“I noted with horror the daily progression of my degradation. I lost interest in politics, then in scientific problems, finally in my wife and children. My speech became blurred; my memory worsened. In the beginning, I reacted strongly to the sufferings of other patients. Eventually I became indifferent. My only thoughts were of toilets, tobacco and the bribes to the male nurses to let me go to the toilet one more time. Then I began to experience a new thought: ‘I must remember everything I see here, I told myself, so that lean tell about it afterwards.”
Last week Soviet Scientist Leonid I. Plyushch was finally able to tell about it. Still hesitant in speech, uncertain at times of his surroundings, the drawn, chain-smoking Ukrainian mathematician appeared at a Paris press conference to discuss both his life as a dissident in the U.S.S.R. and his three-year purgatory in Soviet prisons and mental hospitals. He had been accused of anti-Soviet activities, namely protesting the arrests and trials of other dissidents and publishing his views in samizdat (underground) publications. In what is now a classic Soviet method of punishing dissidents, Plyushch was interrogated, imprisoned and finally sent to an insane asylum administered by the KGB, the Soviet secret police. His account of his experience is perhaps the most damning indictment so far of the way that the Soviets try to stifle protest.
Plyushch, 37, who still considers himself a “neo-Marxist,” was remanded to the Dnepropetrovsk special mental hospital in July 1973 after prison doctors had diagnosed him as a schizophrenic. Once there, he recalled last week: “The horror of the psukhushka [madhouse] got to me. There were more patients than beds, and in two beds shoved together I was put in the middle place of three. Patients twisted in pain from administration of drugs. One of them had his tongue hanging out, another his eyes popping, a third walked curved in an unnatural manner.”
Mentally Sick. These more or less ordinary terrors, however, were less frightening to him than the attempts by doctors at Dnepropetrovsk to convince him that he was mentally sick. “You had to admit to the doctors that you were ill. In the beginning, I argued. Then I came to the conclusion that they were right.” Plyushch’s cause was taken up by Amnesty International, a London-based organization that seeks to dramatize the plight of political prisoners. The Communist parties of France, Italy and Britain demanded his release. Presumably, it was in response to pressure from European Communists that Soviet authorities released Plyushch from the asylum last month and let him go into exile.
The day after Plyushch’s press conference, Moscow’s Literaturnaya Gazeta printed a derisive rebuttal of his statement, which suggests that Soviet authorities knew in advance what he was about to tell. Dismissing such accounts in the West as “dirty gambling on human tragedies,” the Moscow literary journal defended the Soviet system of mental care by citing the cases of other dissidents who had been locked up in mental hospitals in the Soviet Union and were found to be truly sick when released to the West. The report was misleading: most of those cited by Literary Gazette were in good health. The few who were not, in the opinion of Western psychiatrists who had seen them, were unbalanced because of Soviet treatment.
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