The World: Psychoadaptation, or How to Handle Dissenters

OFFICIAL methods of dealing with dissident intellectuals in the Soviet Union have always been harsh and arbitrary. They are no longer, as in Stalin's day, summarily shot. Now, with the authorities anxious to preserve legal forms, an increasingly common punishment for dissenters is confinement to mental hospitals that are often jails in disguise. Technically, Soviet courts cannot sentence a man to prison or labor camp unless he has violated the criminal code. Health officers, however, can commit anyone to "emergency psychiatric hospitalization" if his behavior is simply deemed abnormal. "Why bother with political trials," a leading Soviet forensic psychiatrist reportedly has said, "when we have psychiatric clinics?"

One Soviet citizen who has suffered such treatment is the prominent geneticist and gerontologist Zhores Medvedev, 46, a leading spokesman for the "loyal opposition" within the Russian intelligentsia. Last year he was forced to spend 19 days in a madhouse for a condition diagnosed as "split personality, expressed in the need to combine the scientific work in his field with publicist activities; an overestimation of his own personality; a deterioration in recent years of the quality of his scientific work; an exaggerated attention to detail in his publicist writing; lack of a sense of reality; poor adaptation to the social environment."

Medvedev irritated Soviet authorities when two of his works reached the West. In 1969 the Columbia University Press printed The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, a devastating history of how the crackpot genetic theories of Stalin's pet scientist were established as unassailable dogma until the fall of Khrushchev in 1964.

After that book was published, Medvedev was fired from his job as head of the Obninsk radiological institute, 35 miles southwest of Moscow. Unable to find another job, he set about writing a calm, straightforward survey of the restrictions, censorship, and surveillance that oppress many Soviet intellectuals. This work too found its way to the West via samizdat (literally "self-publishing"), the literary underground. It was his authorship of that book, published in the U.S. this week by St. Martin's Press as The Medvedev Papers, which led directly to Medvedev's forced hospitalization last year.

Medvedev was released only after his twin brother, Roy, an eminent historian, mobilized a protest by a group of internationally renowned writers and scientists, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Physicists Andrei Sakharov and Pyotr Kapitsa, and Mstislav Keldysh, president of the Academy of Sciences. Last summer, in an attempt to hush up the embarrassing affair, the KGB (Soviet secret police) promised the Medvedevs that they would "close the case" and asked for assurances that the brothers would not write about what had happened. Roy Medvedev agreed, on the condition that there be no more "psychiatric blackmail."