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Thus in a single week Soviet authorities had managed to dispose of three more notable dissidents. Of 38 founding members of the Helsinki Watch Committees, 17 are now in prison, while seven have emigrated or been exiled. Yet another trial is expected soon. The defendant will be Alexander Podrabinek, 24, who has devoted himself exclusively to one aspect of the human rights movement: the plight of dissenters who have been imprisoned in KGB-run mental institutions where beatings and the injection of painful and dangerous drugs are commonplace.
The author of an underground book on psychiatric abuse called Punitive Medicine, Podrabinek was arrested last May on a charge of "distributing false fabrications defaming the Soviet state and social structure." Last week a Podrabinek defense committee met in London to hold a "defense hearing" with ten witnesses who will not be allowed to testify at his trial.
They included two British psychiatrists and Vladimir Bukovsky, the Russian dissident whom the Soviets exchanged in 1976 for Chilean Communist Party Chief Luis Corvalan.
Last week the trial of a non-dissident was timed by the Soviet authorities to coincide with the court cases against Shcharansky and the other human rights activists. The defendant was an office worker named Anatoli Filatov, who was charged with high treason. Tried by a military court, he was sentenced to death by firing squad. An official statement about the trial attempted to connect Filatov, who may have been a real spy, with the dissidents. It said, "The intelligence services of the imperialist states are persistently trying to use some members of Soviet society for intelligence and other subversive aims."
Who are the dissidents? In the mid-1960s, groups of intellectuals banded together to protest the large-scale arrests of nationalists in the Ukraine and the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel. They were mostly writers, scientists, teachers and scholars. At first they began calling merely for greater intellectual and artistic freedom; later, such figures as Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn began asking for fundamental changes in Soviet society.
Samizdat, or underground literature, began to flourish, enriched by such banned works as Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle. But even at the height of the movement, active dissenters have never numbered more than a few thousand people. Still, the influence of their ideas is incalculable in a country where muted discontent over material and intellectual deprivation is widespread.