Christians Interned In Soviet Psych Hospital (12/31/77)

Christians Interned In Soviet Psych Hospital

KESTON, England - There has been no change in the punitive use of psychiatry in the Soviet Union since the Congress of the World Psychiatric Association in Honolulu last September condemned the use of psychiatry for political purposes, according to the Soviet Working Group on the Investigation of the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes. They state that there have been at least five new cases since September.

An Orthodox priest in Leningrad, Father Lev Konin, has been threatened with confinement in a mental hospital. The group also reported that Yosyf Terelya, a Ukrainian Catholic was transferred from a mental hospital near his home to the special psychiatric hospital in Dnipropetrovske.

Information reaching Keston College from the Swiss research centre, Glaube in der 2. Welt, indicates continued pressure of this kind against Christians.

The son of Fr. Dmitri Dudko, aged 16, was sent for a psychiatric investigation by a military medical commission because he was wearing a baptismal cross. Although young men are called up for military service only from the age of 18, the military medical examination can take place from the age of 16.

Another incident concerned an Orthodox couple, Alexander Semionov and his wife, from Friazino near Moscow, who were transferred from an ordinary hospital, where they had been treated as out-patients, to a psychiatric hospital when the medical staff noticed that they wore baptismal crosses. Pilgrims to the renowned monastery at Pochayiv in western Ukraine are frequently taken to local psychiatric institutions.

Glaube in der 2. Welt also reports that two psychiatrists recently called at the home of Georgi Fedotov, a member of a group of young people studying religious philosophy, who has already been treated in a psychiatric hospital in connection with his participation in the group. The report goes on to say that an Orthodox monk, Mikhail Gershov, was recently transferred to the psychiatric hospital in Kazan shortly before he was due to be released from the labor camp. Gershov had served altogether 40 years in Soviet prisons and labor camps for his work as an underground priest - he refused to recognize the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church which declared its loyalty to the Soviet regime in 1927. It is believed that he had been a secretly consecrated bishop. According to latest reports, he has died, but the circumstances are not known.

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