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Disgusting Thing. British Sovietologist Peter Reddaway estimates that about 150 political prisoners are held in KGB-controlled mental wards in otherwise ordinary psychiatric hospitals, or in special "institutes" directly under KGB authority.
On certain issues, the Soviets are acutely sensitive to foreign protest. Dr. Snezhnevsky found it necessary to insist in an interview in Izvestia that it is "absolutely impossible for healthy people to be committed to mental hospitals in the Soviet Union." As a sign of concern about their image at home and abroad, Soviet authorities released Zhores Medvedev, at least partly in response to a flurry of protesting telegrams from foreign scientists. Thus the questions raised by Western psychiatrists may yet have some effect on what Dissident Author Andrei Amalrik, last reported in ill health in a Siberian prison camp, calls "the most disgusting thing that this regime does."