Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [327]
If diagnosed as mentally ill, patients were condemned to a term in a hospital, sometimes for a few months, sometimes for many years. The luckier ones were sent on to one of the several hundred ordinary Soviet psychiatric hospitals. These were unhygienic and overcrowded, and often staffed by drunks and sadists. Still, the drunks and sadists were civilians, and the ordinary hospitals were generally less secretive than prisons and camps. Patients were allowed to write letters with greater freedom, and could receive visit from people other than relatives.
Those deemed “especially dangerous,” on the other hand, were sent to the “special psychiatric hospitals,” of which there were only a handful. These were run directly by the MVD. The doctors in them had, like Lunts, MVD ranks. These hospitals looked and felt like prisons, and were surrounded by watchtowers, barbed wire, guards, and dogs. A photograph of the Oryol special psychiatric hospital taken in the 1970s shows patients exercising in an internal courtyard, indistinguishable from a prison exercise yard.74
In both the ordinary and the special hospitals, the doctors aimed, again, at recantation.75 Patients who agreed to renounce their convictions, who admitted that mental illness had caused them to criticize the Soviet system, could be declared healthy and set free. Those who did not recant were considered still ill, and could be given “treatment.” As Soviet psychiatrists did not believe in psychoanalysis, this treatment consisted largely of drugs, electric shocks, and various forms of restraint. Drugs abandoned by the West in the 1930s were administered routinely forcing patients’ body temperatures above 40 degrees centigrade, causing pain and discomfort. Prison doctors also prescribed tranquilizers which caused a range of side effects, including physical rigidity, slowness, and involuntary tics and movements, not to mention apathy and indifference.76
Other treatments included straightforward beating; the injection of insulin, which sends nondiabetics into hypoglycemic shock; and a punishment called the “roll-up,” which Bukovsky described in a 1976 interview: “It involved the use of wet canvas—long pieces of it—in which the patient is rolled up from head to foot, so tightly that it was difficult for him to breathe, and as the canvas began to dry out it would get tighter and tighter and make the patient feel even worse.”77 Another treatment, which Nekipelov witnessed at the Serbsky Institute, was the “lumbar puncture,” the thrusting of a needle into the patient’s spine. Those who returned from a lumbar puncture were put on their sides, where they lay, immobile, their backs smeared with iodine, for several days.78
Many people were affected. In 1977, the year Peter Reddaway and Sidney Bloch published their extensive survey of Soviet psychiatric abuse, at least 365 sane people were known to have undergone treatment for politically defined madness, and there were surely hundreds more.79
Nevertheless, the incarceration of dissidents in hospitals did not, in the end, achieve everything that the Soviet regime had hoped it would. Most of all, it did not deflect the attention of the West. For one, the horrors of psychiatric abuse probably inflamed Western imaginations far more than had more familiar tales of camps and prisons. Anyone who had seen the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest could imagine a Soviet psychiatric hospital all too well. More