On Dissidents and Madness: From The Soviet Union of Leonid Brezhnev to the ''Soviet Union'' of Vladimir Putin

On Dissidents and Madness From The Soviet Union of Leonid Brezhnev to the “Soviet Union” of Vladimir Putin

On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Identity, Freedom, and Moral Imagination in the Baltics 17

Editor Leonidas Donskis, Professor and Dean of Vytautas Magnus University School of Political Science and Diplomacy, Kaunas, Lithuania Editorial and Advisory Board Timo Airaksinen, University of Helsinki, Finland Egidijus Aleksandravicius, Lithuanian Emigration Institute, Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania Stefano Bianchini, University of Bologna, Forlì Campus, Italy Endre Bojtar, Institute of Literary Studies, Budapest, Hungary Kristian Gerner, University of Lund, Sweden John Hiden, University of Glasgow, UK Mikko Lagerspetz, Åbo Academy, Finland Andreas Lawaty, Nordost-Institute, Lüneburg, Germany Olli Loukola, University of Helsinki, Finland Hannu Niemi, University of Helsinki, Finland Alvydas Nikzentaitis, Lithuanian History Institute, Lithuania Yves Plasseraud, Paris, France Rein Raud, Rector of Tallinn University, Estonia Alfred Erich Senn, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, and Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania David Smith, University of Glasgow, UK Saulius Suziedelis, Millersville University, USA Joachim Tauber, Nordost-Institut, Lüneburg, Germany Tomas Venclova, Yale University, USA

On Dissidents and Madness From The Soviet Union of Leonid Brezhnev to the “Soviet Union” of Vladimir Putin

Robert van Voren Foreword by Leonidas Donskis

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

This book is an extended version of the Dutch edition Levenslang; tussen dissidenten en waanzin, which was published by Gottmer Uitgeverij, Haarlem, in April 2009. The original version was extended, translated by the author and edited by Ellen Mercer, for which the author is immensely grateful. The photos in the book are either from the author’s private collection, or from the photo-archive of the Second World Center/Bukovsky Foundation, of which the author was director in 1988–1994 and which is now property of Global Initiative on Psychiatry.

Cover photo: Harrie Timmermans The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2584-4 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Printed in the Netherlands

For the kids

Contents Foreword By Leonidas Donskis

xi

Introduction

1

Chapter 1 – The Soviet Union on my mind

5 6

•

Run-up

Chapter 2 – The Soviet Union in 1980 • •

Control on outside influences Internal control

Chapter 3 – The world of couriers • • • • • •

Split life Smuggled goods Big Brother is watching you End of anonymity Never alone again The turn around

11 12 13 17 20 22 26 29 34 36

Chapter 4 – Campaigning for dissidents • • •

41 Bukovsky Foundation 42 The struggle against the political abuse of psychiatry intensifies 44 Moscow as the center of my world 49

Chapter 5 – Demonstrating in Poland • •

Bigos Drive on to Berlin

Chapter 6 – Playing “musical chairs” with the WPA •

World Congress in Vienna

Chapter 7 – The Soviet Union in 1985 •

A new wind blowing?

55 55 57 61 63 69 70

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viii

Chapter 8 – Sleeping behind my desk • •

Only the Soviet Union The disappointment

Chapter 9 – Intermission, and back to work • • •

In search of my name The Soviet Union calls There they are!

Chapter 10 – The gorillas of Sakharov • •

Old friends and acquaintances Looking for traces of the terror

Chapter 11 – The mouse and the elephant • • •

The philosophical approach of Gluzman On our way to Athens Traveling with Koryagin

Chapter 12 – Playing chess in Athens • •

The confrontation Negotiations with Moscow and the climax

Chapter 13 – The Soviet Union in 1990 •

The Soviet Union on sale

Chapter 14 – The doors are opened • • • •

Ukraine as alternative A new wind and much of the same From trucks to Fokkers From Fokkers to Ilyushins

Chapter 15 – Ukraine on the map • • • •

The first projects Where is Ukraine? From SBU to BVD End to my “diplomatic status”

73 78 86 91 91 95 98 101 104 107 111 112 116 119 123 127 130 135 136 139 141 145 147 150 157 159 161 163 165

Robert van Voren

Chapter 16 – The Romanian marsh • • •

Convoys with humanitarian aid Our chairman returns Toy

Chapter 17 – Change of course in Bratislava • •

Stroganoff with peas A pessimist becomes an optimist

Chapter 18 – From black and white to shades of grey • • •

Black and white Sliding panels Shades of grey

Chapter 19 – From humanitarian aid to structural aid • • • •

On the road with a photo of Gluzman We are going to print Murder by blinys Seminar in a swimming pool

Chapter 20 – Romance with the WPA •

Putting Eastern Europe on the map

Chapter 21 – New style abuse • • • •

The woman with the golden hands Counterfeit dollars Electroshocks as farewell present Diagnosis for sale

Chapter 22 – A successful failure • •

The Big Three From theory to practice

ix 167 168 169 174 177 181 183 187 190 192 198 201 203 206 208 210 217 219 223 224 226 227 230 231 232 235

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Chapter 23 – Renewed struggle with the WPA • • • •

Falun Gong Old roles Blue lights of Yokohama A compromise seems possible

Chapter 24 – Into prison • • • •

The doors are opened The new Russia Temporary success Soviet times return

Chapter 25 – Becoming Lithuanian

239 241 244 248 250 255 256 258 260 261

First encounters with Lithuania Vilnius becomes home Changing perceptions New relationship

265 266 268 270 273

Chapter 26 – Reforming against the wind

275

Chapter 27 – Looking back

281

Epilogue

285

Historical Data

289

Index of Names

293

• • • •

Foreword When Nikita S. Khrushchev denounced, in his 1956 speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, the “crimes of the Stalin era” and condemned Stalinism as a sinister form of the cult of personality, many young idealists were shocked. Some of them still believed in the possibility of socialism with a human face – a great, though unfulfilled and, therefore, false, promise of Khrushchev’s politics of thaw. As Aleksandras Shtromas (1931–1999), a Lithuanian émigré political scientist and a Soviet dissident who foresaw the collapse of the Soviet Union, convincingly argued in his deeply unconventional and challenging theory of patriotism and nationalism, ardent patriots of Russia were able to close one eye on the Soviet Union’s criminal policies for expanding Russia’s territory and advancing its interests. Moreover, they justified Stalin’s crimes precisely for the same reason. Imperial patriots had gone so far as to condemn as traitors all those dissidents or former KGB officers who sided with the Soviet Union’s ideological enemies, that is, the United States, Great Britain, and NATO. Yet things were absolutely different with nationalists who, according to Shtromas, drew a sharp dividing line between Russia and the Soviet Union. Not only profoundly liberal and democratic dissidents like the noble-spirited Andrei Sakharov or the fearless humanist Sergei Kovalyov, but also fiercely conservative-nationalistic Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explicitly regarded the Soviet Union as a criminal state, and the Soviet regime as a crime against Russia and humanity. The dramatic encounter of liberal (or at least moderate) nationalism and imperial patriotism can be properly understood only by those who are able to empathize with people confined to the choice between the Soviet Union as their state and the West constantly demonized by the Soviet propaganda as the embodiment of evil. When you are bound to choose between a rogue state, which claims the exclusive rights of serving or at least presenting itself as your only legitimate motherland, and the imagined enemy of your state and people, which defends the right cause and protects human rights, it is no longer a theoretical and hypothetical choice. Instead, it is an existential move that leads you to cross the point of no return. Can you cooperate with what your state and its powerful propaganda machine regards as the foe of the people? And who is your ally then?

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Foreword

Robert van Voren’s timely and important book sheds new light on old grounds. This book is an account of his friendship with Soviet dissidents, their dedication to the cause, political fight, and resistance to the brutal regime. At the same time, this book revives the idea of Europe as home for those who never confine themselves to national causes and who regard the struggle for human rights, dignity and liberty as a common cause and a joint dedication of all conscious Europeans. Van Voren’s biography reads like an exciting novel. A Canadianborn Dutch and Lithuanian political analyst, a human rights activist, a maverick in the West yet an active member of Soviet dissent, an insider and outsider at one and that same time, a strong opponent of politicized and soulless psychiatry, a Sovietologist and non-fiction writer, Van Voren founded the Global Initiative in Psychiatry (formerly, the Geneva Initiative in Psychiatry), a global network of dissenters, human rights activists, and human rights monitoring groups with its numerous branches in several post-Soviet and post-Communist countries. An outsider in the former Soviet Union, he proved able to become an insider in dissenting circles joining the fearless Soviet dissidents. Van Voren easily reconciles, in his political thought and action, some characteristically Eastern and Western European sensibilities. In the political science world usually dominated by the Left, quite a few political analysts of Eastern or Central European background, due to their uncompromising attitude both to Communism and the criminal past of Soviet totalitarianism were, and continue to be, labeled as “right-wing hawks.” This is not the case with Van Voren who has always been far from this sort of self-inflicted blindness, naiveté, and unpardonable moral provincialism of a significant part of Western academe vis-à-vis the tragedy of Eastern and Central Europe. Yet his deep empathizing with Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, or Lithuania, does not prevent him from assessing in harsh terms the political myopia, moral provincialism, and self-righteousness of the political and media elites of these countries. For instance, Van Voren mercilessly exposes Russia under Vladimir Putin as slipping away from the fragile beginnings of democracy and sliding into the new form of tyranny and dictatorship – mockingly called “managed democracy” or, in Putin’s own parlance, “sovereign democracy,” which is in many ways reminiscent of the “democratic centralism” of the former Soviet Union. Providing this rather grim, pessimistic, not to say orwellesque, picture of Russia run by the criminal cabal explains the subtitle of the book: From the Soviet Union of Leonid Brezhnev to the Soviet Union of Vladimir Putin.

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An Eastern European by free choice and vocation, Robert van Voren has nothing to do with a naïve, exaggerated, and sentimental representation of the Baltic States or their defense at any cost. On the contrary, he offers quite bitter remarks about present Lithuania with its growing prejudice, intolerance, anti-Semitism, and moral and political provincialism. Much to his credit, Van Voren is at his very best applying a Western European perspective on Eastern European countries permeated with his deep responsiveness to, and love for, these countries whose insider and inescapable part he became over the years. Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, and Lithuania through the eyes of a liberal-minded cosmopolitan, a North American and European whose genuine home is modernity and liberal values, rather than a concrete inhabited locality – this is a welcome and timely addition to the political and moral saga of Eastern Europe. In a way, Robert van Voren enables a profound change in European travelogue and its narrative structure: Instead of a naïve and barbarian Eastern European or Canadian Indian (like in Voltaire’s Ingenu) or Persian or Tahitian, we have a Western European who examines the worth of human exchanges, life, and politics in the East, instead of describing it as terra ubi leones. Leonidas Donskis

Introduction It is the spring of 2008, when the associates of the various offices of Global Initiative on Psychiatry gather in the mountains of Georgia, deep into the Caucasus. It is a multi-national and diverse group, consisting mainly of Bulgarians, Georgians, Lithuanians and Dutch, as well as a few other nationalities. The meeting place is on the Military Highway that wanders high up through the mountainous region and leads to Russia. The country has had a tense relationship with its big neighbor for some time and, to make things worse, national parliamentary elections were held at the same time as our meeting. Everybody is on the edge, because the outcome is unclear and the results for the country are uncertain. In the meantime, tension has continued to increase in the separatist border regions of Abkhazia and South-Ossetia. Russia has taken the road of extreme power politics as it supports the drive for independence of the Abkhazians and South-Ossetians and constantly demonstrates to the Georgians that it again claims the status of a super power. In turn, the proud Georgians cannot refrain from showing the Russians that the Soviet Union is a matter of the past and that further influence of the Russians on the domestic politics is not desirable. Both sides use the language of war, and the situation can explode any moment. The meeting takes place in a mountain hotel that is considered to be one of the main winter ski resorts in the country. Long past its glory days, the hotel has been for sale for a considerable period of time, but because of the conflicting interests of various groups it has not yet passed into the hands of private investors. In front of the entrance is a statue of the founder of the hotel, a Georgian businessman who is said to have ended his life violently in an elevator, undoubtedly as the result of a business conflict that got out of hand. The environment is magnificent, the tops of the high mountains covered in snow and the blue sky combine to make the postcard image complete. The ski resort is in many ways still under construction and, like many other Eastern European attractions, the building site has gradually turned into an endless mess with random vehicles and building tools left behind, along with partially completed construction. On one hand, it is an ugly scar on the mountainside; on the other hand, the easy-going and hospitable attitude of the Georgians compensates for the somewhat shoddy scenery. This once-brilliant vacation spot is an example of the condition of the country today; there are many things happening, including some positive things, but here and there it lacks direction and coordination.

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On Dissidents and Madness

The reason for the retreat is the heavy weight in which the organization has carried over the past few years. Eastern Europe is no longer fashionable, and mental health has never been in fashion. For an organization like Global Initiative on Psychiatry, which until several years ago completely focused on building mental health care services in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, this is a disastrous combination. In particular, the accession of ten countries from Central and Eastern Europe to the European Union causes a dilemma. Many donors think that the work has finished in these countries and that they have been transformed to civil societies. They withdraw, or move their area of interest to Africa or other continents. The result is that the available funding sources dwindle rapidly causing the work of our foundation to be under imminent threat. During the coming days the participants need to work on a new strategy and a new vision for the future. The drive needs to return; the associates are exhausted and sometimes lose the sense of direction. The very high stress levels result in people becoming irritated and burnout is around the corner. In three days we needed to bring about a fundamental change. That target is reached, but quite differently than initially planned. The discussions are difficult, and increasingly emotional. The organization is transferring part of its work to new continents and, as a result, attention for the original region of work is under pressure. In a way, we have to work twice as hard with the same level of staff and without guarantees for the result. At the same time, frustration about the developments in Eastern Europe becomes more vocal. In many of the countries, in particular those that belonged to the first wave of accessing countries of the European Union, the situation has stagnated both politically and socially. The big prize has been won; the countries are members of the EU. The changes are no longer necessary, and, in many instances, the old guard continues in their positions and regains more and more of its power, both politically and economically. Young people are leaving the countries of this region and moving to Western Europe or North America, searching for a better future. It is these young people who should be the ones to bring the necessary changes in their own countries but this old story continues to evolve. Many of the EU subsidies wind up at the wrong spots or are being used to maintain or strengthen old structures. It is as if all the successes of the past ten to fifteen years are being nullified. The associates have put their hearts and souls into the reforms in their own countries, and now see their work dissipate. This is a very painful experience for them; it is as if they are putting their ideals for the future to the grave.

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3

Slowly the understanding emerges that a period of work has come to an end, that an irreversible process has taken place. For some of us this is the second time such a major change has been needed. The first time was at the beginning of the nineties, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the dissident movement came to an end. Many dissidents, and also some of their Western supporters, found themselves in a crisis. The movement was a safe and known environment, in spite of the constant threat of the KGB. Danger from outside unites people; a unity is formed like a spider web of invisible connections. In spite of disagreements and differences, each person knew what could be expected from the other. It was a resistance movement with all of the consequences and danger. Betrayal or recanting was punished immediately with exclusion, but for the others it was a social environment that formed the center of life. When countries and interests changed things changed, sometimes in an opposing manner, it was difficult for many to digest. Some became alcoholics while others emigrated and disappeared into thin air. A number of them went into business, others into politics, but the movement as such ended and for a long time nostalgic stories dominated the conversations at the kitchen table. In the mountains of Georgia, we talked about the most recent movement coming to an end. This was a different type of dissident movement, consisting of hundreds of reformers in mental health care from about thirty countries, who, together, formed a kind of safety net for each other. They differed in vision and sometimes had completely different goals in mind, but in one way or the other, they formed a new social network and struggled for innovation, often against fierce resistance by the old guard of psychiatrists and policy makers. They met regularly at seminars, conferences and meetings of the network that we and others organized. Some contacts had grown into close friendships that had lasted for more than a decade; then, as with the dissident movement, there were external factors that ended the unity. Some countries joined the European Union and took their own course; the differences between those who accessed the EU and those who didn’t increased and eventually the distance turned out to be unbridgeable. The number of meetings decreased as donors were looking for direct and concrete results and no longer financed conferences. In addition, many were no longer interested in the region and turned their attention to other parts of the world. At the end of 2006, a period of more than thirteen years had come to an end but only now, a year and a half later, the participants in the mountains of Georgia realized it to its full extent.

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On Dissidents and Madness

This realization was painful but, at the same time, it became obvious that the collective depression had to be overcome in order to find the way for a new stage of the work to begin – a next phase that would empower us all. Gradually, the idea of new possibilities and new chances gave the group renewed energy. Thus, a meeting that had started with a feeling of discouragement and powerlessness ended with a remarkable dose of new energy and eagerness to fight on. This book is about the first two periods, written from the point of view of a participating observer (or perhaps more accurate to say an observing participant), a period in which I internalized the fate of the dissidents in the Soviet Union to such an extent that they dominated my life completely and their fate eventually also determined the course of the rest of my life. It was a period in which I not only developed a love-hate relationship with the region, but also became part of it myself. This was a period that began with the Soviet Union of Leonid Brezhnev and ended with the Soviet Union of Vladimir Putin.

Chapter 1

The Soviet Union on my mind It was the phone call from Moscow that changed everything. The man on the other side was no more than an acquaintance; I had spoken to him only a couple of times. He was a member of a dissident group in Moscow that collected information on the internment of dissenters in psychiatric hospitals, the Moscow “Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes.” I called him in order to find out more about the fate of his friend and fellow Commission member Aleksandr Podrabinek, who had been arrested a year and a half before and had been sentenced to three years of camp for “slandering the Soviet State.” Podrabinek was serving his sentence in a camp in Siberia and no news of about him had reached the West for quite some time. In order to obtain his release, relatives in the United States had set up a “Podrabinek Fund,” of which I led the European section. The conversation took a different turn, however. The man on the other side of the line, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, told me that the pressure by the KGB was increasing constantly, that more and more dissidents were being arrested and that the Soviet authorities clearly had the intention of liquidating the dissident movement. “I would come soon if I were you,” he said, “otherwise, it would no longer make any sense. Later, we will all be gone.”

Photo of the first arrest of Aleksandr Podrabinek

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On Dissidents and Madness

A few weeks later I booked my first trip. It was February 7, 1980. On the same day, Vyacheslav Bakhmin was arrested. He would spend more than four years in prisons and camps and returned to Moscow only in early 1985. As with so many other former political prisoners, he could not get permission to stay with his family in Moscow so he moved to a small city north of the capital. We met every now and then at a small station in Klin, located between his new hometown of Kalinin – now Tver – and Moscow.

