Gulag

Sometimes, the prolonged pressure succeeded. Aleksei Dobrovolsky, one of the co-defendants in the trial of Aleksandr Ginzburg, “broke” very early on, requesting in writing that he be allowed to testify on the radio and tell the whole story of his “criminal” dissident activity, the better to caution young people against following his own dangerous path. ⁵⁸ Pyotr Yakir also broke down under investigation, and “confessed” to having invented what he wrote.⁵⁹

Others died. Yuri Galanskov, another of Ginzburg’s co-defendants, died in 1972. He had developed ulcers in prison. They went untreated, and eventually killed him.⁶⁰ Marchenko also died, in 1986, probably from drugs he was given while on hunger strike.⁶¹ Several more prisoners died—one killed himself—during a monthlong hunger strike in Perm-35 in 1974.⁶² Later, Vasil Stus, a Ukrainian poet and human rights activist, died in Perm in 1985.⁶³

But prisoners also fought back. In 1977, the political prisoners of Perm-35 described their form of defiance:

We often go on hunger strike. In the punishment cells, in transport wagons. On ordinary, insignificant days, on the days of the death of our comrades. On days of unusual activities in the zona, on the 8th of March and the 10th of December, on the 1st of August and the 8th of May, on the 5th of September. We go on hunger strike too often. Diplomats, civil servants sign new agreements on human rights, on the freedom of information, on the banning of torture—and we go on hunger strike, since in the USSR these things are not observed.⁶⁴

Thanks to their efforts, knowledge of the dissident movement was growing all the time in the West—and protests were growing louder. As a result, the treatment of some prisoners took on a new form.

Although I have noted that few archival documents from the 1970s and the 1980s have appeared in public, there are, in fact, some exceptions. In 1991, Vladimir Bukovsky was invited back to Russia from Britain, where he had been living ever since he had been expelled from the country (in exchange for an imprisoned Chilean communist) fifteen years earlier. Bukovsky had been designated a “court expert” in the “trial” of the Communist Party, which took place after the Party had challenged President Yeltsin’s attempt to ban it. He arrived at the Constitutional Court building in Moscow carrying a laptop computer with a hand scanner. Confident that no one in Russia had ever seen either machine before, he sat down and calmly began copying all of the documents that had been brought as evidence. Only as he approached the end of his task did those around him suddenly realize what he was doing. Someone said aloud, “He’s going to publish them, there!” The room fell silent. At that point—“like in a film,” Bukovsky said later—he simply closed his computer, walked to the exit, went straight to the airport, and flew out of Russia.⁶⁵

Thanks to Bukovsky’s efforts, we know, among other things, what happened at the 1967 Politburo meeting which took place just before his own arrest. Bukovsky in particular was struck by how many of those present felt that bringing criminal charges against him would “cause a certain reaction inside the country and abroad.” It would be a mistake, they concluded, simply to arrest Bukovsky—so they proposed to put him in a psychiatric hospital instead.⁶⁶ The era of the psikhushka—the “special mental hospital”—had begun.

The use of psychiatric hospitals for the imprisonment of dissidents had a prehistory. Returning from Western Europe to St. Petersburg in 1836, the Russian philosopher Pyotr Chadaev wrote an essay critical of the regime of Czar Nicholas I: “Contrary to all the laws of the human community,” he declared, at the height of the Russian imperial regime, “Russia moves only in the direction of her own enslavement and the enslavement of all neighboring peoples.” In response, Nicholas had Chadaev detained in his home. The Czar was certain, he declared, that once the Russians learned that their compatriot “suffers from derangement and insanity,” they would forgive him.⁶⁷