Gulag

Recent data testify to the fact that the campaign has the character of a carefully planned anti-Soviet action . . . at the present time, the initiators of the campaign are trying to draw in international and national psychiatric organizations as well as specialists of good reputation, to create a “committee” designed to monitor the activity of psychiatrists in various countries, above all in the USSR . . . An active role in building up the anti-Soviet mood is being played by the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Great Britain, which is under the influence of Zionist elements.⁸²

Andropov carefully described the efforts to get the World Psychiatric Association to denounce the USSR, and revealed quite extensive knowledge of which international seminars had condemned Soviet psychiatry. In response to his memo, the Soviet Ministry of Health proposed to launch a massive propaganda campaign in advance of the upcoming congress of the World Psychiatric Association. They also proposed to prepare scientific documents denying the charges, and to identify “progressive” psychiatrists in the West who would back them up. These “progressives” would, in turn, be rewarded with invitations to the USSR, where they would be taken on tours of specially designated psychiatric hospitals. They even named a few who might come. ⁸³

Rather than retreating from the political abuse of psychiatry, in other words, Andropov proposed to brazen it out. It was not in his nature to concede that any aspect of Soviet policy might be wrong.

Chapter 27

THE 1980s: SMASHING STATUES

The statue’s sundered plinth is being smashed,

The steel of drills is sending up a howl.

The special hardest mixture of cement

Was calculated to endure millennia . . .

All handmade things in the world we live in

Can be reduced to scrap by hands of men.

But the main point is this:

Stone in its essence can

Be never either good or bad.

—Alexander Tvardovsky, “The Statue’s Sundered Plinth” ¹

BY THE TIME Yuri Andropov took over as the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1982, his “crackdown” on the asocial elements in the Soviet Union was in fact well under way. Unlike some of his predecessors, Andropov had always believed that the dissidents, despite their small numbers, should be treated as a serious threat to Soviet power. Having been Soviet Ambassador to Budapest in 1956, he had seen how quickly an intellectual movement could turn into a popular revolution. He also believed that all of the Soviet Union’s many problems— political, economic, social—could be solved through the application of greater discipline: stricter camps and prisons, heavier surveillance, and more harassment. ²

These were the methods Andropov had advocated while head of the KGB, from 1979 on, and these were the methods he continued to pursue during his short reign as the Soviet Union’s leader. Thanks to Andropov, the first half of the 1980s are remembered as the most repressive era in post-Stalinist Soviet history. It was as if the pressure within the system had to reach a boiling point, just before the system itself broke down altogether.

Certainly, from the late 1970s, Andropov’s KGB had made large numbers of arrests and re-arrests: under his direction, recalcitrant activists often received new sentences right at the end of their old ones, as had happened in Stalin’s time. Membership of one of the Helsinki monitoring groups—dissident organizations which tried to monitor the Soviet Union’s observation of the Helsinki Treaty—became a surefire route to prison. Twenty-three members of the Moscow group were arrested between 1977 and 1979, and seven were expelled abroad. Yuri Orlov, leader of the Moscow Helsinki group, remained in prison throughout the first half of the 1980s.³