(l.) Statement in case of arrest of Vyacheslav Bakhmin, smuggled out on photo; (r.): Vyacheslav Bakhmin, 1979 Run-up Indeed the telephone conversation with Vyacheslav Bakhmin complicated my plans for the future. My plan was to first finish my studies and subsequently be sent to Moscow as a correspondent in order to function as a kind of postillon d’amour for the dissident movement. At least, that was the plan of dissident and former political prisoner Vladimir Bukovsky, whom I had met for the first time a year before and who had become a sort of godfather to me. Looking back, it is interesting to realize how one decision, one step, can alter the course of one’s life, especially when the decision is made more or less unconsciously during one’s adolescence. I was fourteen or

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7

fifteen years of age when my father convinced me to read the books of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He devoured one after the other, and as I read all the books on the Second World War as soon as he had finished them, it seemed no more than logical that the same would happen with the books about the Soviet Union. It started with the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. First I read “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” followed by “The First Circle,” and finally the three volumes of “The Gulag Archipelago.” I was stupefied. The books about the war had been quite impressive, but this was quite something else. One sector of the population after the other was deported to Siberia and subsequently slaughtered. During one night, for instance, all Esperantists were arrested in Leningrad, and the next night it was the turn to another group. Hundreds of thousands, even millions of people disappeared in the camps and many never returned. It was a systematic eradication of layers of society, step by step ridding the country of its intelligentsia and bourgeoisie. Solzhenitsyn described all this in detail, in a dry yet dramatic style that was so typical for him, a style that later irritated me but at that time made a huge impression. I wanted to know more, and to read more, including the work of other authors. But one way or the other, I got stuck in the past and the link with the present remained absent. By way of Amnesty International, I finally managed to get hold of a number of copies of the “Chronicle of Current Events,” an underground publication by the dissident movement in Moscow. I learned that the camps were still there, fewer than in the past and with different names, but, still, they were there. In principle the system seemed to be unaltered. In those days, the Moscow dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky, was well known in The Netherlands. He had been exchanged for the Chilean communist leader Luis Corvalan at the Zürich airport; and after a short period in Holland, he had taken up refuge in Britain. His original intention was to study in Leyden, but he refused to learn Dutch. As a result, he first moved to London, and later to Cambridge where he commenced his studies in biology. I decided to write a letter to Bukovsky in order to find out what had happened since the Gulag Archipelago, and what had happened to the camps that played such a central role in the books of Solzhenitsyn: Sukhanovka, Vorkuta, Kolyma… It was a letter with 44 questions, looking back, an impossible letter for somebody who received so much mail. In fact, he had printed standard response cards in order to send a polite but apologetic answer to all. But Bukovsky answered my letter personally and

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in detail, and received the next list of questions by returned mail. Within several months, we had a lively correspondence and, at the beginning of 1978, he invited me to visit him in London. At the age of 18, it was my first plane trip, and my first trip alone, and I was scared to death. Upon arrival in London, I almost immediately accompanied him to a large demonstration on Trafalgar Square to commemorate the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia ten years earlier. The square was full of people, at least 50,000 of them. Bukovsky had been invited as the main speaker. We were pushed to the front by the crowd and before we knew it, we were standing on stage under the statue of Horatio Nelson, me as an insignificant Rotterdam schoolboy next to a man on the front pages of newspapers and who counted Winston Churchill and the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, amongst his friends. It was a breathtaking experience.

Robert van Voren and Vladimir Bukovsky, 1978. Bukovsky and I spent the majority of my time in London in a Greek restaurant, around the corner from his apartment. This was an atmosphere much to his liking - where plates were thrown against the wall to heighten the party fervor. This was an old Greek custom, I was told, which had been banned in Greece by the colonel regime, but was clearly maintained and honored by the owner of this establishment. Bukovsky’s book “To Build a Castle” was at that time an international bestseller and

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royalties were pouring in. He bought a house for his mother in Switzerland and was looking for a home for himself in Britain; in the meantime, part of the money was gradually flowing into the pockets of the owner of the restaurant. At night, after closing time, a select few were invited to the cellar for a continuation of the party. An enthusiastic Bukovsky ordered one starter after the other in order to be able to have a plate to throw with great enthusiasm at a wall. After twelve years of camp, psychiatric hospital and prison, the nights in the Greek restaurant were clearly an attempt to make good for the lost years. Every plate was, in a way, one more frustration that burst into small pieces against the wall of the restaurant. In London, Bukovsky helped me establish contact with a tall lean gentleman, Peter Reddaway, a typical Brit from a diplomat family. His uncle had been an Ambassador, I believe, and also other family members had been in diplomatic service, but Peter Reddaway was professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science and taught Sovietology. In addition, Reddaway was one of the main Western supporters of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, which was the reason Bukovsky introduced us. In retrospect, it seems that Bukovsky already had a plan in his head to put me to good use in one way or another. The plan that developed without my active participation was quite simple: I would study (I just finished high school and was planning to take up history studies at Amsterdam University), followed by a move to Moscow as a correspondent. With all his contacts and influence, Bukovsky could arrange this quite easily. In the meantime, in the West, I could concentrate on journalism and start writing articles about the human rights situation in the Soviet Union. I had to choose a pseudonym, Peter Reddaway recommended, because, otherwise, in time I would not be able to get a visa for the Soviet Union. My pseudonym became that of my uncle, Robert van Voren, the one that he had used as a pseudonym during the war years of 1942-1943 in Rotterdam and under which name he had been arrested. He had spent the rest of the war in a long series of camps and had died shortly after his liberation. In such a way, Simon Luitse came back to life. Bakhmin’s warning by telephone that the Soviet authorities were planning to liquidate the whole of the dissident movement changed these plans altogether. I decided not to wait any longer and booked my first trip. In March 1980 I traveled with a tourist group to Leningrad and Moscow.

Chapter 2

The Soviet Union in 1980 More than twenty five years later, it is beyond imagination that a country of two hundred and seventy million people was virtually completely closed to the rest of the world. Although the People’s Republic of China has all the traits of a totalitarian state, the country is still relatively open and accessible. It is true that communication with the outside world is controlled as much as possible, but at the same time even political opponents are able to disseminate their calls for democracy and human rights by telephone or internet. The “closed society” is almost an extinct species, except from some exceptions such as Myanmar and North Korea. Even Cuba recently had to open its doors. The scene was quite different in 1980. The Soviet Union was a closed super power that, to the outside world, seemed to be at its height of power. Soviet troops had invaded Afghanistan a year before in order to help a communist government stay in control. According to Western experts, Moscow was trying to get access to the Indian Ocean and possibly move on to expand its influence in Pakistan. In Indochina, only Communist regimes were in power. In Central America, civil wars were raging, whereby feudal regimes supported by Washington were increasingly unsuccessful in their wars against communist oriented insurgents. The power of Moscow also seemed unstoppable on the African continent. The parades on Red Square during communist festivities consisted of a show of military power, a military power holding the world hostage. Because of the invasion of Afghanistan, the Olympic Games were partially boycotted, but the Games did take place and Soviet authorities managed to get their propagandistic advantages out of them. While the country was presented as a progressive and modern super power, the Games were simultaneously used to finish off the relatively small dissident movement. A well organized and carefully orchestrated wave of arrests engulfed the country, the Olympic cities were cleansed of anybody who could disturb the beautiful yet so fragile image of a harmonious socialist society: mental patients, alcoholics, social “garbage” and dissidents were arrested en masse and delivered to psychiatric institutions or met with other fates. The dissidents received increasingly long camp terms, as we later found out - all following the plan of KGB-chairman Yuri Andropov to use the Games as a way of ending the dissident movement once and for all.

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On Dissidents and Madness

Control on outside influences During these years, there was almost total control over contacts between East and West. The Soviet Union could be visited only with a visa, and a visa was only provided when the travel plan had been approved from beginning to end. The country had some ninety “open cities” where Westerners were admitted with controls over the maximum number of days that could be spent in each city. I remember one city in Siberia that could be visited for only one night. The problem was, however, that the only plane in landed at the airport in the evening and the only plane out left the city in the morning, as a result of which a visit could only be during night hours. Other cities could be visited for longer periods, but every detail of the visit was controlled. After arrival, one had to report to the previously booked hotel or, in the exceptional case that the visit was “private” (which was discouraged as much as possible and, as a result, hardly ever happened) one had to report to the local immigration office, the “OVIR.” Without a stamp of the OVIR or the hotel, one could not leave the country. On top of that, one could only visit the previously selected cities, but one was not allowed to leave them. Visitors could not go beyond the usual perimeter of 25-40 kilometers from the center of any approved city – beyond that was forbidden territory. Presence in forbidden territory could lead to arrest and expulsion. Hotels were strictly controlled, and Soviet citizens were allowed inside only under strict supervision and in exceptional cases. Guards were at the front doors, and on every floor a dezhurnaya was located next to the elevator to carefully monitor and note movements. The hotels were also crammed with listening devices. Most foreigners went about town with a guide of the travel agency “Intourist,” who was charged with keeping all travelers under control. Dutchmen were quite notorious there due to the tendency to be obstinate and doing exactly what is forbidden. When a tourist bus would open its doors, they disappeared in all directions and subsequently it was a very unpleasant task for the Intourist guide to put all the fleas of the flea-circus back into the box. For some groups, “meetings with Soviet citizens” were organized, during which carefully selected and scrutinized “ordinary citizens” were instructed to tell the often naïve foreigners that life in the Soviet Union was fantastic and that there was no better society that the communist one. Even if one managed to escape the Intourist guide, it turned out to be impossible to disappear in the crowd. The Western clothes and open faces were visible from a long distance, as if you were a peasant who, straight from his land, had been dropped at a gala dinner.

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The travel groups that visited the country were inundated with useless information from the very first moment of arrival. It started during the bus ride from the airport to the hotel where the guide would sum up an enormous amount of facts, such as how long the road from the airport was, how many inhabitants were living in the city, how many citizens had died during the second World War (or rather, the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviets called it), how many factories were located in the city, etc. etc. This was terribly exhausting for the visitors; whether intended or not, this information overload caused the visitors to soon stop listening and to accept the greatness of the Soviet system without any discussion. Internal control Control on foreigners was maximal, but for Soviet citizens it was no different. Inhabitants of large cities such as Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev needed a propyska, a residence permit; otherwise they could be deported back to their original hometown as illegal citizens. Many girls from the provinces tried to marry elderly male citizens of these cities in order to get a propyska. They might have hoped for a short marital life and early death of their husbands, after which time, they could keep their propyska, thereby escaping the harsh life in the provinces. These girls took this chance willingly and accepted the necessity of having several years of physical contact with an elderly Muscovite because life in the provinces was not only grey but also quite inhuman. While on the outside the country seemed to be at the height of its power, disintegration had been visible in the provinces for a long time. Alcoholism, mafia practices and deep poverty were the rule rather than the exception. “Kolkhoz” (collective farm) farmers often did not even get an identity card that enabled them to leave the kolkhoz; as a result, they were no different that modern slaves in a communist utopia. There was not much to eat; sugar, flour and coffee were often unavailable for months and fruit was non-existent. This was also the case for Moscow where people would line up for hours in order to purchase bananas or oranges. Good meat was usually unavailable in the shops and could only be acquired via barter trade. In a way, this barter trade dominated daily life. People would hasten to join any line on the street and then ask why the line was developing. If, for instance, the line was for shoes and you were lucky that shoes were available by the time you got to the counter, the size of the shoes was no matter of discussion: you were handed a pair of shoes, and that was it. Then the next step had to be taken: who would want your shoes of, for instance, size 39, and what could you get back for them. You called all your friends

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and acquaintances in order to start the negotiation process. Everyone had a list of what they had available, and what they needed. That varied from underwear to shoes, from meat products to coffee, from toilet paper to light bulbs. The barter trade was the backbone of Soviet society and resulted in a completely new vocabulary in Russian, with expressions such as po blatu (via your network) and verbs such as dostat’, something in the middle of acquiring and conquering. Life was not so harsh in all of the republics of the Soviet Union. The Republic of Moldova was known because of its wines and Mediterranean climate. One said that in Georgia it was always “party time” and the wines were available in abundance. Lithuania was known because of its excellent sausages, made of real meat and unlike the Soviet sausages in Moscow that seemed to be made of a mixture of old paper and a mash of white beans. The Baltic beaches were much loved by the Russians. Holiday in these regions was, for many Soviet citizens, like a trip abroad, to places where Soviet grayness had not yet developed to such an extent. This difference between the smaller Soviet republics and Russia proper would later be the cause for many Russians to claim that they had been victims of the Soviet system more than others. And how could ordinary citizens in the Soviet Union know that things were different elsewhere? After decades of isolation and fully controlled information streams, the West was something unreachable and, as a result, unimaginable. Like a well-known Soviet joke summarized it: “Western capitalism stinks, but God, how good is the smell of it!” And indeed, to the outside world, one repeated the official slogans that life was better in the Soviet Union than anywhere else, but at the same time one was longing for a sniff of “West.” Western plastic bags were collectors items, people refused to remove brand stickers from Italian sunglasses only to show that they were real. Even empty liquor bottles from the West, or boxes in which these bottles had been packaged, were saved carefully and put somewhere as part of the interior decoration. The West had become something unreal, a kind of fata morgana, and stories about daily life in the West were almost sucked from your lips. Attempts by the authorities to counter this by spreading rumors that the chewing gum handed out by Western tourists were poisoned turned out to be fruitless. Western radio broadcasts to the Soviet Union could hardly change this information vacuum. Although programs of the BBC, Deutsche Welle and the popular Radio Liberty were essential sources of information about what was happening both in the world and in one’s own country,

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listening to them was forbidden and could lead to serious trouble or even arrest. But radio programs could not compensate for the lack of first hand knowledge about life in the capitalist Western societies. Contacts with friends or relatives in the West were discouraged and at least carefully monitored. Copying machines were forbidden and even typewriters were often registered in order to be able to disclose the author of “undesirable texts” based on the” finger print” of the typewriter used. This was the Soviet Union ruled by Leonid Brezhnev, the man who replaced the boorish Ukrainian Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 and subsequently ruled the country for more than sixteen years. He had become old and was in failing health. Like a badly constructed robot, he watched the parades on Red Square, and just as stiffly he opened the Olympic Games in 1980. According to a Soviet joke, he started his opening speech at the top of the stationary: “O, O, O, O, O….”, reading the five Olympic rings with a shaky and cracking voice.

Chapter 3

The world of couriers My first trip in the spring of 1980 found me entering the world of couriers. Peter Reddaway had a number of them, usually students who studied Sovietology in his department. They traveled several times a year to the Soviet Union with a suitcase full of material aid for the dissident movement. The aid consisted mainly of thermo-underwear; warm clothes; vitamins; vitamin candies re-wrapped in Soviet wrappings to be sent to prisoners; bouillon cubes for use when baking cookies or other food products in order to improve the food-intake of political prisoners; ballpoints and lighters to bribe prison guards; and magical slates. These magical slates formed a simple and effective method to communicate without giving the KGB the possibility to monitor a conversation with its bugging devices. The trick was quite simple: a prisoner carried on a conversation about something simple, and, in the meantime, he wrote down the important information on the magical slate. A piece of cake. It took some practice to become proficient in carrying on a simple conversation while simultaneously transferring important information, but it was a wonderful way of avoiding the scrutiny of the KGB. Thus, I left for Leningrad with a full suitcase, with a memorized list of addresses of people whom I was supposed to visit. The first address was that of three elderly ladies, one was, by profession, a writer of fairy tales with a second was the illustrator of the stories. The profession of the third remained unknown to me. I was continually amazed all these years by their greeting when I arrived – an example of how I was met on many occasions: the door swung open, I was invited in, I took off my coat and shoes, was given a pair of sandals and before I knew it, I was sitting at the kitchen table, fully decked and with loads of food. Only then did the question come: “What are you coming for?” As if there was no Soviet Union with a spying KGB, and as if there were no food shortages – endless hospitality and sincere happiness about the sudden and unexpected link with the outside world. Traveling with a tourist group was quite an adventure. I booked my trips with the travel agency Vernu on the Utrechtsestraat in Amsterdam, a bulwark of the pro-Soviet Friendship Association Netherlands-USSR. The trip consisted of hardliners, mixed with fellow travelers and completely naïve people, full of trust believing in Soviet propaganda. The tourist groups usually consisted of 15-20 people, usually older couples, eternal singles, experienced group travelers who constantly found pretexts to have a jolly good time, and every now and then an individual traveler

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who clearly did not fit. After some time, I acquired the ability to pick them out quite easily, the individual travelers who went to the Soviet Union for “other” reasons: contacts with the dissident movement or with the Jewish emigration movement, meetings with independent artists, or for the purpose of illegal trade in antiquities and pieces of art. To go with a tourist group was by far the cheapest solution as traveling alone was expensive and was, in addition, suspicious. These individuals would, as I did, travel with the group to the hotel, where they told the Intourist guide that they would not be seen for the remainder of the trip, and that they would go into town on their own. In the beginning of the eighties, the guides still offered some resistance, because the travelers were their responsibility and they could get into trouble if one of their sheep disappeared into thin air. Questions such as “Where are you going?” “What are you going to do?” were weak and ineffective attempts to exert some sort of control. Later, when Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev opened the first windows and doors, they gave up altogether: “Do whatever you want” became the rule. Initially I slept in the hotel, and even had my breakfast there and sometimes a lunch or dinner to keep up the façade. However, it became more difficult to go back and forth from the dissidents to the tourists. To listen everyday to the happy stories of the group members, after having listened just a while earlier to the reports of arrests and situations in camps while in the home of dissident friends turned out to be too difficult to handle. After 1983, I only slept at the dissidents’ homes and never stayed overnight at the hotel. Looking back I have to admit that I was pretty naïve in the beginning and was hardly prepared for my trip. I had received almost no instructions as to how to behave myself while traveling. I saw a KGB officer on every street corner, I thought that I was constantly under surveillance and had permanent diarrhea out of fear. When I visited one of the dissidents in Leningrad during my first visit, I met two other Dutch visitors, students of Slavic languages in Amsterdam, who both later became journalists. They asked me what my plans were and without thinking I told them whom I was planning to see, without taking the listening devices of the KGB into account. Later, back in The Netherlands, they told everybody how stupid I had been, that I was too talkative and not trustworthy. My sweet revenge came several months later when the dissident in question was arrested and recanted during KGB interrogation, naming many people, including the two Dutch ladies as well as myself. I may have been too talkative, but I had only mentioned my pseudonym. The dissident didn’t know my real name,

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and nor did the two Dutch students and that was my salvation. My name did not appear in the newspapers and the KGB did not manage to establish a link between the person named and myself. It would eventually take the authorities three years to establish the link between Robert van Voren and myself. Also when other dissidents recanted under KGB pressure, the same thing happened: they mentioned Robert van Voren, but a “Van Voren” did not appear in the records of the immigration department and, as a result, I remained out of sight. In Moscow, I was more strongly confronted with the wave of arrests that had started in 1979 that were directed at ridding the Olympic cities from dissidents before the Olympic Games would commence in July 1980. Some of the people I met at the beginning of my trip were arrested already before I had left the country. I had coincidentally been part of their last days in freedom. At one dissident’s home, I met the Estonian ornithologist Mart Niklus. He was tense, and quickly finished his cup of tea before going to the Presidium of the Communist party to deliver a letter. Two hours later, he was back, in a good mood but still very nervous. The letter turned out to be a petition to the Politburo to annul the MolotovRibbentrop Pact. This agreement signed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939 had resulted in the division of Eastern Europe and, among others, the Soviet occupation of the Baltic countries. Annulling the agreement would automatically mean that the Soviets would have to leave his home country of Estonia. The consequence of the petition was clear to all those present: Mart Niklus had signed his own arrest warrant. It would not be the first time, he was a “political recidivist” and was therefore punished extra harshly with fifteen years of camp and exile. I was devastated. This kind man, who rapidly tried his English, French and German on me, would now be imprisoned until 1995. I decided to continue doing this work until he would be free again, and with that decision I also sealed my Mart Niklus in 1988, shortly after his release from camp. own future.

