 months. Upon his release, he continued his life as a dissident; and in
March 1988, Sofyanik wrote to the Soviet government renouncing his Soviet citizenship.
For that, he was again incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital, this time for
six months.
That
was his last blush with psychiatry until this week. A year after his last
incarceration, the All-Union Society of Neuropathologists and Psychiatrists
denounced the political use of psychiatry and promised never to do so
again. But, as Podrabinek notes, no one
who had done so was punished; and those who knew how to do so continued to
remain available.
The
call to Sofyanik and the threat that he will be detained for life are the
results, the human rights activist says.
Not surprisingly, the victim hopes to escape from Russian-occupied
Crimea to Ukraine.
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