Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [328]
Eventually, the issue galvanized scientists in the Soviet Union. When Zhores Medvedev was condemned to a psychiatric hospital, many of them wrote letters of protest to the Soviet Academy of Scientists. Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear physicist who was, by the late 1960s, emerging as the moral leader of the dissident movement, made a public statement on Medvedev’s behalf at an international symposium at the Institute of Genetics. Solzhenitsyn, by now in the West, wrote an open letter to the Soviet authorities protesting Medvedev’s incarceration. “After all,” he wrote, “it is time to think clearly: the incarceration of free-thinking healthy people is SPIRITUAL MURDER.”81
The international attention probably played a part in persuading the authorities to release a number of prisoners, among them Medvedev, who was then expelled from the country. But some in the upper echelons of the Soviet elite felt this had been the wrong response. In 1976, Yuri Andropov, then the chief of the KGB, wrote a secret memo, describing fairly accurately (if you ignore the snide tone and the anti-Semitism) the international origins of the “anti-Soviet campaign”:
Recent data testify to the fact that the campaign has the character of a carefully planned anti-Soviet action . . . at the present time, the initiators of the campaign are trying to draw in international and national psychiatric organizations as well as specialists of good reputation, to create a “committee” designed to monitor the activity of psychiatrists in various countries, above all in the USSR . . . An active role in building up the anti-Soviet mood is being played by the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Great Britain, which is under the influence of Zionist elements.82
Andropov carefully described the efforts to get the World Psychiatric Association to denounce the USSR, and revealed quite extensive knowledge of which international seminars had condemned Soviet psychiatry. In response to his memo, the Soviet Ministry of Health proposed to launch a massive propaganda campaign in advance of the upcoming congress of the World Psychiatric Association. They also proposed to prepare scientific documents denying the charges, and to identify “progressive” psychiatrists in the West who would back them up. These “progressives” would, in turn, be rewarded with invitations to the USSR, where they would be taken on tours of specially designated psychiatric hospitals. They even named a few who might come. 83
Rather than retreating from the political abuse of psychiatry, in other words, Andropov proposed to brazen it out. It was not in his nature to concede that any aspect of Soviet policy might be wrong.
Chapter 27
THE 1980s: SMASHING STATUES
The statue’s sundered plinth is being smashed,
The steel of drills is sending up a howl.
The special hardest mixture of cement
Was calculated to endure millennia . . .
All handmade things in the world we live in
Can be reduced to scrap by hands of men.
But the main point is this:
Stone in its essence can
Be never either good or bad.
—Alexander Tvardovsky, “The Statue’s Sundered Plinth” 1
BY THE TIME Yuri Andropov took over as the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1982, his “crackdown” on the asocial elements in the Soviet Union was in fact well under way. Unlike some of his predecessors, Andropov had always believed that the dissidents, despite their small numbers, should be treated as a serious threat to Soviet