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Split life As a result of the repeated trips to the USSR and everything that came with it, I increasingly started to lead a split life. The message of the two Dutch ladies had had its effect. I told only a few people that I was going to the Soviet Union, even my fellow students and friends did not know. My direct family knew, my girlfriend knew of course, as well as my colleagues at work and the study coordinator of the faculty of history at Amsterdam University. I owe him a lot, because without his support I would never have been able to finish my studies. Because of the constant traveling to the Soviet Union I wound up in a sort of twilight zone. I had the feeling that I was living more in the Soviet Union than in The Netherlands, my heart was there, with the people whose fate had become my own. A trip to the Soviet Union was more than just a week in the country itself. It cost me, just like many of my colleague couriers, about a month of preparation, both emotionally and logistically. Emotionally because I knew I would again wind up in situations that would have a strong emotional effect on me. I would meet people who would be arrested either shortly after or who had just lost a loved one as result of an arrest. On top of that, I knew that I would live a week under extreme tension. And at the same time I had to prepare myself for the worst. There was a constant threat that a Western visitor would be arrested and would be sentenced to a few years of camp in order to serve as a deterrent. That meant that with every trip, I had to write a statement in case of arrest and, in case worse came to the worst, a testament. And on top of that I had to say goodbye to people as if I would not come back after a week. Apart from the emotional pressure, most the weeks prior to departure were spent on preparing for my job in the country: buying material aid, collecting information and addresses, and preparing my fake calendar. Every courier had his own way of hiding information. This was necessary, because we could be checked at the border, and thus the addresses had to be coded or otherwise hidden. A colleague of mine wrote the information down on a white piece of paper with milk, and then scribbled some unimportant things with a soft pencil on top of it. In the Soviet Union he held the piece of paper above a candle, after which the milk changed color and the addresses became visible. I inserted the addresses in my university calendar and altered the names and addresses in a way that only I understood what was written.

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The flight to the Soviet Union was possibly the most anxietyproducing part of the trip. I would spend four hours on the plane, hardly able to eat anything because of the tension. The latter was not so bad, because in the beginning of the eighties a colleague courier from England was poisoned in the plane en route to Moscow with, as it turned out later, a poison from Libya. He spent the week in bed in Moscow, in dire pain. From that moment onwards, I refused to eat anything they offered, either on the plane or in the Soviet hotels. The plane was always Aeroflot that seemed to be a gateway to hell, with a penetrating smell of Soviet petrol; oddly, a smell that I started to like after a couple of years. If I now smell that stench, and that unfortunately happens less and less frequently, I am immediately gripped by feelings of nostalgia. Plump stewardesses would stomp through the corridor and dump the food on your lap, often with a glass of watery tasteless lemonade. Shaky chairs that would fall forward like dominos when you walked through the corridor to the exit. These are flights I will never forget, flights during which I would count the hours and eventually the minutes until arrival. Upon arrival at the airport, my fellow passengers and I had to go through passport control. The cabins of the custom officers in Russia have hardly changed, nor has the unfriendly glance of the custom officers. Only then would things become even slower while I was standing between two closed “saloon doors” in front of the custom officer. He did all kinds of things with my passport under a sort of window sill, looked at me, again moved some things around, looked at the back of my head via a mirror on the wall behind me, checked my height (the centimeters were marked on his window) and eventually with a serious face and a gracious movement stamped your passport, visa and custom forms. Bleng, bleng, bleng. And then on to luggage control. Suitcases were opened and everything was carefully checked. Journals and books were scrutinized, everything with undesirable themes and nude pictures were taken away. The ironic thing was that they never checked medication. I sometimes had half a suitcase full of medicine, a ridiculous amount in all sorts, colors and sizes. When the customs officer asked for whom the medication was intended, the answer “for myself” was sufficient, even if it would have meant that I would have had to spend at least a whole week chewing on the pills in order to get rid of them. Once I took the whole treatment course for tuberculosis with me, for the brother of Alexander Podrabinek who was also serving a camp

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term and had contracted tuberculosis. It consisted of a hundred glass pots with a suspicious white powder. I picked the medicine up in Paris and was immediately taken aside at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam. The medicine was checked, calls were made to the donor in Paris and eventually, after much talking, they were convinced it was not heroin and I was allowed to take it into the country. In Moscow, however, they had no problem with it whatsoever. “For whom is that?” they asked, and after a “for myself” the search of my suitcase continued. White powder did not raise any alarm at that time in the Soviet Union. After return from the Soviet Union it would take another month to return back to my normal life. The trip was invariably a shocking event, a peek in a lake of human misery. And on top of that, at the end, the terrible feeling that I had to leave my friends behind while I had the luxury of escaping from that hell, not knowing whether they would still be there the next time when I returned. After arrival in The Netherlands, I had to deal with all the information I had collected and smuggled out of the country, information had to be shared with other couriers and campaigns had to be organized. And on top of that, my studies were waiting, and, again, I had missed a lot of lectures and working group sessions. This is where the study coordinator was of great help. He had informed the various teachers and lecturers that I would sometimes not be around – I don’t know what reason he gave. Later I heard that some were convinced I was working for the Dutch secret service BVD. The study coordinator had also worked out a perfect “deal”: for every lecture or working group session missed I had to write another five pages for a paper. That meant that some of my papers turned into theses of 40-50 pages. But it helped me to study and at the same time travel to the Soviet Union four times a year. Eventually, I managed to finish my studies with only two years of delay. Smuggled goods The task of the courier was not only to deliver goods, but also to pick them up. In my case, however, it was not only cubes of bouillon, warm clothes or medicine, but information. Couriers were an essential element in the link between the dissident movement and the outside world. They collected information on the situation in the camps, prisons, psychiatric hospitals and places of exile, and informed Western supporters how the families left behind were doing

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and what kind of support was needed. One needed medication; the other warm clothes; a third was going to visit a political prisoner in exile and had a whole list of necessities. Part of this information was passed on to the West by telephone, although at most dissident homes the telephones had been disconnected and the number of dissidents who were brave enough to go to the post office and shout the information through the receiver while the whole post office was listening in was rather limited. The rest of the information went via us, the couriers. In addition, the couriers formed a conduit for underground literature, memoirs, even of complete books. This mainly concerned the so-called samizdat, self published – and therefore forbidden – literature. Documents, journals and also books were typed on a typewriter in multiple copies, often four or five copies with layers of carbon paper in between. The last copy was, as a result, hardly legible. Part of the samizdat we delivered to Western correspondents (like Bukovsky had wanted me to become) or to Western diplomats. There were only a few who dared to do this, as most were afraid of the consequences if the Soviet authorities discovered these activities. For many years, my main delivery address was an American diplomat working at the US Embassy in Moscow, who forwarded the documents to my post box in Amsterdam through diplomatic mail, and to a correspondent of the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, Xan Smiley. Xan was a bit of an eccentric, and lived in the apartment bloc for foreigners that was carefully watched by guards sitting outside in booths. Usually I would find him in his office in the morning, walking around in a soiled jersey, a bit confused and often with the behavior of someone who had had a glass too many the evening before. Part of his family had lived in Kenya and during parties organized by the tenants of the apartment bloc he showed this clearly: invariably he would proudly walk around with a T-shirt with big letters “Kenya” printed on it. We would talk about recent events, how common acquaintances were doing and eventually the envelope, or several envelopes, would change hands. A short time later I would be outside, mingling with the other visitors, and a week later the postman in Holland would bring the envelopes with documents and underground literature and I could start my campaigns in the West. This readiness to help was hard to find among the limited number of Dutchmen in Moscow; they always found a way out. The Dutch Ambassador Van Agt (a cousin of the former Dutch prime minister Dries van Agt) refused to send poems by political prisoner Irina Ratushinskaya to Holland because he considered them to be “literarily insignificant.” When these poems by Ratushinskaya, who in the mean time had been sentenced

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Samizdat edition of Ratushinskaya poems, smuggled out on film to twelve years of camp and exile, did reach the West, they were published in many languages and received very positive critiques. When I finally met somebody at the Dutch Embassy who was willing to pass on literature, The Hague spoiled everything. The envelope was kept at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague and not passed on. I never saw it again. This was a disaster, because it contained a number of important statements by dissidents that needed to be published, and these people had confided and put their trust in me. However, the Ministry could not be moved: diplomatic mail was not for dissident samizdat, and hence the envelope remained in the ministerial safe. I had to take out all the samizdat I could not send via correspondents or diplomats. That could not be done, of course, in my suitcase or hand luggage, as the border control was very strict and I was searched from top to bottom, especially after 1983. I had to find another solution. Initially I made photos of documents and I took the film rolls out. However, after I realized that there was developing equipment at the airport and the films could easily be developed, I decided to increase the safety of my materials. From then on I put everything on slides, which were films that were much more complex to develop and would never be processed in the short time between going through customs and entering the plane. In addition, I would keep the beginning of the

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Example of samizdat smuggled out of the USSR on film: a report on a house search carried out by the KGB at a dissident’s home film hanging out of the metal canister and glued the box carefully closed. They now looked completely unused and without any problem I would manage to smuggle ten or more films at a time to The Netherlands. Even with a complete search, looking for samizdat, they did not manage to find anything.

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Years later, when the Soviet Union was already part of the past, I told the Deputy Chairman of the Ukrainian secret service SBU, Volodymir Pristaiko, how I and my colleagues had smuggled materials to the West. The man had worked with the Ukrainian KGB but had changed his life after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and had even been one of the authors of the Constitution of independent Ukraine. He was also the author of books and collections about terror under Stalin. He listened carefully but was clearly not amused. Such simple methods, and never discovered, that was apparently too much of a damage to his image of the KGB. Big Brother is watching you It took some years before I found myself in the orbit of the KGB. After I had imagined a KGB officer behind each tree during my first trip, I became more quiet and convinced that all was OK. Whether they were there or no, I didn’t see them. If they weren’t there it was excellent, it meant that they still didn’t know who I was. If they were there, it was not so good, but still not bad: they were following me, but did not want me to know that I was being followed. It would have been worse if they had started following me ostensibly or - the worst-case scenario – to obstruct me. Then something would have really been wrong. Still, to a large degree, it was a matter of positioning oneself, an issue of attitude. If you want to feel threatened, you will be threatened. On the other hand, if you are able to create a certain distance and take the attitude that you couldn’t care less, that they were just doing their job, then it was somehow pleasant to have a few “bodyguards” behind you, especially when you had to go into one of the dark suburbs at night to visit someone. I taught myself that attitude after reading the story of the writer Valery Tarsis, who one day in the 1960s had been called in for interrogation by the KGB. “You know,” they had told him, “it can be dangerous in the streets. Suddenly you are walking past a building and a brick falls down, right on your head. I would be more careful.” Tarsis reacted laconically, and answered: “I am sure that when a brick comes down, one of your associates will jump in order to prevent it from hitting me, otherwise the whole world will think that the KGB killed me.” And that was exactly the attitude that was needed, one of “they can sit on the roof, it is their problem.” That way you were able to turn a negative factor into a positive one: free protection! And I must say that when the “tail” of KGB officers stopped in 1989, I felt quite unprotected and unsafe. Of course the control by the KGB went beyond organizing a “tail.” The apartments of most of the dissidents were bugged, and so we

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had to work with magical slates. In order to disconnect the microphones some would turn the dial on the telephone all the way to the end and then put a pencil in the hole, as a result of which the dial would not roll back. Whether it worked, I don’t know, but it increased the feeling of being in control over the KGB. Also hotels were bugged, with listening devices in the walls of restaurants, bars and telephones in the rooms. In order to check this, I repeatedly unplugged the phone in my hotel room, and the effect was astonishing: within ten minutes somebody would be in front of my door shouting that I should reconnect the phone, and that it was unacceptable because of potential fire alarm. Apparently they immediately noticed that the phone was disconnected. Sometimes a meeting was organized that had to remain under the radar of the KGB. Perhaps the meeting might put a person in danger, or because the goal of the meeting should remain a secret. In 1981, I was supposed to do an interview with the Moscow dissident Yuri Kiselyov, leader of the Action Group for the Rights of the Disabled in the Soviet Union. Kiselyov had no legs due to an accident and moved around by sitting on a piece of wood with four wheels, while in each hand he held some kind of handle with which he pushed himself forward. The action group had been founded because dissidents in the Soviet Union were living the life of heretics, without the necessary aids and support, spit out by a society that considered only people who could work as being of any value. The interview was to be broadcasted by Dutch television and had to be taped with a super-8 camera, without the authorities noticing anything. The interview had been carefully arranged: I would only film and not ask questions, per se, to make sure that the KGB would be alerted through their listening devices. In order to do so, however, I had to reach his apartment unnoticed; otherwise, they would still find out that something was Yuri Kiselyov going on. One evening I was picked up at the apartment of friends, taken through a back door and into a park behind the apartment, and put in a taxi. We drove through Moscow without uttering a word, until close to the apartment of Kiselyov. Here, the same thing happened: via the backside of the

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building we entered, quickly up the stairs to his apartment, and then sneaked inside. While I silently unpacked the camera and prepared everything, my companion maintained some small talk with Kiselyov. When I was ready, I turned on the camera, taped Kiselyov’s answers to my questions on paper, packed everything and left again, without exchanging even one word with Kiselyov. Only a strong handshake and a look in the eye confirmed that we were “brothers in evil”: I took a risk by filming him, he took a much larger risk by giving the interview and had to count on a possible arrest and several years in a camp. By some miracle, Kiselyov managed to avoid such a fate. Later I did a few more of these interviews, having similar meetings with dissidents, sometimes in a completely empty apartment of an unknown person in an unknown part of the city, with only two stools in front of each other in the empty living room. At that time, the interview often concerned a person who just returned from the camps and could provide fresh information on other political prisoners. Information was exchanged and after some talking, we would both leave into the darkness, each in his own direction. The same way I was sometimes smuggled into a building that was located next to a “secret object.” Those were usually places were dissidents were being held, such as the Butyrka prison in Moscow, the Lefortovo prison of the KGB, or the Serbski Institute for Forensic Psychiatry. From the roof of neighboring buildings I secretively made pictures of these “secret objects,” in order to use them during campaigns in the West. These were exciting moments, but also special confrontations with places where your own acquaintances or friends were being held. It was impossible to come closer, only my own arrest would have brought me closer to them.

Photo of Lefortovo prison, made by Robert van Voren in 1980.

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End of anonymity In the summer of 1983 my life in anonymity ended. Until then it seemed the KGB did not know who I was and I did my job quite undisturbed. I took the necessary precautions, like switching trains in the metro several times and jumping out of the carriage just before the doors closed, but for the rest I had no trouble. That was just what I needed, because the psychological pressure was maximal and I couldn’t handle much more. The wave of arrests on the eve of the Olympic Games of 1980 didn’t end after the Games, and it was clear that the KGB was set on liquidating the whole dissident movement. One after the other found him/herself behind bars; it was a constant action of saying goodbye. In order to make maximum use of the time in Moscow, I took short naps instead of sleeping and sat in the kitchen of dissident friends until the early hours of the morning talking, planning strategy and making use of the moment; maybe my next visit would find them gone as well. After several nights of not sleeping, it seems your mind goes onto a different level, a kind of mystic feeling, as if you can fly. Your senses are maximally open to outside stimuli; all impressions reach you at double strength, as if you live with double intensity. The constant threat of arrest of your friends, the possibility that you will never see them again, all leaves an unforgettable impression. Those evenings and nights in Moscow I will never forget, it is still as if they happened yesterday. In July 1983, I visited Moscow and had several appointments with the independent peace movement, the “Group for Establishing Trust between the USSR and USA.” This group had been founded by the Moscow artist Sergei Batovrin, who wanted to form a counter-balance against the official peace movement that of course only campaigned against the American cruise missiles but kept its mouth shut about the SS-20’s that were directed towards Western Europe. Batovrin and his friends campaigned against both weapon systems and, as a result, were the objects of KGB’s attention. We tried to support the movement as much as we could, by establishing contacts with Western peace movements with the request to support them – to which we received a very lukewarm reaction, by the way – and by organizing campaigns. When one of their members was arrested, the Bukovsky Foundation sent Dutch activists to the Soviet Union, where they walked around in the metro wearing a T-shirt with the text “Oleg Radzinsky – who’s next?” They were arrested and kicked out of the country. The next group went to Moscow with plastic bags with the same imprint. Plastic bags were a very desirable object in the Soviet Union those days and we hoped that this way we could spread the message. They also were arrested. A third group went with leaflets glued in packs on their backs. They reached Moscow and

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managed to distribute the leaflets in the metro, but also they were arrested and extradited. Looking back, these actions were a bit like the first acts of resistance during the German occupation of The Netherlands: full of good intentions, quite naive in implementation and with very little effect. Oleg Radzinsky, by the way, recanted during KGB interrogation and made it impossible for us to use the T-shirts any longer. We had quite a stock and for many years I slept in Oleg Radzinsky T-shirts, just like Batovrin, leader of the Independent my colleagues and friends, the only way to put them to good use. Peace Movement. Many of the members of the independent peace movement were given the choice between emigration and arrest and almost all chose the first option. Some joined the movement primarily with the hope to get an exit visa. This didn’t strengthen the image of the group, but who could blame them for making use of this opportunity to get out of the country? The presence of an ever-growing number of members of the independent peace movement in the West had little influence on the support they got from the Western peace movement. The Dutch IKV continued to be reluctant, the British END even sent a “spy” in order to gather information. The person concerned quickly noticed, however, that we were not a movement inspired by the CIA, as the END suspected, and quickly chose our side. For many years, she participated in our campaigns and we developed a close friendship that lasted for many years. One afternoon, I had an appointment with the independent peace movement in the flat of one of its members. We soon concluded that a normal conversation was impossible because of the flat being bugged. With a group of seven-eight people the system of magical slates didn’t work anymore, and, therefore, we decided to continue the conversation outside, in a nearby park. At a certain moment, I noticed that some men was standing at some trees pretending to urinate. It was a strange sight, a kind of collective urge to pee. But before I realized what was happening, we were surrounded by the very same men and two police vans pulled over. We were detained and shoved into the vans, and, at high speed, we took off in the direction of the police station. One of the persons sitting in my van was Vladimir Brodsky,

Robert van Voren

Document provided by the Independent Peace Movement, authorizing Robert van Voren to speak on their behalf abroad (1983)

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member of the independent peace movement, who had a pile of documents with him that I was supposed to take out of the country. He quickly started to tear the documents into pieces and push the remnants through a crack in the door. Apparently we were the first van and the second one followed us, because suddenly our van stopped. It is likely that the policemen in the second van had seen the pieces of paper being pushed through the crack. The back door flew open and a policeman entered our van, and remained standing in the middle, making sure nothing else would be disposed off. When asked why we had been arrested, he answered with a big grin on his face: it was because we were drunk in public. After arrival at the police station, we were all put into a cell. It took a while, but then we were taken out one by one for questioning. I was terribly nervous and was ready to hit Brodsky over the head, because of his way of easing his own tension by telling jokes. I was pretending that I did not speak Russian in order to make sure I would not be questioned, and so I had to pretend that I didn’t understand the jokes. On top of that, telling jokes was not my way to ease the tension and I found it quite irritating. Eventually I was taken away for questioning. The questions were put in Russian and I pretended that I did not understand a word of it. Instead, in English, I demanded that I be allowed to see my consul. The interrogators did not seem to understand my English, however. Maybe they were pretending, but probably it was the simple truth. It felt as though this session lasted forever. A different interrogator was brought in, this time in civilian clothes and to my thinking, a KGB officer, however again without success. They started calling around, took my passport and went away, brought it back and tried again. Then, suddenly, I was allowed to go. It was already dark outside, the streets were quiet. Without waiting, I disappeared into thin air, in a desperate attempt to prevent being picked up and deported from the country, or to avoid the KGB from following me to the place where I was going to hide. Because one thing was clear to me: going back to my hotel would be the most stupid thing I could do. They would be waiting for me, tell to pack my bags and then take me to the airport and put me on a plane. And, as they did many times before, they would probably send me to a totally different destination than Amsterdam, so it would be quite a hassle for me to make my way back home. In order to avoid this fate, I submerged myself in Moscow by night. Bus, metro, taxi, bus, and then again the same, just to be sure that

Robert van Voren nobody was following me. I went from one side of the city to the other until late at night, until I was absolutely convinced that no KGB was following me. Eventually, I went to the house of my Moscow friends, the family of Irina Grivnina, a dissident who had just ended a period of three years in exile for her membership in the Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes. She had been denied permission to return to her husband and children in Moscow, but had refused to obey the order to find a residence elsewhere.

