August 25 2000
RUSSIA
SEDATION ECHOES THE BAD OLD DAYS
From Giles Whittell in Moscow
THE sedation of a grieving mother for berating the Russian Deputy Prime Minister recalls all too clearly the abuse of psychiatry during the Soviet era for suppressing dissidents.
Dozens of "special psychiatric hospitals" run by the Interior Ministry - in other words, by the police - housed dissidents rounded up by the KGB during the 1960s and 1970s. There, tranquillisers were prescribed for "imbalanced" political views, and freedom could often be won only at the price of phoney recantations.
Nadezhda Tylik, who collapsed after being injected while demanding answers on the Kursk tragedy from Ilya Klebanov, the Deputy Prime Minister, last Friday, may not be facing a term in such an institution - they were closed in 1986 - but her treatment at the hands of a doctor does seem redolent of the KGB.
Mrs Tylik has not been seen in public since her tirade. Her sin of yelling at a government official for denying her information was little different from that of V. M. Moiseyev, a teacher, in 1966. Having attacked the Communist Party for denying him a flat, he was sent to an asylum for ten years, where he went blind.
Dissidents have had consolations. Under Brezhnev they knew that Stalin would have sent them to a labour camp. Since Brezhnev they have known that the danger of assassination has been receding.
A third of the Soviet dissidents of the 1960s and 1970s are thought to have been sent to psychiatric hospitals. About 754,000 were struck off a notorious psychiatric register in 1988, but at least 100 political prisoners were still in asylums.The next year - the year in which Vladimir Putin returned from KGB service in Germany and first considered leaving the agency - suspected KGB agents broke into a new non-governmental Soviet psychiatric association and stole all its records.
Their successors in the FSB are now accused of trying to steal television tapes of the meeting with Mr Klebanov and of demanding that those who filmed them be fired.
