Pliushch, In London, Speaks Of Horrors In Soviet "Psych-Prisons" (12/26/76)

Pliushch, In London, Speaks Of Horrors In Soviet "Psych-Prisons"

LONDON, England. - It is almost a year since Leonid Pliushch, the Soviet mathematician and cyberneticist, was released from his psychiatric prison hospital in Ukraine and exiled to the West, wrote Caroline Moorehead in the London Times of November 27th.

He arrived weak and broken by two and a half years of large forced doses of insulin and haloperidol, prescribed to cure the "dangerous nature of his anti-Soviet activities" - his support of human rights inside the Soviet Union.

Today Leonid Pliushch has recovered his strength. He looks frail and frowning, but says he now retains only "the memories and nightmares of my detention".

He was in London for a meeting organized by Amnesty International and other British civil rights organizations at the Central Hall, Westminster, on behalf of all victims of politico-psychiatric repression".

Mr. Pliushch is very much an exception. He believes that his release was due almost entirely to the direct intervention of the French Communist Party, rather than to any softening of the official line.

Detention in special prison hospitals and mental asylums has if anything increased since his departure. Calculating by what he calls his own "psycho-prison", where 70 of the 1,000 patients were political prisoners, he estimates that there may be as many as 600 people held at this moment for dissident views in the extreme isolation and brutality of severe psychiatric wards.

There are many hundreds more "about whom one knows nothing, workers, and activists, whose only crime has been that of earning the disapproval of a policeman or the manager of a collective farm", who are in ordinary mental asylums. There, the food is better, the isolation less total.

"Danger comes from the insane, the aggressive, unsupervised patients."

It is not only that detention is becoming a standard form of repression for dissidents, but that "hooliganism and random brutality is increasing, people beaten up and intimidated, their windows stoned, for no more than belonging to a democratic rights movement, or to an orthodox church group."

Leonid Pliushch produces names and cases to illustrate his point: Petro Starchyk inside psychiatric prison for "singing songs based on Mandelstaum's poems"; Ida Nudel, active in the Jewish emigration movement, certified chronically alcoholic (she doesn't drink) and sent to a drying out center. There are dozens more.

Is there anything the West can do? "Nothing systematic", says Mr. Pliushch, "because there is no consistent government policy. Pressure from worker organizations, trade unions, committees of prominent mathematicians and psychiatrists, the press - it all helps. But that just saves individuals.

"As I see it, repression is increasing because the West reacts so weakly to what is going on. If it didn't allow the Soviet Union to get away with hypocritical answers, acted in fact in a principled and not a diplomatic manner, it would be significant. Take the case of detente. That's only really possible with the democratization of the Soviet Union. Governments could insist on the Soviet Union honoring the obligations of the international treaties they have ratified."

The West could do worse, he adds, than to form a committee, containing all shades of political opinion, as well as psychiatrists and jurists, "mindful of hoodwinking and falsehoods" to ask Brezhnev if they could visit the special hospitals.

This might at least convince the sceptics who say that Stalinism is now an anachronism.

"Particularly among the left in Britain there seems to be more illusions than elsewhere about the Soviet Union - a belief that by criticizing it you are undermining all socialism. In my opinion the reverse is true." (The British Communist Party have declined to take part in the meeting; they sent an observer.)

As important as the detentions, he believes, but totally neglected by the West, is the question of the national groups - in Ukraine, the Baltic States and the Crimea - fighting to preserve their culture and their language against increasing repression and "Russification".

"This is one of the key problems today", says Mr. Pliushch. "It is both very dangerous and closely connected to outward imperialist expansion. The Soviet authorities had no trouble invading Czecho-Slovakia in 1968 because they were able to play on the nationalist suspicions of the soldiers. Anti-semitism in the Soviet Union today is beginning to look very like the Nazi variant of it."

Leonid Pliushch has chosen to settle in Paris with his wife and two teenage sons. He has resumed work on his study of the psychology of children's games and a "structural psycho-analysis of culture".

"I don't want", he says, "to make political activism my profession. But I shall continue to fight for human and national rights not only in the Soviet Union, but everywhere, because the very existence of a dictatorship in Chile helps that of one in the Soviet Union."

He talks of freedom, and how it is something that is impossible to appreciate, unless you have been without it.

He insists that he is now, as he always has been, a neo-Marxist.

"I don't see that any very great contribution to Marxism has been made since Lenin and Gramsci...The way ahead lies with the critique of classical Marxism, and the development of those aspects of it which were not sufficiently developed by Marx - its superstructure, the philosophy, the question of nation, culture, ethics and aesthetics."

Leonid Pliushch's actual release was thought to have been finally triggered off by a meeting of mathematicians, the French left and trade unionists sponsored by Amnesty just over a year ago in Paris.

The hope was that the meeting at Central Hall would do the same for Bukovsky and Gluzman authors of a Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents, now imprisoned, and in some danger to their health, in the Soviet Union.

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