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Irina Grivnina and Robert van Voren, April 1980

I was shocked by what happened and Grivnina was livid because I had put myself in this situation, but there was actually very little I could have done to prevent it from happening. After further discussions, I went to sleep in my usual spot, on the balcony of Grivnina’s flat, as all the beds in the apartment were occupied. The next day it all seemed to be a matter of the past, until the doorbell rang and Irina opened the door without thinking. It was the police, accompanied by the KGB, who had come to establish officially her illegal presence in the flat. We tried with all of our might to keep the door closed, but our efforts were in vain; the men pushed themselves in. A report was made, and all those present had to show their documents. Within twenty-four hours, the KGB had established my real identity twice. I lived at Grivnina’s flat for the remainder of the week, preparing myself for a return to The Netherlands. As usual, I collected samizdat to be taken out and photographed it on slides, and entered all in code in my calendar. On the day of departure I said goodbye, a heart rending moment because I was convinced I would never be allowed to return again. It was a goodbye forever, and tears were running down our cheeks. In the hotel, I was met by a tense and angry guide. She didn’t talk to me, nor did the other members of the group who probably had been informed that there was something wrong with me. At the airport as I went through luggage control, I saw, in the distance, two men watching how I went through the checkpoint. My

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suitcase was searched, but not more than at other times. Afterwards, I went through passport control and noted that, again, these men were watching from a distance, but again nothing unusual happened. At the last checkpoint before boarding the plane, where the hand luggage was checked, the two men were waiting for me, together with two colleagues. I was taken aside, told to undress, bend over, and a body search followed. In the meantime, my hand luggage was carefully checked, piece by piece. Every item was carefully screened and put aside: books, papers, films with slides, some food, camera… Nothing! Everything went back into the bag. They asked if something strange happen during my stay? “No, nothing at all.” “No problems?” “No, nothing at all.” “You didn’t have any contact with the police?” “No, why should I, I am just a simple tourist. Nothing at all…” The guys consulted with each other and made a phone call. Last call for passengers… “You can go.” At the last moment I was allowed to enter the gate, to the plane. Immediately after I entered the airplane, the door closed and the engines were started. I was just in time. And it was a KLM plane! My happiness had no boundaries, I had escaped! For the next four hours I enjoyed the flight, but gradually new worries appeared on the horizon: what would happen to my friends, what were my chances of ever returning to the Soviet Union? These worries became very real when I left the plane and a colleague was waiting for me. My arrest had been reported by the independent peace movement and had been in the newspapers, the press was waiting for me and wanted to have interviews… But I didn’t want any interview! I didn’t want any press, I wanted silence, and I wanted to return to the Soviet Union. I managed to escape via a side door, leaving the press behind at the airport. They didn’t understand a bit of it: for many years I had been harassing them to get publicity for “my dissidents,” and now I didn’t want to see them. The next day, I went to the travel agency and booked a new trip to the Soviet Union, and two weeks later I got the good news: all was OK, I had been issued a visa. Never alone again I had a visa, but I also had a “file.” The arrest had revealed the real identity of Robert van Voren, and from that day onwards the KGB

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kept track of me. Wherever I went I was followed, sometimes by up to four KGB officers. It was a peaceful thought, in a strange way, now everything was clear. Also I lost my fear of the KGB. I had the feeling that I had looked them in the eye, I had seen their real face, and the mystic frightening image that I used to have had disappeared. They were normal people, even though they were not always nice and I probably would not have immediately made them part of my circle of friends, but the image of the somewhat malignant agent in a raincoat with hat sunk deep above their eyes had disappeared forever. I now understood they had been recruited because of a combination of character traits, intelligence and readiness to follow and obey orders, and, as a result, the rumors that KGB chief Yuri Andropov was addicted to jazz and good whisky had become a lot more realistic to me. In spite of the fact that they now knew who I was, I was given a visa every time I booked a trip. For a long time, I wondered why, but eventually I concluded that it was a lot easier for them to follow me and see with whom I had contacts, what connections existed between dissidents, than to forbid me to enter the country and know that somebody else would take my place within no time. I was followed, the flats were bugged, and in a certain way I became a tool for the KGB to draw a better “map” of the dissident movement. By the way, the people whom I visited knew that I was “contaminated.” But if you already know that you will be arrested sooner or later, or when your husband or wife has been arrested, or if it doesn’t make any difference to you because you already crossed the psychological border and lost your fear, than this fact is no longer of any importance. These developments, however, did make a difference though for the “home front,” and, in particular, for Vladimir Bukovsky who realized in what psychological state I was by now. It is a strange process. First, you are afraid of being arrested, then you get used to the idea and you don’t care, and, subsequently, you start to long for an arrest. You long for it, because you have been waiting for such a long time and you are losing your patience. And you long for it because your friends – and most of my friends were former political prisoners – had all served their time. One had served three years, the other seven, the third even with a total sentence of more than twenty years, as if they were medals. It is a strange hierarchy, which they possibly didn’t sense as such in the way that I did. I had no time served: I was in that respect a “sissy.” In the course of 1984 and 1985, I visited Vladimir Bukovsky several times in Palo Alto, California. He was there doing research, carrying

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out some biological experiments which didn’t really progress because he was busier fighting communism than working on his dissertation. He had founded the organization “Resistance International,” a mixture of anticommunists from Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa. Not only friends of mine from the Soviet Union participated, but also the well-known former Cuban political prisoner Armando Valladares, the Sandinistas from Nicaragua and Jonas Savimbi from Angola. I learned that Bukovsky was very much concerned; in the summer of 1985, he told me that he had received information that soon a foreigner was going to be arrested in the Soviet Union and sentenced to a long term of imprisonment in order to scare off others. He warned me that I could be that person and added: “And so you should stop traveling there.” “But I will go anyway,” I answered. “What do you want, you will be arrested!” “Yes, that is possible.” “And you will be convicted to a camp term.” “So what?” “And you won‘t come out soon, until they exchange you for a Soviet spy.” “Maybe,” I said, “but how many years have you served? Why shouldn‘t I serve my time?” “You are crazy,” Bukovsky exclaimed, “you just want to get caught!” And that ended the discussion. He wrote me a letter upon my return to The Netherlands in which he once again explained his position and urged me to stop traveling, but it didn’t help. A month later, I was back in the Soviet Union, whether it was the smartest move or not. Bukovsky was right, I was longing to be arrested, I was ready, but it never happened. The fear of Bukovsky was logical, even if only for practical reasons. I knew too much of the dissident movement, of who did what, where, and how, and if I had recanted during KGB interrogation, I could have seriously hurt the organization. But, at that moment, these arguments were only of secondary significance. I demanded my right to my own camp term, very simple. The turn around One of my regular addresses in Moscow was that of Larisa Bogoraz, a dissident who had demonstrated on Red Square in Moscow with seven others in 1968 in protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia, a case of extreme courage. Larisa was a very special woman. She looked

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Letter from Vladimir Bukovsky, urging Robert van Voren (official first name: Joss) to stop traveling to the Soviet Union, 1985. many years older than she really was, which was the result of an extremely difficult life and undoubtedly also because she was smoking like a chimney. She smoked Belomorkanal, so-called papyrosy, cigarettes with a carton mouthpiece that you had to fold in a particular manner, and with tobacco that made Gauloises taste like Marlboro Lights. The cigarettes had been named after a canal that forced laborers had dug in the 1930s in North-Western Russia and during which more than two hundred thousand

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of them had perished. For Larisa, this was reason enough to smoke these cigarettes: Belomorkanal was for her a smoking monument for the victims of Stalin. Later, in the early 1990s, we once brought her to Amsterdam for treatment because of alleged heart problems. The next morning when the doctor came in, he could hardly see her. She was sitting in bed, puffing one Belomarkanal after the other, with a murderous blue fume blocking full sight of her. The doctor had her moved to a separate room, where she continued smoking, but treatment was canceled: somebody who was able to smoke such cigarettes was beyond treatment. Larisa was living in the southern part of Moscow, on the Leninski Prospekt, in a flat on the ground floor with her son Pavlik. The father of Pavlik was her second husband, Anatoly Marchenko, who, like her first husband, the writer Yuli Daniel, was a dissident writer. At that moment he was serving a new term of fifteen years in camp and exile. Marchenko had written one of the first books about the camps under Stalin and had served already a number of long terms of imprisonment. Actually he spent most of his life behind bars. Larisa told that during his last short time in freedom, they had several times gone shopping, but it had driven her crazy. When entering a shop he would raise his arms automatically, as if he expected to be body-searched. It had become an automatism after many years in camp, because there a body search was carried out every time he entered a building or went from one part of the camp to the other. Before he had lost this involuntary movement he was again behind bars. It would be his last imprisonment. At the end of 1986, Anatoly Marchenko went on a hunger strike out of protest against the inhuman living conditions in Chistopol prison, where he was incarcerated at that time. He announced that he would stay on the hunger strike until all his demands had been met, including the release of all political prisoners in the Soviet Union. Chistopol was the prison where political prisoners were incarcerated, and Anatoly Marchenko shared the corridor with other well-known dissidents such as Anatoly Koryagin and Anatoly Shcharansky, all in solitary confinement. The hunger strike took place on the eve of a major conference in Vienna, where delegations from the European and North American countries would convene to discuss security and collaboration in Europe. These conferences were held regularly in order to monitor the implementation of the so-called Helsinki Accords that had been signed in 1975. These Helsinki Accords guaranteed the rights and freedoms of citizens in Europe and North America and had been the reason for the dissident movement in the Soviet Union to establish “Helsinki Groups” that would monitor

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the implementation of these agreements. All Helsinki Groups had been eliminated by this time as a result of the arrest of all of their members, and a number of them had already died in imprisonment.

Larisa Bogoraz, Anatoly Marchenko and their son Pavel The hunger strike of Marchenko was meant to call the attention to the plight of the political prisoners, and he succeeded in that purpose tragically and beyond expectation. It has never become fully clear how long he was on hunger strike, but a few weeks after Larisa found out that her husband had put everything at stake, the authorities ordered her to prepare the family for emigration. Apparently they had decided to get rid of this troublemaker. Larisa started to make preparations, but the wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly. By the time all the papers were ready Anatoly Marchenko in his coffin. Anatoly Marchenko had passed The photo was taken illegally just away – he had died from starvation. before his burial. His death resulted in a wave of protests. The United States and a number of other Western countries threatened to leave the Vienna conference and to suspend the Helsinki process. It was clear that the Soviets had gone too far, the Helsinki process was more dead than alive. At that moment the new Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev intervened. He personally called

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the most renowned dissident, Andrei Sakharov, who had been in exile and under house arrest in Gorki since 1980, and invited him to come back to Moscow. A few weeks later the largest wave of release of political prisoners started since the death of Stalin.

Burial of Anatoly Marchenko

Chapter 4

Campaigning for dissidents Reading about injustice does not leave you cold when you have grown up in an environment where righteousness is a central theme and the affects of the Second World War and, in particular, Nazi terror are a daily subject of conversation even 30 years after the war ended. Two of my uncles had been in the camps, only one of them had returned and he had been marked for life. The more I became interested in the repression of the dissidents in the Soviet Union, the stronger I had the urge to do something about it. In 1977, I started collecting signatures under petitions addressed to Brezhnev, calling on him to release the political prisoners. My first “case” was that of Sergei Kovalyov, a biologist who had been an editor of the important samizdat publication Chronicle of Current Events and who had been arrested in Vilnius in 1974. He had been sentenced to seven years of camp and three years of exile. With homemade petitions I went from door to door, ringing doorbells and asking people to sign. What one can now hardly imagine was that without exception, people were afraid to put a signature, out of fear that if the Soviets would come they would be listed as one to be arrested. They purposely wrote their names illegibly, or just put a cross instead Trial against Sergei of a signature. I sent the packages of Kovalyov: Andrei Sakharov in signatures to the Soviet Embassy; a drop front of the court building in Vilnius, 1974. in the ocean, of course.

At the end of 1977, Vladimir Bukovsky asked me if I was willing to establish a European branch of the Podrabinek Fund, an opportunity that I took with both hands. Podrabinek had been arrested that year because of his membership of the Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes and was in jail awaiting his trial. The case of Podrabinek opened for me the door to the issue of political abuse of psychiatry. After having read a multitude of books about Nazi camps and having subsequently read a pile of literature on Soviet camps, I thought I

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could imagine life in camps. However, the idea that while being a political prisoner you would be locked up with dangerous madmen was beyond my imagination. I knew nothing about psychiatry, for me was anybody with a psychiatric illness a “lunatic” and, hence, dangerous. Not very subtle, but for me psychiatry was an unknown and undiscovered area and thus scary. I found some archaic literature about psychiatry at the home of a psychiatrist’s family where I was babysitting and my interest was aroused. I decided to concentrate on political prisoners who had wound up in psychiatric hospitals, and the Podrabinek Fund was a nice introduction into the field. Bukovsky Foundation After the summer of 1979, I moved to Amsterdam in order to commence my studies. I joined the Bukovsky Foundation, a small organization with whom I had established contact in the months preceding my move and which was directed by Henk Wolzak. The foundation had its offices on the Van Woustraat in the Dutch capital, just around the corner from the famous Albert Cuyp market, at Henk Wolzak’s home residence. Amsterdam was a turbulent city in those years. Everywhere squatters had occupied empty buildings and regularly battles took place in the Amsterdam streets between riot police and the squatters. Henk Wolzak was a bit of a strange character. Born in 1940 and with only a limited education, he had developed himself to being a freelance journalist for newspapers like Het Parool and Trouw. Although the claimed to have studied history and theology, this was more fantasy than reality: he had attended some university lectures, but had never registered himself as a student. He spoke three words of German and English, which in no way hindered him in orienting Demonstration for the release of Vladimir Bukovsky. Henk Wolzak is on the left. In front of him a counter demonstration by a member of a proSoviet organization. His board reads: “In the Soviet Union the counter revolution does not have a chance”.

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himself internationally. His smooth chat had allowed him to get quite far in this and he could count among his friends a number of well-known Dutch writers such as Renate Rubinstein and Simon Carmiggelt. Wolzak had the personality of an Einzelgänger, a loner, who was often recalcitrant, and that is probably because he felt at ease with the dissident movement. He was a man who deserved a certain amount of admiration because of his perseverance, his ability to convince others and to create and use networks. However, at the same time, he had a strong inferiority complex that made him quarrelsome, which did not always help the cause. For instance, after receiving a negative response from a donor, he would write back angry letters, signing not with “met hartelijke groeten” (with best wishes) but with “met hatelijke groeten” (with despising wishes), or he would answer that he, in fact, he didn’t want their money anyway because he didn’t like them after all. In both cases he could, of course, forget about this donor, but also didn’t realize that donors have their own network and that such a letter could be passed around. In the 1970s, Henk Wolzak had been in charge of the campaigns to obtain the release of Vladimir Bukovsky in The Netherlands. He had been in the Soviet Union several times, visited families of political prisoners and other dissidents, but because of his lack of knowledge of languages, he had not been able to really communicate with them. Eventually, they had given him samizdat to smuggle out of the country, which he did. The small circle of Slavic language experts and Sovietologists around professor Karel van het Reve in Leyden and professor Jan Bezemer in Amsterdam did not really take him seriously and avoided him as much as possible. Partially that was understandable, because, indeed, he was a bit of a loose canon, but on the other side that group was pretty arrogant and closed for those who were not part of their “inner crowd.” Because I was linked to Henk Wolzak, I was automatically excluded as well. Initially I didn’t like it, but gradually I accepted it and after a while even started to like it, because their arrogance was quite irritating. Wolzak took me under his wing and helped me to develop a career as a freelance journalist. After a while, I wrote, as a rule, one article per day, and Henk went from newspaper to newspaper to get them published. The articles were about dissidents, political prisoners, the situation in camps, prisons and psychiatric hospitals and formed a part of our campaigns to obtain their release. Apart from that, I translated a lot of articles from English into Dutch and earned part of my income in that way. After a while, I also started giving radio interviews, in particular with the Evangelical Broadcasting Corporation (EO), which had the human rights situation in

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the Soviet Union as a permanent theme on their agenda. The young reporter Andries Knevel, who later became director of the company and one of their anchormen, visited Wolzak at home quite often, and gradually I became a part of the image of the EO, in particular when Knevel was promoted to head of the radio department. It was a strange combination, because I had long hair reaching my shoulders and walked around in a black jacket that was the standard outfit of Amsterdam squatters, or in a black ladies fur coat, not very typical for an EO-adherent. But maybe that was exactly the reason why the EO liked me – I looked like a leftwinger, but when I opened my mouth I sounded like a right-winger. At least, that is how society perceived it, because Holland was quite sectarian and when you were against the Soviet regime you were automatically right-wing, no discussion about it. Robert van Voren, 1980 The struggle against the political abuse of psychiatry intensifies In the fall of 1980, several groups of activists from Germany, Switzerland, France and the United Kingdom concerned with the struggle against political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, decided to join forces. Until then all the campaigns had been at a national level, without much coherence. In three years time, the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) would hold its World Congress in Vienna. This international body is an umbrella organization of national psychiatric associations from all over the world with a World Congress organized once every six years (later once every three years), attracting some ten thousand psychiatrists. Among its members was the Soviet All-Union Association of Psychiatrists and Neuropathologists, on paper a non-governmental organization (NGO), but in reality a branch of the Ministry of Health of the USSR. And even on its stationary it didn’t look like an NGO: at the top of the stationary was printed “Ministry of Health of the USSR” and only then “All-Union Association… etc.” A few years earlier, in 1977, this Soviet association had been condemned for the continuous political abuse of psychiatry for political purposes, during a tumultuous World Congress in Honolulu, Hawaii. In addition, the WPA set up a Committee to Review Alleged Abuses of

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Psychiatry and required that all Member Societies cooperate with the investigation of any cases brought before the Committee. However, this did not end the political abuse of psychiatry: still many dissidents were incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals. In order to avoid international criticism the emphasis had shifted towards lesser-known dissidents; the well-known dissidents were now most often sent to camps and prisons. The Moscow “Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes” collected as much information as possible on the victims of Soviet psychiatric terror and published this information in their Information Bulletins. The Soviet authorities reacted aggressively. Members of the group were followed, threatened, subjected to interrogations and house searches. In May 1978 founder Aleksandr Podrabinek was arrested, followed in February 1980 by Vyacheslav Bakhmin and a short time later by Leonard Ternovsky, whom I had met in Moscow a few days before his arrest. Irina Grivnina, whom I mentioned earlier, followed in September 1980. The group was under severe pressure and it was clear that the authorities planned to liquidate the group altogether. Because of this situation, it was clear that the pressure on the Soviet Union had to be increased to the maximum possible. The above-mentioned national committees decided to link up in order to start an international campaign with the objective of convincing the member societies of the WPA that they had to exclude the Soviet member association in 1983 at the World Congress in Vienna. In December, representatives of the various groups met in Hôpital St Anne, one of the oldest psychiatric hospitals in Paris. Together with Henk Wolzak I traveled to Paris, as representatives from The Netherlands. It was an extraordinary event. Not only was the background of all the participants totally different, there were also quite a few people who knew no foreign languages and thus everything had to be translated. The French hosts consisted of a number of psychiatrists, among whom was Cyrille Koupernik, an internationally respected child and adolescent psychiatrist. Koupernik had been born in Petrograd on the night of the February Revolution of 1917, and escaped to France with his parents a few years later. He was a well-known figure in France. He was a member of the Legion d’Honneur and had played a leading role in the protest movement against the war in Vietnam. When years later I told a French psychiatrist that Koupernik was Cyrille Koupernik

