Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [326]
Thanks to Bukovsky’s efforts, we know, among other things, what happened at the 1967 Politburo meeting which took place just before his own arrest. Bukovsky in particular was struck by how many of those present felt that bringing criminal charges against him would “cause a certain reaction inside the country and abroad.” It would be a mistake, they concluded, simply to arrest Bukovsky—so they proposed to put him in a psychiatric hospital instead.66 The era of the psikhushka—the “special mental hospital”—had begun.
The use of psychiatric hospitals for the imprisonment of dissidents had a prehistory. Returning from Western Europe to St. Petersburg in 1836, the Russian philosopher Pyotr Chadaev wrote an essay critical of the regime of Czar Nicholas I: “Contrary to all the laws of the human community,” he declared, at the height of the Russian imperial regime, “Russia moves only in the direction of her own enslavement and the enslavement of all neighboring peoples.” In response, Nicholas had Chadaev detained in his home. The Czar was certain, he declared, that once the Russians learned that their compatriot “suffers from derangement and insanity,” they would forgive him.67
In the aftermath of the Thaw, the authorities began once again to use psychiatric hospitals to incarcerate dissidents—a policy which had many advantages for the KGB. Above all, it helped discredit the dissidents, both in the West and in the USSR, and deflected attention away from them. If these were not serious political opponents of the regime, but merely crazy people, who could object to their hospitalization?
With great enthusiasm, the Soviet psychiatric establishment participated in the farce. To explain the phenomenon of dissidence, they came up with the definition of “sluggish schizophrenia” or “creeping schizophrenia.” This, scientists explained, was a form of schizophrenia which left no mark on the intellect or outward behavior, yet could encompass nearly any form of behavior deemed asocial or abnormal. “Most frequently, ideas about a ‘struggle for truth and justice’ are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure,” wrote two Soviet professers, both of the Serbsky Institute:
A characteristic feature of overvalued ideas is the patient’s conviction of his own rectitude, an obsession with asserting his trampled “rights,” and the significance of these feelings for the patient’s personality. They tend to exploit judicial proceedings as a platform for making speeches and appeals.68
And, by this definition, just about all of the dissidents qualified as crazy. The writer and scientist Zhores Medvedev was diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia” accompanied by “paranoid delusions of reforming society.” His symptoms included that of a “split personality”—meaning he worked both as a scientist and as a writer. Natalya Gorbanevskaya, the first editor of the Chronicle, was diagnosed with sluggish schizophrenia with “no clear symptoms,” but which resulted in “abnormal changes in emotions, wills and thought patterns.” The dissident Red Army General Pyotr Grigorenko was diagnosed with a psychological condition “characterized by the presence of reformist ideas, in particular for the reorganization of the state apparatus; and this was linked with ideas of overestimation of his own personality that reached messianic proportions. ”69 In one report sent up to the Central Committee, a local KGB commander also complained that he had on his hands a group of citizens with a very particular form of mental illness: they “try to found new ‘parties,’ organizations, and councils, preparing and distributing plans for new laws and programs.”70
Depending on the circumstances of their arrest—or non-arrest—prisoners deemed mentally ill could be sent to a variety of institutions. Some were assessed by prison doctors, others by clinics. In a category of its own was the Serbsky Institute, whose special diagnostic section, headed in the 1960s and 1970s by Doctor Danil Lunts, was responsible for assessing political offenders. Dr. Lunts personally examined Sinyavsky,