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one of our founding members, the guy was overwhelmed by surprise. “Mon Dieu!” he said, “Cyrille Koupernik! At that time you had two great men: the Président de la République and Cyrille Koupernik!” The core of the French delegation was, however, a group of activists led by the somewhat overly excited, and as it turned out later, Trotskyite Martine LeGuay, and the Parisian psychiatrist Gérard Bles. Gérard had a strong posture, a flamboyant man with a strong sense of humor, and the appearance of a painter in the time of the Renaissance, which in a way wasn’t so strange because one of his ancestors had apparently been a painter at the Dutch royal court of Orange. Although a very pleasant character, he spoke only three words of English and so Martine had to translate every word for Gérard in addition to having her own contribution to the conversation, which did not really help to speed things along. Also the German delegation was rather mixed. The group was more or less led by the German psychiatrist Friedrich Weinberger, a somewhat strange fellow with eyes that continuously rolled in their sockets and who took a lot of effort to look important. He was accompanied by the very kind and gentle psychiatrist Helmut Bieber, almost the opposite of Weinberger, and by a German journalist with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Claus Einar Langen. Langen had been sent to the Eastern front as a young journalist at the end of the war and was almost immediately taken prisoner. He had been imprisoned in Siberia for quite a few years and as far as I remember he had been released in 1955 after the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had gone to Moscow to obtain the release of all German prisoners of war, with success. His long imprisonment had not really turned Langen into a friend of the Soviets and it had affected him considerably, both mentally and physically. On top of that he only knew German, and so he also contributed to the Babylonic confusion. The Swiss delegation was more mixed and of quite a high caliber. Among the participants were well-known psychiatrists like Charles Durand and Hugo Solms from Geneva, as well as the energetic Catherine Kuhn, who already since 1974 led a Swiss association against the political abuse of psychiatry and was clearly the center of the group. Languages were no problem here, and the same counted for the British delegation led by Peter Reddaway, who by then had become a sort of second “mental godfather” for me, next to Vladimir Bukovsky. The meeting lasted for two days, continuously lengthened because of the language barriers and because of the fact that the way of

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holding a meeting was different from country to country. Finally, after a two-day marathon, we had a deal. A temporary union would be formed in order to coordinate the international campaigns. Following a good Swiss example it would be a confederation and after a lot of deliberation the name “International Association on the Political Use of Psychiatry” was chosen. This had taken a lot of time, because the name should sound OK in all languages used, should have an acceptable acronym (IAPUP) and on top of that the participants disagreed for a long time about the prefix “on.” “Against” sounded too negative, “for” was wrong, “to combat” too militant. Finally the British managed to convince all to accept “on,” but until our name change in 1989 the issue would repeatedly lead to new debates during board meetings. As representative of the Podrabinek Fund, I became a member of the “committee of representatives.” It was not a Board, because a Board meant a structure, a legal status, which was exactly what the group did not want. There was a name, a committee with an unclear and continuously changing composition, and that’s it. No statutes, no bank account, no budget. In 1981 and 1982 the representatives met regularly in one of the cities from which the representatives originated. As a relatively new member of the group and on top of that by far the youngest, I was more of a follower than having any real input. However, as courier to the Soviet Union, I was the only one who knew what was happening from personal experience and the reality of the atmosphere in the Soviet Union. My task was to provide materials for the campaigns for the release of political prisoners in the Soviet Union and in defense of the very few people who had the courage to oppose these abuses. Among them, of course, were the members of the “Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes,” of which the last member at liberty was to be arrested in February 1981. One of the first meetings of IAPUP. From left to right: Martine LeGuay, Christine Shaw, Alan Wynn, Catherine Kuhn, unknown, Peter Reddaway, Robert van Voren, Evgeny Nikolayev, Gérard Bles, Helmut Bieber.

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The coincidence was that apart from a couple of Western correspondents in Moscow, I was the only foreigner who ever met this psychiatrist before his arrest. The meeting had taken place in August 1980, during a birthday party for a member of the Working Commission, Leonard Ternovsky, who at that moment was in Butyrka prison awaiting his trial. The Working Commission had only three remaining members: Irina Grivnina (with whom I had come to the birthday party), Feliks Serebrov and the psychiatrist Anatoly Koryagin. The mood was somber and at the same time acquiescent. Everybody present knew that the arrest of the remaining members was only a mater of time. Anatoly Koryagin was originally from Siberia, then living in Kharkov and was in Moscow for several days, with a special reason. He had collaborated with the Working Commission for quite some time already and had carried out psychiatric examinations of people who either had been hospitalized for political purposes or were afraid that they would meet this fate within the near future. Koryagin’s psychiatric reports had to prevent this from happening, and at the same time they formed concrete evidence that healthy people were put in psychiatric hospitals for political reasons. Until that moment, Koryagin had worked in silence, but now he demanded official membership of the group; knowing that all the members would be arrested, he wanted to share the fate of his friends. I took photographs during the party. The three members of the group posed, together with the daughter of Ternovsky, undoubtedly realizing that the photos would be used after their arrest in the campaigns for their release. They were the last photos that reached the West, and also the only recent pictures that existed of Koryagin. Indeed, later on, these photographs were a crucial element in our campaigns on his behalf. Photo of Anatoly Koryagin, made during the party on Leonard Ternovsky’s birthday: Left to right: daughter Olga Ternovskaya, Feliks Serebrov, Anatoly Koryagin and Irina Grivnina.

The sequence of events was rapid. Two weeks after my return to The Netherlands, Irina Grivnina was arrested. Shortly after, in January

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1981, Felix Serebrov was taken into custody. His earlier experiences as a prisoner had had their effect on him. He broke down under KGB interrogation and named people that he knew. Among them was Robert van Voren, but again the KGB did not succeed in establishing a link between that name and myself. In February 1981, Anatoly Koryagin was picked up, and the Working Commission ceased to exist. Moscow as the center of my world It felt like the aftermath of a funeral. Shortly after Koryagin’s arrest, I returned to Moscow. Everywhere were gaps, many of the people with whom I had a close connection had been arrested. The house of Grivnina felt empty, her husband had resumed life as much as was possible and was now running the household for himself and his daughter. The younger brother of Vyacheslav Bakhmin, Viktor, dropped by almost every day, just like the gentle girl, Irina, who would later become his wife. The evenings in the kitchen were filled with Viktor playing the guitar, accompanied by his melancholic voice. He sang songs of well-known dissident and half-dissident singers such as Bulat Okudjava, Vladimir Vysotsky and Yuli Kim. It deepened the feeling of loss, even though I couldn’t understand the texts due to my limited knowledge of Russian. Viktor knew three words of English, Grivnina’s husband even less. I clearly had a problem of communication. Viktor Bakhmin The same happened at other addresses. Whether on purpose or not, the KGB had succeeded in arresting everybody who could function as an interpreter. I had to face a rather fundamental decision: either I stopped traveling or I had to learn Russian. I chose the latter option. I had started studying Russian as a second subject at Amsterdam University, but that was not such a great success. It went slowly, was mostly focusing on learning grammar and on top of that I soon found out that my lecturer didn’t speak Russian himself. Bukovsky had made clear from the very start that the worst I could do was to learn grammar, because he was convinced that if I learned the grammar, I would never be able to speak Russian normally. So I had to look for other options. I found one in Germany, where in a Bischofliches Seminarium of the Catholic Church

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in Aachen, just across the border from The Netherlands, the “Free Andrei Sakharov University” organized its summer courses. It was a kind of combination of language course, pioneer’s camp and a holiday resort for the dissident movement in Western Europe. As a student you were forced to speak no other language than Russian, even if you went downtown. From early in the morning until late at night we were following language classes, followed by theatre and singing classes. During the evening, people would meet in the bar, where a well-known guest would give a lecture. The participants were students of Slavic languages, Russophiles, American soldiers who undoubtedly were supposed to use the Russian they learned to eavesdrop on the Soviets, and some loose characters like me. The teachers were a funny combination of Russians who indeed had some didactical skills, writers, poets and people who had declared themselves to be “teachers.” Hence the quality of teaching was rather mixed. For instance one poet always managed to extend his lessons by starting to recite his poetry at length and at the top of his voice, while the veins on his forehead would swell until they looked like red colored cables under his skin and his voice thundered across the inner courtyard of the school building. It was the disadvantaged student who did not agree with him while discussing his poetry, as he/she would be the object of long lasting vilification and anger. My Russian was, at the beginning, limited to one expression informing the other side that I did not speak Russian and did not understand a word. However, after five days of complete mute silence at the dining table as well as in the bar, I went into a sort of trance, just like during the series of sleepless nights in Moscow. I surpassed myself and, without really noticing, I started to speak Russian. First just a few words and with much apprehension and a terrible accent, but after ten days the nightmares in Russian started and that meant that I had passed through the main barrier. The evenings in the bar were unforgettable. Most of the speakers were wellknown dissidents, writers, artists and prominent former political prisoners. The Germanist Lev Kopelev, a close friend of German author Heinrich Böll and himself a well-known writer in Germany, was always present. With his long grey beard and his omnipresent walking stick he looked like a Russian landlord from Tsarist times. Also the writer Alexander Zinoviev was usually on the program. Being a former lecturer in MarxismLeninism he could describe the Homo Sovieticus

Aleksandr Zinoviev, Munich, 1982

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better than anybody else, and his books Yawning Heights and The Radiant Future were bestsellers in the West. He was an agitated little fellow, short and always fiercely gesticulating. When I interviewed him a year later at his home in Munich, his wife had just left him the night before, leaving behind a note that she would only return if he would agree to see a psychiatrist. He was pacing up and down his living room, waving his arms as if he was holding a sword in his hand, and at the same time exclaiming: “I can only take my sword and kill myself!” In 1982 the writer Vladimir Voinovich gave a lecture in the bar. His books were usually satirical and magnificently characterized the Soviet system. The book The Extraordinary Life of Private Ivan Chonkin was a classic soon after it was published and it established his fame forever. Shortly Vladimir Voinovich, 1981 before his appearance, the Politburo had stripped him of his Soviet citizenship and that afternoon he had composed a letter to Brezhnev in response. Even before he managed to start reading his letter, his sense of humor overtook him. He started to laugh, tried it again, but every time he had to discontinue because of an overwhelming urge to laugh, shaking with laughter on his chair. Tears were rolling down his cheeks. Only after several attempts he managed to read the whole letter. Voinovich made fun of the decision to strip him of his Soviet citizenship in his own unforgettable way and ended by expressing his conviction that one day people would have to exchange twenty kilos of Brezhnev’s memoirs for one copy of his Ivan Chonkin. The audience roared with laughter, but the laughter of Voinovich was heard above everybody else. The evenings lasted until deep in the night, the mood was excellent and the clumsy Russian of the students must have been an extra attraction for the native Russians who were present. At the same time, the events in the Soviet Union hang like a grey blanket over those present. It was clear things were very bad and getting worse, that the repression was increasing and that the flow of information from the Soviet Union was drying up. As more and more arrests took place, the number of people who were willing to take risks declined. It all looked increasingly hopeless, one dissident samizdat publication after the other ceased to exist. The authorities were

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also becoming more and more violent and merciless. While until that time, outright maltreatment and torture had been exceptions; the authorities were increasingly reverting to these measures. Living conditions in places of detention deteriorated, communication with family was made increasingly difficult and the list of products that family was allowed to send in parcels became shorter and shorter. Also “pressure cells” were used more frequently. The system was quite simple: a prisoner was put in a cell with a number of regular criminals who had been instructed to beat him up. One week, two weeks, three weeks… The guards pretended that they did not notice. Until the prisoner was more dead than alive, or had succumbed to the pressure and agreed to sign a statement that he would collaborate with the KGB. On top of that, fewer political prisoners were released at the end of their term. This method was quite simple. Just before the end of a term the prisoner concerned was charged with another political crime and was given the choice: either sign a statement that he would refrain from further political activity, or a new conviction. Most of the prisoners chose the latter option and disappeared again into the Gulag for an additional number of years. As a result of my growing knowledge of Russian, my range of operation increased considerably. I could now visit people alone, without interpreters, and slowly developed a new list of contacts. Most of them were members of the “second ring” of the dissident movement, the group that did not sign any statements and protests to the authorities themselves, but were an indispensable source of support. They helped the political prisoners and their families, often with financial support of the Solzhenitsyn Fund. That fund had been established by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn with the royalties from his trilogy The Gulag Archipelago and functioned as a kind of social service for the dissident movement. Every family left behind received financial support, dependent on their own income and the number of children. Prisoners who arrived in exile following their term in camp were given new warm clothes, food and the necessary medicines. The “second ring” made sure that everything reached its destination. Most of the material aid that I delivered in Moscow found its way via the “second ring.” In addition, I went every day in Moscow to the currency shops for products. These “Beriozkas” were intended for diplomats, Western correspondents and businessmen, as well as a small group of Soviet citizens who were allowed to enter these shops. Here you could buy things that were either unavailable elsewhere or would take many hours of queuing before you could get them. My shopping list was quite constant:

Robert van Voren salami sausages, cans of ham, milk powder, condensed milk, coffee, sugar and, if available, books of Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelshtam that had been printed in the USSR but were not available in regular shops. They were poets who had been despised and ridiculed by the Stalinist regime and who, in the case of Mandelshtam, had eventually been murdered. They were officially no longer forbidden, but were still in the “twilight zone” and not available to regular Soviet citizens. Loaded with huge bags, I would leave the shop and make myself invisible among the regular public in the streets and metro, carefully hiding the contents of my bags.

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Irina Yakir, Moscow, 1982

One of my standard addresses was Irina Yakir, the granddaughter of Marshall Iona Yakir who had been executed in 1938. Her life story was a kind of mirror of the history of the Soviet Union. Marshall Yakir was one of the most respected commanders of the Red Army and a hero for the Soviet population. In 1937, he fell in disgrace and was arrested. After severe torture he was eventually, together with a number of other army commanders, killed in the basement of the KGB headquarters in Moscow. As usual, his family was also arrested, including his son Pyotr. After having been frightfully tortured, he was sent to the Gulag in Siberia. Here he met his wife, and while still in prison, they got married. They even had a daughter, Irina, born in the Gulag. After Party leader Nikita Khrushchev coincidentally met Poytr Yakir during a visit to the region where he was incarcerated, he gave orders to allow him to return to Moscow. Khrushchev had known Pyotr’s father and apparently felt that he had to intervene. In the 1960s, Pyotr became one of the most famous dissidents in Moscow. His flat was a constant meeting place for other dissidents and Western correspondents, as well as visitors from the West. Also his daughter Irina Yakir had become active in the dissident movement. In June 1972, Pyotr Yakir was arrested and accused of having been involved in the samizdat publication Chronicle of Current Events. After nine months of total isolation and constant interrogation, the eighteen years of imprisonment under Stalin Pyotr Yakir, 1979

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had their effect: Yakir broke down, mentioned the names of many other dissidents and gave a public confession. He was released and returned home. There a dissident daughter awaited him, who had no intention to end her own dissident activities. And that meant that every time people came to the flat for a meeting, he had to leave the room or even the flat. He started drinking and became lonely. One day in 1980 he was walking down the street when a falling tree hit him. Irina managed to get him to the hospital, but the only doctor present was totally drunk and could not stand on his feet. That way Pyotr Yakir ended his life, bleeding to death as a result of a ruptured artery, a tragic end to an even more tragic life. Irina Yakir’s home was a regular address for the delivery of material aid for political prisoners and the collection of information of what happened in camps and psychiatric hospitals. She was also the one who arranged the secret interview with Yuri Kiselyov and who had smuggled me into his house. A visit to Moscow usually started and ended with a visit to her flat, and often she would introduce me to other people involved in the movement. One of these invitations concerned the author of the Tales from Kolyma, Varlam Shalamov, who was languishing in a dilapidated nursing home in Tuntsevo, near Moscow. Irina visited him regularly, took care of him and brought him food. I, unfortunately, declined the invitation as I was too busy and had to go and see someone else at the time. Later I was deeply sorry for my stupidity, because in 1982 Shalamov died and I had missed he Last photo of Varlam Shalamov opportunity to meet a unique person.

Chapter 5

Demonstrating in Poland The year of the Olympic Games was not only the year of a wave of repression among dissidents in the Soviet Union, it was also the year of the free trade union Solidarnosc, and the newly established freedom in Poland attracted me like a magnet. The trade union had been established after a strike at the Lenin shipyard in the Northern Polish city of Gdansk, led by trade union activist Lech Walesa. The strike had initially been of a local nature, but gradually it became more and more national and, eventually, the authorities backed down. Undoubtedly the election of a Pole, Karol Woytyla, to the position of Pope of the Catholic Church had given the Poles wings. It was not the first time that the Poles rose against their communist rulers, but it was the first time that the intellectuals and workers joined forces. Before only one of the two groups had rebelled but the other had refused to join, providing the authorities the opportunity to quell the uprising with force. A combined resistance was, however, too much for the authorities to handle. After the authorities had agreed with all the demands of the strikers, among them being the founding of a free trade union, the agreement was signed at an official ceremony. A victorious Lech Walesa signed the agreement with an enormous ballpoint with a clearly visible picture of the Polish Pope John Paul II on it. The humiliation of the communist authorities could not have been more painful. Bigos Poland opened up to the outside world, and I wanted to be part of it. Together with my girlfriend, I traveled to Poland in the summer of 1981 when we spent a month visiting the country. After a short stay in Warsaw, we flew in a rickety Antonov plane to Gdansk, the base of Solidarnosc, where a beautiful monument of three enormous crosses in front of the shipyard symbolized the resistance against the communist rulers. It was an impressive moment. This was still communist Eastern Europe, and you had to pinch your arm to realize that this was reality, not a dream. Everywhere were flags, stickers and buttons of Solidarnosc, a free press, people who openly expressed their opinion. The difference with Moscow was one of day and night. Poland was going through a deep economic crisis; at least that was the impression given by looking at the shops. We had been forced to exchange a standard amount of Western currency to Polish zlotys, and

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the result was an impossible stack of banknotes that we couldn’t spend. There was hardly anything available in the shops. Later, it became clear that this had been on purpose: the Polish rulers stored food products in warehouses in order to deepen the crisis. The critical situation would be used to legitimize a state of martial law, after which the shops would be filled with the products from the warehouses and everybody would see that life was much better since communism had been restored. Only at the open market could we still buy things, and that is where we usually did our shopping. Our meals consisted of apples, mushrooms and tomatoes. For breakfast, mashed apples with tomato; for lunch, tomato salad with apple as desert, and for dinner, fried mushrooms, mashed apples and tomato. Lovely. And if we were lucky we would find a lonely pack of bigos in the freezer of the supermarket, a typical Polish cabbage meal. To create variety we sometimes dined in a restaurant, but the choice there was not much greater. Our favorite was the Russian restaurant in the Culture Palace in Warsaw, the sugar cake that Stalin had “donated” to the city after the war, and that for the Poles was the ultimate symbol of Soviet oppression. They had an extensive menu, but it made no sense to choose. Everything we selected was unavailable, and finally the grim waiter pointed with his finger at the only course they had available: rabbit. Good, then we’ll have two times rabbit! The plates came back twenty minutes later. It turned out to be some kind of stew with a bone here and there but almost no meat. Armed with a fat pack of zlotys in our pocket, we ordered another round of the same, and to the surprise of the waiter, after that a starter. We could eat as much as we wanted since the money remained a constant burden for us. After Gdansk and Warsaw, we went to Katowice and visited the extermination camp complex Auschwitz-Birkenau, to which we were taken by a moonshining Pole. On the road, we managed to buy a bottle of holy wine from a Romanian priest who was selling his earthly (but all the same holy) goods in order to pay for his petrol. The wine had a sacred taste. Finally, we took a local train to the mountains of Zakopane, which went at such a speed that you might as well walk next to it, and we eventually reached the mountainous border of Czechoslovakia. Staying overnight in a mountain cabin put us in contact with a group of youngsters from Warsaw. Like us, they were in their early twenties, almost continuously euphoric because of the suddenly acquired freedom and the possibilities it offered. They continuously practiced their English with us, and of course politics was the eternal object of conversation. Contact with foreigners was no longer dangerous; the world seemed to be open to them and looked fantastic. This stimulating optimism was noticeable everywhere. At the

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campground in Warsaw, we were awakened in the middle of the night by a boy from a neighboring tent, whom we didn’t know at all. “Pink Floyd is coming!” he shouted and he signaled that I should climb out of my bed. Pink Floyd was not coming at all, but there was a rumor that they were intending to come, and that was enough to let him go crazy with happiness. Pink Floyd in Warsaw, then the country was really free! While dancing he went from tent to tent, waking up people with his empty rumor. Back in Warsaw we visited our new friends, the core being a brother and sister, whose father was a member of the municipal council on behalf of the Communist Party and the mother a board member of the journalist union of Solidarnosc. Their house sometimes looked like a front line, only they were fighting with words. Dad was alone in front of his wife and kids, but still the family stayed together and there was love on both sides. It was democracy in a nutshell. Drive on to Berlin Five months after our trip, General Jaruzelsky ended freedom and declared a state of emergency. Shortly before this action, I had been visiting Bukovsky during one of my regular visits to Cambridge. Coincidentally during my visit, his friend Adam Michnik, one of the leading Polish dissidents at that time, telephoned. His photo was in the newspaper, and Bukovsky remarked jokingly: “Adam, you have become too fat, it is time you wind up in prison again!” These turned out to be prophetic words, because a few weeks later, Adam was back in jail. The country was locked up, dissidents and trade unionists went behind bars and military rule ended the short-lived freedom. During clashes with the military, dozens of people were killed. The state of emergency lasted a year and a half. During that time, we hardly had any contact with our Polish friends. At the end of April 1982, the country opened up again, and we returned with the first international train that was allowed to enter. It was an impressive journey. We crossed Germany, with a long stop at train station Friedrichstrasse in East-Berlin where we saw from our carriage how the East-German border guards sent a dog with short legs under the train to check whether anyone was trying to flee communism. The station was full of flags of socialist brother nations hanging from the ceiling, a view that constantly reminded me of photos of Nazi Germany, where the same type of red flags with swastikas had been hanging from the buildings. The behavior of the custom officers and the people’s police, the Vopos, strengthened the sense that one dictatorial

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regime had been exchanged for the other; but, in reality, much had remained the same. The flags, the strict militaristic control machinery, the youth movement Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ) so similar to the Hitlerjugend under the Nazis was eerie. At the border, we noticed the difference from the period of Solidarnosc. In 1981, the Polish border guards constantly excused themselves for the harsh behavior of their East-German colleagues and happily went through the train carriages without paying any attention to the luggage; it was now almost the other way around. The East Germans were business-like and without emotion, while the Polish officers turned everything upside down. The passengers had to get out, the couches were carefully screened and subsequently the bags were searched. We had piles of “suspicious goods” with us, the same materials we used to bring to the Soviet dissident movement: magical slates, type-ex, carbon paper, ballpoints, a whole variety of goods that would be handy for any underground movement. To our relief, nothing was confiscated and we continued our trip without a problem. Warsaw had changed. The optimistic atmosphere was gone, and the grey communist blanket again enveloped the city. There were a lot of extra military and policemen on the streets, because in a few days it would be May 1 and the authorities expected serious trouble. That was not so strange, because the now illegal trade union Solidarnosc wanted to use the festivity marking Labor Day to demonstrate against the military regime and to show that they were far from dead. The authorities, of course, wanted to do everything to prevent this from happening. Our friends were preparing for this direct confrontation with the rulers. Mother was secretively still active as a trade unionist, and father pretended he didn’t notice anything, or would walk the dog when secret meetings were held in his apartment. The underground resistance was meeting in his living room, but his loyalty was more with his family than with the Communist Party. The son had been in jail for a while, and was now active within the Catholic Church. Plans for the demonstration were drawn up and, without question, we agreed to participate in the demonstration: that was exactly why we had come to Poland! Early in the morning of May 1, we took the bus to the center of the city. The bus passed the statute of Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Polish communist who founded the secret police Cheka, the predecessor of the KGB, in Russia in 1917. Dzerzhinsky had the nickname “Bloody Felix” and that night supporters of Solidarnosc painted the hands of the statue red. The bus

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routes to the center had been diverted, as we were informed by the driver on the intercom. “We are going to Praha,” we heard him announce through the speakers, referring to one of the suburbs of Warsaw. “Then why don’t you drive on to West-Berlin!” one of the passengers shouted, followed by the roaring laughter of the passengers on the bus. The inner city of Warsaw looked like a war zone. Everywhere were busses full of ZOMO, the Polish riot police. The policemen looked scary, dressed in special black suits, with big helmets, shields and batons. Many of the ZOMO officers were wearing mirrored sunglasses, making it impossible to see their eyes. With a small group, we moved in the direction of the old town. There others already started forming a crowd. Every time the group increased to several hundred participants, the ZOMO attacked. In the distance, we could hear their boots rumbling on the cobblestones and then, suddenly, we would see them coming around the corner, running with the shields in one hand and with the other waving their baton in anticipation of a confrontation. This image of the charging riot police reminded us of Amsterdam, where regular fights took place between police and squatters and where innocent bystanders could wind up in the middle of the fight and barely avoid being beaten up. But this was different, far more threatening. This ZOMO was extremely violent, as if they had been aroused to the max by something. With fierce determination, they would race after us, trying to hit demonstrators. Those people unfortunate enough to be caught received an endless salvo of baton-strikes. Arrested demonstrators were pushed into the prison vans, bleeding profusely and often hardly conscious. Photo of the demonstrations in Warsaw, made by the author

This game of cat and mouse lasted the whole morning. Tired of running and of the constant tension, we eventually left the battleground, but

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we were also not safe elsewhere in the center. We were constantly stopped by ZOMO, and then surrounded by a group of overly excited “gorillas” that demanded to see our documents. Polish citizens were pushed into a prison van without any exception, but because of our foreign passports, we were allowed to go, only to be stopped around the corner by the next group of ZOMO. At night we met at our friends’ home. We all had managed to escape the ZOMO; we had been lucky. Solidarnosc had shown itself to be alive and kicking, the state of emergency had made the movement even more determined and it had appeared strengthened rather than weakened. The basis had been laid for the next struggle against the communist dictatorship. Eight years later, Lech Walesa would become President of Poland.

Chapter 6

Playing “musical chairs” with the WPA Our association of national committees against the political abuse of psychiatry focused its activities completely on the World Psychiatric Association (WPA). The goal of the campaign was to convince this umbrella organization that the Soviets had ignored the resolution of Honolulu, continued the political abuse of psychiatry unabatedly and had not released the political prisoners being held in psychiatric institutions. In other words, the Soviets did not only violate the resolution in which they had been condemned, but also the Honolulu Declaration, in which the use of psychiatry for nonmedical purposes had been outlawed. The All Union Society also had never responded to any request made by the WPA Review Committee on Abuses of Psychiatry. Therefore, only one conclusion was possible: the membership of the Soviets had to be suspended or terminated. However, the executive committee of the WPA did not agree with this conclusion. Many of the executive committee members maintained good relations with the psychiatric leadership in Moscow, which not only denied that something was wrong but was actually, at the same time, itself responsible for the development and sophistication of this means of repression. Members of the executive committee of the WPA, as well as board members of large Western psychiatric associations, were treated royally during their visits to Moscow and were shown psychiatric hospitals where everything looked fine. The Soviets campaigned against these “unjust attacks” on them, played a clever game of being one moment insulted and the other angry and upset, and many of the visitors bought it. In particular, the Armenian Marat Vartanyan was masterful in his dealings with the WPA and other visitors. He had been a Vice President of the WPA before the World Congress in 1977 and continued to represent the USSR at WPA Congresses and symposia. Being by nature flamboyant, hospitable, full of humor and with a Western style, he managed to fool one after the other. It was second nature to him - he had played this game during his whole scientific career. With psychiatrists, he would declare that he didn’t know much about the psychiatric system because he was a geneticist; in front of geneticists, he maintained that he was “just a psychiatrist” and therefore did not really know all the details of genetics. He was as slick as one could be, and had no problem lying in the blink of an eye. Being completely unscrupulous both in words and in behavior, he was the perfect ambassador of Soviet psychiatry. The WPA did not want to take any action and refused any sanction against the Soviets. The psychology of the average WPA Executive

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Committee member played an important role. In the course of the years we – that is, all those who were connected to our campaign – got to know many of them, and often saw them functioning from very close distance, and not always in the most pleasant manner. They could be divided into three categories: the smallest group consisted of scientists Jim Birley (l.) receiving a Distinguished who were not interested in power and influence, but Fellowship of the American Psychiatric who sincerely believed that Association. the WPA could contribute to the development of mental health care and had joined the executive committee for that reason. These were individual cases, and they soon became allies in our campaign. Then followed a much larger category, the psychiatrists who seemed to be honest, who created the impression that they were concerned with the advance of their profession, but who soon after becoming a member of the executive of the WPA went into a free fall. Within several months, they started to suffer from what we called “WPAitis,” the megalomaniacal feeling that they ruled the world. Individuals in the third category had this feeling from the very beginning, and that was the exact reason why they wanted to be elected to the board of the association. Not free from narcissism and an inflated image of themselves, far detached from the daily psychiatric practice, they traveled around the globe, from conference to conference. Our future chairman, Professor Jim Birley used to call them “airport psychiatrists.” Our call for a medicalethics approach had absolutely no effect on them. Their goal was to make the association as big as possible, and without having the Soviet society on board they would no longer be able to maintain their claim that they represented the whole world. The only way to force the WPA to take a position was via its member associations. They would send their delegates to the General Assembly of the WPA to vote on all resolutions brought before them by member societies. Their number of votes was dependent on the size of the membership of the association and the size of their financial contribution to the WPA. The biggest member associations were, among others, the American, British, Italian and Japanese. If we could convince them, as well

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as a number of the European psychiatric associations, then a majority would be in favor of expelling the Soviets or suspending their membership. The committee of representatives of IAPUP met regularly in order to determine our strategy and to see how the vote distribution was developing. Within several associations we already had our supporters, who lobbied and informed us how things were developing. And one association after the other adopted a resolution in which the General Assembly of the WPA was asked to consider ending the membership of the Soviet member association. The IAPUP meetings were usually protracted ones, without any simultaneous translation, everything in English, French and German. Long deliberations and exposes, sometimes strong differences of opinion, agitated activists who were convinced they had the best approach. There was no voting, as it was a confederation, a temporary association, and so it was a matter of discussing as long as was need until all the noses were standing in the same direction. The Czech-British psychiatrist Dr. Gery Low-Beer, one of the first activists against the political abuse, found a nice solution to this. He would doze off and slowly his snoring would fill the room. However, right at the moment when a decision had to be made he would wake up, voice his opinion, and after the decision was taken he would continue his nap. At the end of 1982 it was clear that we had reached our target: the majority in the General Assembly would vote for expulsion. Apparently also the Soviets had come to that conclusion, because in January 1983 they kept the honor to themselves. In a fuming letter they informed the executive committee of the WPA that they could no longer accept the unfounded accusations and insults and that they withdrew from the WPA. It was an enormous loss of prestige, never before had a super power been forced to leave a global scientific organization because of violations of human rights. World Congress in Vienna Still the battle was not over yet. It was now important that the General Assembly adopt a resolution that would put conditions to the return of the Soviet society. Also a resolution was put forward calling on the WPA to accept the dissident psychiatrist Dr. Anatoly Koryagin as an honorary member. Dr. Koryagin at that moment was serving a term of imprisonment of seven years’ camp and five years’ exile because of his membership in

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the Moscow Working Commission. In addition, the idea was raised that it would be helpful to the cause if we could promote several candidates for membership of the executive committee who would support our moral and ethical position from within the organization and who would be less susceptible for the wining and dining of the Soviets. The World Congress in Vienna in the summer of 1983 was the first time that I attended such a large meeting. As courier to the Soviet Union, I thought it would be best not to show my face too much, and in order to hide my true appearance a bit I had grown a beard. On top of that I decided to stay in the shadows. That was not so difficult, because although I was the only one who knew most of the members of the Working Commission personally, I was and remained a strange element in the team. I was not a psychiatrist, had no medical background, had just turned 24, with long hair and a beard, was an activist by nature and was inclined to take action and not waste too much time on discussions and diplomatic approaches. One of the members of our group would regularly remind me that I was not a psychiatrist and therefore should remain Robert van Voren with beard,, in the background. 1983 Ellen Mercer, Director of the Office of International Affairs of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), played a very prominent role. Ellen was a well-known figure in international psychiatry. She knew everybody, and everybody knew her. When she entered a room it was impossible not to notice. With a considerably strong voice and usually accompanying her talking with a lot of laughing, with almost illuminated grey hair, a lot of charm and a great sense of humor, she managed to maintain relationships with all parties. Everybody considered her to be an ally, the Soviets, the WPA and us as well. What the others did not know, however, was that she was our secret service, our ears and eyes. As Director for International Affairs of the APA, she participated in most meetings, had direct access to internal documents Ellen Mercer

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of the WPA and knew exactly who was taking which position. Ellen participated in the meetings of our committee of representatives and helped develop our strategy. She was our secret weapon. Also in Vienna she played this role. We did not have a stand, and the executive committee had forbidden that we disseminate our literature during the congress. Thus Ellen decided to put our material on the table of the APA, resulting in an angry outburst of the General Secretary of the WPA, the Austrian Peter Berner, who almost had a heart attack on the spot, swept the materials angrily off the table and ran off, fuming. Ellen was threatened with disciplinary action, but was supported by her immediate boss, Melvin Sabshin, who had been medical director of the APA for as long as one could remember. It ended with a fizzle, but the atmosphere remained very tense. Also the General Assembly was tumultuous. The President of the WPA, the Frenchman Pierre Pichot, made a complete mess of it and prolonged the meeting as much as possible. First the assembly debated whether the departure of the Soviets should be accepted at all. Subsequently, a resolution was brought forward by somebody who did not even have the right to do so, and as a result the resolution had to be annulled. In the end, the British delegate Kenneth Rawnsley presented a resolution in which the return of the Soviets was welcomed on the condition that they would end the political abuse of psychiatry. The resolution had been phrased very diplomatically and was eventually accepted with an overwhelming majority. The resolution to make Dr. Anatoly Koryagin an honorary member of the WPA was more contentious, but was eventually adopted with a two-thirds majority. Then, the election of the new executive committee started. As a first-time observer to such proceedings, I didn’t know if regular procedures were followed, but I had the distinct impression that quite a number of delegates were completely unprepared. Names were mentioned and disappeared again off the table. In the meantime, every now and then a delegate friendly to our cause would step outside in order to report to us. We were sitting in the lobby outside the meeting hall, anxious for news, as if we were watching a soccer game. The day before, the Dane Fini Schulsinger had been nominated as candidate for the position of General Secretary. We supported his candidacy, because we had heard that he was a member of Amnesty International and on top of that we had heard rumors that he had shown himself to be an opponent of the political abuse of psychiatry. His election made the main candidate for Presidency withdraw his candidacy.

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The Austrian Peter Berner, by then probably exhausted because of all the irritation and frustration, the same man who had swept our materials off the table of the APA, refused to work together with Fini Schulsinger and withdrew from the election. That caused a deadlock; what to do? One of the delegates who supported us walked out of the Assembly asking who we could recommend as president? I had seen the Dutch professor Bastiaans of the Center 1940-1945 sitting in the restaurant, and immediately went to him with the question whether he would agree to become president of the WPA. Bastiaans, international renowned for his treatment of former concentration camp inmates, a big man with an equally big ego, did not have to think for a long time, even though a completely unknown young man made the proposal. Sure, he had no problem with that proposition! He quickly finished his lunch and followed me to the lobby, where he shortly consulted with the delegate who had asked us to find someone. This man went back inside and proposed Bastiaans’ candidacy. It turned out to be in vain, because during the voting Professor Bastiaans lost against the Greek candidate Costas Stefanis. Subsequently the rest of the executive committee was elected. In spite of the Soviet resignation and the decision of several Eastern European member associations to withdraw from the WPA, an Eastern European was voted into the executive committee: the Hungarian Professor Pal Juhasz from Budapest. Juhasz was known to be an ethical person, and, thus, we applauded his election. It was, however, exactly this ethical position that caused him trouble. After the World Congress, he was immediately pressured by his government and called in for questioning on several occasions. From Stasi archives, we later found out that his main “crime” had been that he did not stick to an agreement reached between the socialist member societies and had not condemned the attacks on the Soviet society. Instead, he had agreed to be elected to the WPA executive committee. He was disciplined by the Party, then also by his Ministry of Health and finally lost his post as President of the Hungarian Psychiatric Association. Merely seven months after the World Congress, on February 27, 1984, he died of a heart attack. The Hungarian authorities informed the executive committee of the WPA that their presence at his funeral was undesirable. One could not think of a clearer sign that Juhasz had run into trouble with the authorities. An East German, Jochen Neumann, took his place. He was not an unfriendly character who, as we later discovered, was at the same time a Stasi agent and kept his bosses in East Berlin and Moscow informed of everything that happened within the WPA. How Neumann managed to get himself elected as a successor to Juhasz is not

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totally clear. However, the same Stasi archives indicate that it was a very carefully concerted effort by his bosses in East Berlin and the Soviets. It seems that the initial idea of the Stasi was to have his nomination for the post presented to the new President of the WPA, Costas Stefanis, by Soviet psychiatrist Marat Vartanyan, the main apologist for Soviet psychiatry (who, it appears, were in close contact). However, because of lack of time and the urgency of the matter, the East German Psychiatric Society was instructed to send a telegram to Stefanis nominating Neumann, who was subsequently sent by the Stasi to Italy to get himself elected, in which he succeeded. A very fishy situation, that is for sure. The World Congress in Vienna was, in our view, a success. The resolution that put conditions to a Soviet return had been adopted, Koryagin had become an honorary member of the WPA and we had the feeling that an executive committee had been elected that would support our positions. It seemed we had reached our goals, if not for the fact that opponents of the political abuse of psychiatry were still behind bars and that soon we discovered that the internment of dissenters in psychiatric hospitals did not stop. Only the method changed: well-known dissidents disappeared to the camps, and a large portion of the lesser-known dissidents went to the hospitals. As soon as their names would become known in the West they would be transferred to the camps.

Chapter 7

The Soviet Union in 1985 After five years of repression, not much was left of the dissident movement. Most of the dissidents had been sentenced to long terms of imprisonment or forced into emigration. Many of the political prisoners who were supposed to return home after completing their term of imprisonment, had been offered a very simple choice: either sign a statement in which they promised to refrain from future political activities, or face a new arrest and conviction on basis of a faked charge. The exception who dared to speak out and express his opinion had only a limited “term of expiration” as dissident: soon they would be called up for questioning by the KGB, house searches would start, harassments and condemnations by “labor collectives” and eventually the inevitable arrest. The number of political prisoners that lost their lives during imprisonment grew rapidly. The country itself just buried its third leader in the course of three years. The old and worn Leonid Brezhnev had died in November 1982 after a month-long absence and the list of diseases and ailments in his obituary was just as long as the number of medals that had adorned the chest of this party leader. His successor became the former chairman of the KGB Yuri Andropov, the architect of the policy of repression of the dissident movement and for the outside world, a first class hawk. Within fifteen months of almost constant absence, his leadership also ended. Subsequently Konstantin Chernenko was shoved forward, but he turned out to be just as worn out as his two immediate predecessors and disappeared quite soon from the scene, only to die after months of absence from a long list of ailments and diseases. The Soviet Union seemed to have gotten stuck. While all international obligations were met and the façade of a superpower was upheld, at home the country was in shambles. The economy sunk in an ever-deeper crisis and the food deficits became increasingly serious. Grain was imported in large quantities from Canada and the United States, basic necessities like sugar, flour, butter and meat were often unavailable. In the meantime, the connection between the authorities and the mafia had gotten stronger by the day and it was possible to refer to them as a unity of two. Many mafia-bosses had a highly-placed protector, or a service that offered protection and in exchange shared part of the acquired wealth. One mafia group was supported by the police, the other by the state automobile inspection GAI, a third by the KGB, and so they could do their business uninterrupted. Even the family of Brezhnev was up to their ears in mafia business. Daughter Galina was married to “Boris the Gypsy,” a character

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It is said that it was Yuri Andropov who understood the necessity of building a bridge to the younger generation and who pushed the young Mikhail Gorbachev to a more prominent position. Although this was not in line with his generally accepted position as a hawk, as Boris Tsvigun head of the KGB he was inevitably extremely well informed and should have known more than anyone how precarious the situation really was. Nothing was left of Communist fervor and there was no longer the belief that somebody believed in the optimistic dream that Soviet communism was about to overtake capitalism. The slogans were repeated without any conviction, and, beyond that, people were not fed ideological nonsense. You didn’t have to be a visionary to see that this couldn’t go on much longer and that the country was on the edge of the abyss. For Andropov, it was probably more an issue of survival than a sudden surge of democratic feelings. A new wind blowing? The man who became Party leader in the spring of 1985 was surely much younger, but if you looked at the series of Soviet portraits, he didn’t seem to be much more colorful than his colleagues. In the early photos of Gorbachev, there was no sign of the birthmark on his forehead and in officially distributed photographs, he had exactly the same expressionless face as the other members of the gang. At the same time, his election was a clear break with the past. He was the first Party leader who had not lived through the Second World War as an adult and who had not served as a party bureaucrat in the fearful and dangerous times of Josef Stalin. As we found out later, he was coming from a family that had suffered under Stalinist terror and his grandfather had spent many years in the Gulag. As a result, Mikhail Gorbachev undoubtedly had his own view of the achievements of Soviet communism. Gorbachev was facing a virtually impossible task. Not only did he lead the biggest political disaster area of the twentieth century, he also had to uphold its status as a superpower, was in charge of a huge nuclear arsenal and had to share that power with a group of communist dinosaurs who had turned the slogan “until death does us part” as their prime objective.

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In 1985, it was still very difficult to see how the policies of Gorbachev would lead to any radical change. In April 1985, the plenum of the Communist Party mentioned a plan for reforms and also at other meetings the word “reforms” was used repeatedly, but in practice very little happened that could be considered as being radical. The first signs of change came in the summer of 1985. Andrei Gromyko, who had been the Minister of Foreign Affairs for 28 years and was internationally known as “Mr. Nyet,” was replaced by Eduard Shevardnadze, who would later become President of independent Georgia. Later that year Gorbachev started a campaign against alcohol abuse that turned out to be an outright disaster. While the original idea was to limit the widespread abuse of alcohol in Soviet society, the campaign only stimulated the illegal production of alcohol and the State lost hundreds of millions of Rubles of tax money. The mafia found a new source of income with the illegal production of alcohol. Old wine regions such as in Georgia and Moldova were burned down without any consideration of their economic, historic and emotional values, which led to irreparable damage to their national economies. The campaign promised little good for the remainder of Gorbachev’s reform policies and would establish his reputation in these republics for many decades to come. Even now, more than twenty years later, the reaction to mentioning his name in, for instance, Tbilisi is one of anger: “The man who destroyed century old wine producing Georgian regions.” Only a few years later, when Gorbachev had firmly established his power base and the worst Soviet hawks had been moved to the sideline, he would get the chance to deal with issues in a different manner. The first reference to “ perestroika,” a thorough reform of the Soviet system, was made during the Twenty-seventh party Congress in the spring of 1986. For many the reform plans did not go far enough. The break with the past came a month later, when, in April 1986, one of the nuclear reactions in Chernobyl exploded and huge clouds of nuclear waste were spread all over Europe. After many days of silence and a first denial, there came official statements that indeed something went wrong. The statement by the Ukrainian Minister of Health that it was not all that bad and that a little radiation was even good for your health was, no doubt, seen as a temporary result of old habits. The region was evacuated, cities like Chernobyl and Pripyat given back to the contaminated nature and the infallibility of the Soviet Union was put on the graveyard of history. And finally, later in 1986, Gorbachev would do what nobody had considered to be possible and what only Party leader Nikita Khrushchev

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had done before him in 1954-1955: he would order the release of all political prisoners in the Soviet Union. This was the result of the enormous international protest that followed the death of the well-known political prisoner Anatoly Marchenko. At the beginning, they were released one by one with conditions but, eventually, at the beginning of 1987 he would open the doors altogether and a new era would start for the democratization movement in the Soviet Union. However, for the time being this all sounded like future music. For most of the Sovietologists, Gorbachev seemed to be more of the same. I was also one of the skeptics, and the title of one of my books in 1988 clearly resounded that view: “Between Hope and Illusion”, with a clear emphasis on the latter. I couldn’t dare to believe that a new era would start; for me, it was all still somber and discouraging. In 1985, the atmosphere in Moscow was one of drabness, a discouraging sequence of bad news coming out of the camps and prisons. We continued to hope for improvement in the situation but, at the same time, were aware that our hopes were far from the reality.

Chapter 8

Sleeping behind my desk Irina Grivnina had been sentenced to five years in exile in the beginning of 1981 and, after deducting pre-trail detention, a total of more than two years were still left to be served. One day in prison counted for three days in exile and as pre-trial detention had lasted for quite some time her total time of punishment had been considerably shortened. After her arrival in her place of exile in Kazakhstan, her daughter joined her; her husband stayed behind in Moscow.

One of the first photos of Irina Grivnina and her daughter Masha in exile, 1981 Soon contact had been reestablished. We corresponded telephoned every one or two weeks. That was not an easy task. The telephone conversations had to be ordered at the foreign department of the Dutch telephone service. Normally the phone call would then be arranged almost automatically, but in this case it was more complicated. I had to call the Dutch telephone service, explain to them what was going on and ask them to connect me with the operator in Moscow under the pretext that I spoke Russian and could organize the call more easily. Usually, after that, things would go quite smoothly. Following my explanation and a few kind words, the operator in Moscow would connect me to the post office in the village where Grivnina lived, and often I would hear her already in the distance, shouting that she was there and ready to talk. After some time this became routine, the operators at all three locations knew us, and the link was established quite quickly. The conversations were not just about her situation, to the contrary. She maintained contact with other prisoners in exile and the families of other political prisoners who had no communication with the outside world. Grivnina would then pass on their information during our conversations, completely fearless, just like before her arrest in 1980. In addition to the information I collected during my trips to Moscow and the information from fellow couriers, it was one the important sources of information for campaigns in the West.

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The dissident movement in the West had gradually separated into two camps. On one hand you had the camp of Vladimir Bukovsky with his “Resistance International” which had its offices on the Champs Elysées in Paris, and later in a street behind Avenue Foch, not far from the Arc de Triomphe. His core group consisted of people like the writer Vladimir Maksimov, author of the beautiful novel Seven Days of Creation, Eduard Kuznetsov, one of the members of the Jewish emigration movement arrested in 1971 because of their plan to hijack a plane to Israel and had initially been sentenced to death. Around them were a mixture of dissidents, former prisoners from Stalin’s Gulag and a wide range of anti-communists. I was usually automatically considered to be a member of this group, because Bukovsky had introduced me into the world of dissidents. The other group was led by Kronid Lubarsky in Munich and Ludmilla Alekseeva in New York. Alekseeva had been a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group and was forced to leave the Soviet Union in 1977 in order to avoid arrest. Kronid Lubarsky had been an editor of the Chronicle of Current Events and had been sentenced to five years in 1973. After that he had left the Soviet Union, settled in Germany and published the journal Vesti iz SSSR (News from the USSR). Friend and foe agreed that his publication was of vital importance; it was a dry listing of all the events that concerned the Soviet dissident movement, including searches, interrogations, arrests, convictions, and news from prisons, camps and psychiatric hospitals. All the information that people like Grivnina passed on, or that I and others smuggled to the West, was published in Vesti iz USSR. Many of the people around Lubarsky also belonged to my circle of friends and acquaintances, but the Russians among them always looked at me with a certain level of distrust because of my connection to Vladimir Bukovsky. Kronid Lubarsky Apart from these two camps there were a number of separate groups that did not participate in this power struggle. These included the group of Russian emigrants linked to the émigré publishing house Possev in Frankfurt am Main, which in turn was closely linked to another Russian émigré organization, the NTS (Narodno Trudovoi Soyuz, the people’s labor movement). The latter was a neo fascist organization that in the 1930s tried several times to topple the Soviet regime and was notorious because

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it was heavily infiltrated by the Soviet secret service, all the way up to its leadership. Another group worked at Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, a radio station that was financed by the Americans and was housed in a well protected building at Öttingenstrasse in the Bavarian capital Munich and broadcasted twenty-four hours a day in many languages to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In the course of the years my link to Vladimir Bukovsky weakened. I concentrated on the political prisoners in the Soviet Union and in particular on my friends, and apart from that on the campaign against the political abuse of psychiatry. Bukovsky’s ambitions went much further: he wanted to end communism all over the world, and thus the globe was his battlefield: from Nicaragua to Vietnam, from Angola to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. During the years that he studied biology in Cambridge and later in California, I visited him regularly. After his return to England the frequency gradually decreased. I may have been too stubborn for him and I had too many contacts with people with whom he fundamentally disagreed. I would see him every now and then in Paris, where I traveled once every two-three months to visit the offices of Russkaya Mysl, a Russian-language émigré newspaper that was financed by the Americans and which was one of the main sources of information for of the Russians abroad. I published my articles there and exchanged news with the editors. Apart from that I was obliged to visit the offices of Resistance International, which I tried to keep as short as possible and where an always-morose Vladimir Maksimov was using his associates to get rid of his frustration and a constant flow of anticommunists passed through the office. If Bukovsky was in Paris, dinner would be a collective party at one of the restaurants on the Champs Elysées: a long table with the whole leadership of the dissident movement, eating a steady flow of oysters that were served on large trays. Sometimes Bukovsky sent me to instruct people for their trips. One day I was sent to Rome for a meeting with two members of the Partito Radicale Italiana, an Italian political party that supported the dissident movement as much as it could. Antonio Stango and Savik Shuster were planning to travel to Afghanistan, which at that moment was occupied by the Soviets. The idea was that they would “decorate” the walls in Kabul with false Krasnaya Zvezda’s (Red Star), the Soviet army newspaper. The newspaper looked like the original, but was full of articles by dissidents in which Soviet soldiers were urged to leave Afghanistan and in which reports were published on the crimes committed by Soviet soldiers in the country. The front page had a large heading reading “All

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Home!” including a drawing of a Soviet soldier who was breaking his gun in half. I told Stango and Shuster how I smuggled my stuff into the Soviet Union. Shortly after our meeting, they managed to enter Afghanistan and succeeded in their goal: during the night, when Soviet soldiers had retreated into their military bases, they glued false Krasnaya Zvezda’s on the walls of houses in Kabul. One day, just after a visit to the offices of Resistance International, I met an old friend, Viktor Fainberg. It was pure coincidence, and Viktor was both happy and shocked. “I don’t have my teeth with me,” he said, “can you please wait here on a bench, I will go home and get them, I feel terribly ashamed.” And off he went, before I could respond. Viktor was quite a character. I met him for the first time in Paris in 1980, shortly after he had tried, together with Vladimir Borisov, Andrei Amalrik and his wife Gyuzel, to travel from France to Spain illegally in order to attend a conference on the Helsinki Accords. They had to cross the border illegally because all four of them were stateless and the Spaniards refused to let them in, afraid of a confrontation with the Soviets. The trip had been endless, in the middle of the night they had lost their way in the Pyrenées Mountains, had driven in circles and only the next afternoon, after more than 24 hours in the car, had they reached the highway to Madrid. Here the car had slipped and hit a truck. A piece of metal had plunged into Amalrik’s neck and he tragically bled to Andrei Amalrik death because of a severed artery. The world was shocked. Fainberg was sitting on the edge of my bed and was rolling a cigarette. Not a normal one, because Fainberg missed Soviet papyrosy, and thus he bought a Soviet newspaper, tore of a piece, took some pipe tobacco and rolled the piece of newspaper into a cigarette. After lighting it the room would fill itself with blue smoke and an enormous stench; but Fainberg was sitting with a satisfied face smoking his cigarette. When asked how this accident could have happened, he answered calmly: “Well, when you put four Russians in one car you have five different opinions.” Apparently they had had a quarrel, being overly tired, and as a result the car had wound up on the wrong side of the road.

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Fainberg was, like Larisa Bogoraz, one of the seven people who had demonstrated on Red Square in Moscow in 1968 against the invasion into Czechoslovakia. He had been sent to the Special Psychiatric Hospital in Leningrad for compulsory treatment, where he was incarcerated for a period of five years. During his internment a psychiatrist working in the institution, Marina Voikhanskaya, fell in love with him. She helped him as much as she could, and after his release they married and emigrated to the United Kingdom. The fight to get permission to have her son come to England was front-page news for quite some time. The marriage between the two was doomed, however, as the combination was an impossible one. After their divorce, Marina stayed in the United Kingdom and Viktor moved to Paris. Viktor had two flaws - traveling and making telephone calls. He traveled around Europe, from one place to the next. The warnings preceded him: Viktor is on his way! You never knew how long he would stay, you only knew that your telephone bill would grow to unimaginable proportions. Viktor’s host could assume that he/she would have time for nothing else because Viktor liked to talk, for hours, whether on the Viktor Fainberg with the author, phone or in person. Paris, 1980 An acquaintance in Copenhagen even had his phone disconnected when he heard that Viktor was on his way. But even that was no guarantee, because he discovered that the empty apartment next door was not locked and still had a phone. He climbed to the other balcony, entered the flat and enjoyed a quiet environment for phone calls. Eventually, the telephone company presented the bill to Viktor’s acquaintance. In Amsterdam, Viktor was put up in the office of the Bukovsky Foundation. He slept on the floor, which didn’t bother him at all. He could stay for a month or longer. Of course, admonitions not to use the phone too long had no effect whatsoever, it was more a tradition than something that would have any effect. On top of everything, Henk Wolzak gave him artificial teeth, because after all these years in imprisonment not much was left of the original ones. One morning we entered the office and found Viktor sleeping on the ground with his arm in a cast. He got himself up, in a good mood like

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always, and immediately started talking. The night before he had gone out and met a couple that was having a quarrel. The man was beating up his wife. Viktor couldn’t stand quarrels and had intervened, telling the man to keep his hands off. To his surprise the woman had turned against him, and had broken his arm with a direct hit of her handbag. This did not dampen Viktor’s mood; he had seen worse. It took an hour before Viktor came back to me. He kept his artificial teeth carefully at home, afraid that the present from Wolzak would get damaged. Only the Soviet Union The summer of 1983 found everything upside down. In June, Irina Grivnina returned to Moscow after ending her term of exile. Just like so many other political prisoners she did not get permission to take up residence in the capital, but she refused to leave. According to legislation, she had the right to move in with her husband and children and thus she held on. A new arrest was imminent. After the World Congress in Vienna, I immediately traveled to Moscow, a visit that would result in my arrest, together with the members of the independent peace movement, followed by my hiding at Grivnina’s home, which I mentioned earlier. After my return to The Netherlands, I concluded that I could not combine studying with campaigning. Studying seemed senseless to me, a waste of time. How could I be busy with the Middle Ages while somewhere else friends of mine were in camps or exile? The days filled themselves with campaigning; every week I would call Grivnina and also corresponded with other dissidents and political prisoners. My family also was pulled into this line of work. My father, after an early retirement as head of public relations of the City of Rotterdam, was now working at the Bukovsky Foundation and wrote books about the Hunger in Ukraine in 1932-1933, the MolotovRibbentrop Pact and a biography of Andrei Sakharov. He also coordinated the organization of the annual Sakharov Congresses, organized on or around the birthday of Andrei Sakharov on May 21, with the goal of calling attention to the plight of this Nobel Prize winner and the other political prisoners in the Soviet Union. Just like me he had taken a pseudonym, Jack van Doorn, and together with my mother he had joined the battalion of couriers that visited the dissident movement in the Soviet Union and provided support. And just like me they would travel to Leningrad and Moscow at regular intervals, with suitcases full of material aid, in order to deliver the materials and collect information. During one of her trips, my mother was the first to

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use a homemade hidden camera. It was our Super-8 camera that was now incorporated in a shoulder bag, with an opening that could be closed off. A button on the outside operated the camera; you couldn’t see anything from the outside. After having practiced in The Netherlands, she took it with her to the Soviet Union. The goal was to make a film of Kresti prison in Leningrad, on the banks of the Neva River. That objective was reached, but the film could not be used: the camera went back and forth and up and down at such a speed that the viewer immediately became seasick. My elder sister was corresponding in the mean time with Valery Marchenko, one of the most prominent Ukrainian dissidents. He was at that moment in exile, finishing his punishment of nine years of imprisonment. After his return to Kiev, Marchenko continued his political activity; within no time he was again behind bars. This time, being a dangerous recidivist, he was sentenced to a term of ten years in camp and five years in exile. My sister, who in the course of time had developed a close relationship with him and cared a lot about him, was broken.

Valery Marchenko in exile

It became worse, because Marchenko was suffering from nephritis and arrived in camp more dead than alive. He was immediately put on transport to Leningrad, to the central prison hospital. This trip took about a month going from one transit prison to the other, a lengthy torture for a healthy person let alone somebody who was dying. After arrival in Leningrad it became clear that Valery’s kidneys had stopped functioning altogether and that he desperately needed a dialysis. In the hospital next door a dialysis machine was available, but the authorities refused to transfer him to this ordinary hospital and have him connected to this device that would save his life. After several torturous weeks, Marchenko died, at the age of 38. The Soviet Union had entered our lives deeply. My studies were basically discontinued; I had more important things to do. That choice was still possible then, because it was the last year of the old educational system in The Netherlands where there was no limit to the number of years one could study. I could have studied for fifteen years if I wanted to, and some people at my faculty were doing exactly that. My parents gave me a small stipend, the rest I earned with translations

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and writing articles. Also radio-interviews provided some income. I lived in one of the few remaining apartments in Amsterdam where rent was less than 100 guilders (approximately 45 euro). My refusal to pay a raise in rent because of the state of disrepair of the apartment was honored year in year out. My plans to study Sovietology with Peter Reddaway at the London School of Economics (LSE) were shelved. I was admitted twice at the LSE, and twice I prepared myself but at the last minute decided that I couldn’t leave because of the campaigns for dissidents that had to continue. At the beginning of 1983, we opened a shop at the Ceintuurbaan in Amsterdam. The “Second World Shop” (Tweede Wereld Winkel) sold dissident literature, books about the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, newspapers, and a variety of souvenirs from the region, such as matroshka dolls, wooden spoons and Palekh lacquer boxes. The director became Jan Veldmeijer, who had been a courier to the Soviet Union for many years and continued to do so. The shop was unique. We had working relations with dissident publishing houses in Munich, Paris and New York, and had many of their books available in our store. We carried very unique things not available anywhere else in The Netherlands. As a result, Amsterdam had two bookstores that were focused on the Soviet Union: Pegasus, the communist bookstore on the Leidsestraat that was linked to the communist party, and the Tweede Wereld Winkel of the Bukovsky Foundation. In addition to selling books and other informational materials, we also did a whole range of other things to promote our “issue.” We would organize regular exhibitions, for which my father usually wrote the accompanying booklet. Apart from that we organized lectures and musical evenings. That became a more prominent part of our work when we moved to a larger and more central location in Amsterdam, on the Raadhuisstraat behind the Queen’s Palace on Dam Square. This was a so-called “A-1 location,” next to the international communications center of the Dutch telecom service PTT. Here we had all the space we needed. The influence of the Bukovsky Foundation was during those years at its height. The official opening was done by Hans van den Broek, Minister of Foreign Affairs of The Netherlands and later Commissioner for External Relations of the European Commission. Prime-Minister Ruud Lubbers opened the Sakharov Congress, held that year at the Sonesta Hotel in Amsterdam. This was one of the events organized by my father, together with a former colleague of his from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Canada in the late 1950s, Frits van Roon. Together they also did our monthly, “Boekovski Berichten” (Bukovsky News). For them it was a wonderful opportunity to work together again, and to use their knowledge and good services for a

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charitable cause. In the meantime, they would talk about the days in Canada, sitting at a big table on the top floor of our office, shaking with laughter when reminiscing events from the past. I repeatedly saw tears of laughter rolling down their cheeks. Jack van Doorn, 1990. Jack van Doorn was the pseudonym of the author’s father.

Working with your father is a special process, in particular when you are supposed to be the boss and he is supposed to follow your instructions. Although he was a very experienced public relations officer who had several decades of international experience, and although he must have disagreed with some of my decisions, he never showed his disagreement in public. However, at the end of the afternoon, when he had taken the train back home, I would often find a small note on my desk with suggestions, things that I shouldn’t forget or pay more attention to, or corrections to an article that I had written. Henk Wolzak, who was then officially the director, had positioned himself more and more on the back seat. He operated mostly from his home, and with the same speed as before: drinking coffee in the morning, then to the mailbox, then back again for more coffee, then some small jobs, have a sandwich, and after that on the road to see if some articles could be published and to network a little, followed by a beer and, subsequently, dinner. He hardly ever appeared at the office. It had become the domain of a new generation. I was responsible for “foreign affairs” and “campaigns.” Foreign affairs meant contact with abroad, with human rights organizations in other countries, with dissidents in Europe and North America, and with donors outside The Netherlands. Campaigns had a broad meaning related to organizing protests, trying to involve other organizations in the campaigns and maintaining contacts with the media and Dutch politicians. The latter was of particular importance, because we were convinced that only through a sustained media campaign and a constant pressure on Soviet authorities could something be done about the fate of Soviet political prisoners. That meant keeping the press constantly abreast of developments, getting

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to know as many journalists as possible and maintaining a personal relationship so it could be used the moment it would be needed when something newsworthy would happen. It also was important to maintain contacts with members of Parliament. One a week I traveled to The Hague to meet members of parliament, either through agreed meetings or, informally, in the press center of Dutch Parliament, Nieuwspoort. The goal was to maintain a communication network with all parties in Parliament, accept with the Centrum Party of Janmaat, which was then a small neofascist grouping in Dutch politics (although it must be said that many of its views are now shared by larger Robert van Voren, 1985 Dutch political parties). The “Grivnina-campaign” had been a very good example. The first step had been to organize an invitation to the family to come to The Netherlands. The well-known Dutch publicist, Anne Biegel, at that time already close to eighty years old, agreed to take all the bureaucratic hurdles in order to get such an invitation and went to The Hague in order to have the necessary papers legalized at the Soviet consulate. Together with journalist Heleen Swildens, she had traveled to the Soviet Union for many years as a courier, but she now felt she was too old to make such trips, and so she had no problem revealing her identity to the Soviet authorities. However, Heleen still wanted to travel to the USSR, but Anne Biegel insisted that she come with her to the consulate as moral support. This presented quite a dilemma. In their own clever way, they soon found a solution: Heleen Swildens put on a wig and hid herself behind a pair of dark sunglasses. The ladies went to the Soviet consulate several times, where an inexorable consul Viktor Gribanov constantly found excuses to turn down the application. It was clear that another approach was needed. We found one in Dutch politics. In the course of time, the best political contacts had developed with the leader of the liberal fraction in Dutch Parliament, Ed Nijpels. Nijpels earlier had agreed to intervene on behalf of Grivnina and now he agreed to invite her officially to come to The Netherlands for permanent residence. For the parliamentary leader of one of the most important political parties in the country, this was a very unusual step and it took the Soviets by surprise. However, the Soviet

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Embassy blocked this approach as well. A visa to travel to Moscow to visit Irina Grivnina was also denied to Ed Nijpels, resulting in the lodging of official protests. Ed Nijpels enjoyed campaigning. He was relatively young, looked a bit like a young playful dog that is looking for an opportunity to romp, and somehow the chemistry between us worked. I regularly came to his office, and even when he was not there, I was allowed to sit in his office and prepare letters to the Soviet authorities that he would sign and mail upon his return. Eventually I even had his private phone numbers in case something serious happened in Moscow, so I could reach him immediately and agree on what action should be taken. Even his phone numbers during holidays were given, which was a nice illustration of his dedication. My access to him was extraordinary, and sometimes this was cause for concern among his colleagues. The deputy leader of the fraction Albert-Jan Evenhuis had no problem with it, he calmly continued to sit in his office in a lazy chair and puff his cigar. But Joris Voorhoeve, responsible for foreign affairs in the fraction, was much more formal and had a lot of concern about my unrestricted access to Nijpels. Still these worries were unfounded. My access was the result of Nijpels’s decision to support Irina Grivnina personally, and I never had the impression that his concern was some kind of political game or otherwise insincere. If it had been, there would have been a lot of things he did not have to do in order to get the political benefit, and he would also never have given me a carte blanche. It was a relationship based on trust, for which I am still very grateful to him. Also good contacts were developed with other political parties, and at a certain moment we were able to organize support committees for five political prisoners from the largest political factions in Parliament: the Christian democrats, the social democrats and the liberals. One of the committees even consisted of the three leaders of these fractions, including former Prime Minister Joop Den Uyl, a towering figure in Dutch politics. They sent letters to Soviet authorities, demanded meetings with the Soviet ambassador and participated in campaigns on behalf of “their” political prisoners. Relations with leftist parties were a bit more awkward. That wasn’t surprising since, for them, the Soviet Union was still a socialist country in spite of all its shortcomings and thus the criticism had to be nuanced and free from anti-communist sentiment. Ria Beckers of the Political Radical

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Party PPR, Andrée van Es of the Party of Socialist Pacifists PSP and Ina Brouwer of the Dutch Communist Party CPN participated, but it took a lot of talk and discussion to get them to that point. In particular, Ina Brouwer believed little of the ongoing repression in the Soviet Union. Her party had changed its course into Marxism-feminism, but during conversations at her home in Amsterdam, we invariably started discussing the terror under Stalin and the repressive machinery of the KGB. She recognized that something was wrong, but for her its was more that the cause was good in principle but the implementation had taken a wrong turn, as opposed to the belief that the system had been wrong and repressive from the very start. In her view, communism still had a good chance of success if the necessary reforms were carried out. The climax of our Grivnina campaign was undoubtedly the night watch in front of the Soviet Embassy in The Hague in 1984. In order to create new media attention and to give a signal to the Soviet authorities, we decided that during a whole week, twenty-four hours a day, members of Dutch parliament would be positioned outside the Soviet Embassy with banners calling attention to the fate of Irina Grivnina and other dissidents and political prisoners in the Soviet Union. Nijpels would head off the campaign and spend the first night outside the embassy. We had worked out a schedule for the remainder of the week and members of Parliament were asked to register themselves for the times when they could make themselves available. Those who did not do this by themselves received a phone call from us, during which we tried to convince them to participate. One by one, they agreed and eventually more than one-third of the Dutch MP’s spent some time outside the embassy, including members of the leftist parties PPR and PSP and Ina Brouwer of the communist CPN. It is unlikely that any such activity had ever taken place before and it resulted in great pictures. To start with Ed Nijpels, sitting on a folding chair in front of the gate of the embassy, with a bottle of Dutch herbal gin between his legs. The press loved it. Everyday, a new face appeared in the newspapers, party after party. The Soviets could not claim to be unaware of the fact that Grivnina had great support in The Netherlands. After this protest, the most prominent member of the Dutch Salvation Army, Major Bosshardt, was asked by the largest Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf to become involved. She agreed to adopt Irina Grivnina and her family. Together with Chris Fernig of De Telegraaf, I went to her home to reach an agreement on the details. She was sitting happily in her living room drinking tea, discussing the consequences of her action, when she saw two young girls walking the streets on the bridge in

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front of her house, in the rain. “Chris,” she said, “can you go outside and ask these poor girls in for a cup of tea? They are pitifully standing in the rain.” Of course Chris returned alone. The girls were not at all interested in tea; they were busy working. The article in De Telegraaf, of course on the front page, was carefully prepared and printed at a pre-selected moment. Again we received a great deal of publicity. Not only did De Telegraaf give so much attention to the case, but every action of Grivnina was reported upon in detail in half of the Dutch press. It had become a twenty-four hour job; often I didn’t leave my office and slept on a folding bed behind my desk. The journal Elsevier agreed to hire Grivnina as their Moscow correspondent, and also the Nederlands Dagblad agreed to publish her articles. She was launched as a poetess and Poetry International accepted her into its membership. Her fame also gradually spread to other countries. Die Welt, The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, Le Monde, and others published her articles and statements. Kurt Vonnegut, whom she had met in Moscow at some stage, supported her, as did a number of Japanese authors whose works had been translated into Russian by Grivnina’s father, who, in fact, didn’t want to have anything to do with his daughter out of fear for his own career. Eventually Grivnina’s fame expanded in a way that it bore no relation to her actual importance within the dissident movement; her situation was not so dramatic that the constant attention by the world press was logical. Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov was in a much more difficult and inhumane situation, living under house arrest in Gorki and constantly subjected to harassments that eventually threatened his life. Also, the Ukrainian poet Vasyl Stus died in camp Perm-35; there were no more than three lines in the newspaper. The Soviet authorities must often have wondered why this woman had become so well-known in the West. Yes, she was stubborn and had an impossible character, but that counted for half of the dissident movement. Why, then, had she Grave of Vasyl Stus, Perm, 1988 become so famous?

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The case of Grivnina showed me that by persistence and patience, we could create a great deal of excitement and attention as well as the fact that the power to convince others was of fundamental importance. Of course, I was deeply concerned about the fate of Irina Grivnina and her family and, for me, she was then the most important dissident on my list. Thus, I could tell her story with a lot of conviction. The fact that she had a small child from whom she might be separated along with the very touching pictures of her and her baby daughter had a miraculous effect. Photo of Irina Grivnina and her daughter used widely during the campaign, 1983 The disappointment In the end the Soviet authorities gave in. Maybe this was the first sign that change was around the corner. Gorbachev had just assumed power and apart from the fact that he was young and that the pictures of him did not turn him into some doll at Madame Tussaud’s (although at first the strawberry mark on his head was retouched) there were no indicators that a radical break with the past was imminent. All commentators, including myself, expressed their skepticism and predicted that the repressive policies would continue. Suddenly, there was the phone call: “We are allowed to leave!” shouted an excited Grivnina on the other end of the telephone line. They had two weeks to pack their bags and get out. It was clear that this move was forever; nobody thought that the prediction of Andrei Amalrik that the Soviet Union would collapse would become true within the coming decades. Finally, they arrived at the Vienna airport, where all the emigrants from the Soviet Union arrived first. It was too unreal to be true. And it became even more so the next day, when I accompanied them to Amsterdam. At Schiphol Airport, Ed Nijpels and the Speaker of Dutch Parliament, Dick Dolman, were waiting for them at the gate, with a wall of journalists. I had never seen so many journalists together in my whole life, they were pushing and pulling, quarrelling all to be able to get the best picture. It was as if a famous Hollywood star had just arrived. A busy

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press conference followed, and then home. My home, that is, which was a small studio on the top floor and at the backside of a five-story building in the old Kinkerbuurt at the edge of the center of Amsterdam. It was a building that had been constructed in the 1880s and had collapsed before it was completed. It had been rebuilt, of course, but it was still rickety and on top of that quite dilapidated. But no one cared; they were free!

Robert van Voren, Dick Dolman, Ed Nijpels and Joris Voorhoeve, The Hague, 1986, at the presentation of a book on the case of Irina Grivnina. During the first months all seemed to go well. A welcoming reception was organized at the Dutch parliament, and almost all MP’s attended. Grivnina was given a job at the journal Elsevier, and her husband was offered a position as a computer programmer at the municipal computer center by the then-Mayor of Amsterdam, Ed van Thijn. Daughter Masha went to the international school and, with priority, the family was given an apartment in Amsterdam. They were welcomed with open arms everywhere. New furniture was arranged for the apartment very quickly. Family and my friends came with cupboards, chairs, cutlery, kitchen utensils and a whole list of other necessities, while via Major Bosshardt the remainder of the necessary furniture could be collected from the Salvation Army. It was as if the red carpet had been rolled out, everything was thought of and taken care of. In addition, media attention remained high; particularly when Grivnina was taken to Geneva, where a summit meeting was organized between President Reagan and Soviet leader Gorbachev. It was an event

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on the divide between the old and the new era. The tension between East and West was still high, but a summit meeting in Reykjavik had created some openings. The meeting in Geneva was supposed to help continue that process. Grivnina was accredited in Geneva as a correspondent of the Elsevier. I accompanied her and was also accredited as a journalist. The problems started when Gorbachev arrived at the Geneva airport. Grivnina was standing in front of the crowd of journalists. After the plane landed, Gorbachev disembarked and came to the stage in front of the press to make a short statement. Subsequently, the press was given the opportunity to ask questions. That was the moment Grivnina had been waiting for; with a loud voice, she shouted above everybody else: “And how is Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov? Why are you still holding him captive?“ As if stung by a wasp, Gorbachev ended the press conference and entered his limousine. Because I felt problems were coming, I pulled Grivnina into the building, running ahead of everybody to the exit, into a Andrei Sakharov in exile, Gorki, taxi and left. 1984 Two days later a similar event happened again. This time a press conference was held by a number of prominent members of the Soviet delegation, among whom were one or two members of the Politburo and the America-specialist Georgi Arbatov, who was known in the west as a dove. The day before, we had scared the living daylights out of Arbatov when we approached him as he was leaving his hotel for a stroll along the Lake of Geneva. The poor man didn’t know what to think of it and probably was convinced that we would physically attack him. After a press statement it was time for questions. Grivnina didn’t wait, jumped up and immediately posed the same question: “And how is Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov doing? Why are you still keeping him captive?” Simultaneously we started handing out a press statement asking for attention to given to the fate of Soviet political prisoners and, in particular, that of psychiatrist Anatoly Koryagin. The press immediately focused on us, cameras turned away from the stage to us, until the stupefied and angry Soviets broke off the press conference, got up and walked away. An international political scandal had been created within minutes.

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Again, we tried to get away before something else happened, but we were too late. At the exit of the hall, the director of the press center was waiting for us, livid. Without any hesitation, he pulled off our accreditations and we had to leave the building immediately. What had happened was a huge disgrace for him, I realized later, and he would probably remember it for a long time. In the meantime, the images were broadcast all over the world; again the telephone constantly rang Grivnina had acquired the status of celebrity. These events were followed by trips to other cities where she spoke and appeared on television programs. It was a victorious tour, but soon it became boring. Every time, there were the same stories, the same questions. The talk shows were the top of superficiality. It was almost like looking at monkeys in the zoo, people wanted to see what a recently released dissident looked like in reality. And then it went wrong. When silence set down, the big hole opened up. There was no need to fight anymore, the KGB had been conquered, and adrenaline was no longer needed. The attention faded away, they became a family just like everybody else. People didn’t applaud any longer when she entered the room, the expectations changed. Elsevier complained about the quality of her articles. And Moscow was far away. Because that is what became clear once and for all: they had left Moscow, had lost their circle of friends and would in all probability never return. The door had been closed shut. I became the object of frustration. In one way or another, the frustration had to be released. In a way, Grivnina had to deal with two frustrations. She had left her usual environment, but also the façade that had been so carefully created around her started to crumble. We had created it in order to get her out of the country, but now it turned out to be a fata morgana. She wasn’t the famous journalist and great writer that we had created, she was just a courageous dissident who had caused the KGB a lot of trouble. But that was too much to handle. When her articles were rejected or criticized, she would allege that they weren’t bad articles but, rather, it was my translation that was of bad quality. She said that the furniture they had received from all these kind people was old, trash, and they had been duped. She felt that the flat was also bad, even though for Amsterdam standards it was big and in a prime location, not far from the center. Everything was wrong, and that was all my fault. To make matters worse, I was now also accused of convincing them to emigrate and that, in fact, they never had wanted to leave the Soviet Union. She didn’t want

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to have anything to do with me. I was banned from their apartment; her husband and daughter were forbidden to have any contact with me. I ceased to exist in her eyes. I was stupefied. I was angry, sad and subsequently livid. The emotions fluctuated from one to the other at high speed. It was incomprehensible, I had done everything during two and a half years to get the family to The Netherlands; I had stopped my studies, put my relationships at risk, and from one day to the next, I was a persona non grata. I decided that I didn’t want to have anything to do with dissidents from that period forward.

Chapter 9

Intermission, and back to work I really had enough of this work. All of my frustrations found their way out. I did this work because I believed in it and, thus, because I felt I had no choice. I constantly told myself: if I don’t do it, nobody will. I didn’t expect any gratitude; that is the last reason to do this. But I hoped that my efforts would somehow be recognized, that they wouldn’t go unnoticed. Two and a half years of campaigning is a long time, especially when it absorbs all your time and attention. While my few remaining friends enjoyed student life, I was glued to my office until late in the evening and sometimes even until the next morning, working on campaigns to get people released. And nothing happened. In spite of all the campaigns, things only turned for the worse. Living conditions in the camps and prisons got worse and worse, and life in psychiatric hospitals was no better. One political prisoner after the other succumbed and died of exhaustion or after having been broken by the system. And in the meantime four times per year the tension: Soviet Union in, Soviet Union out. Yes arrest, no arrest. It drives you mad. And when you are then shoved aside in this manner, something breaks. Or rather, a wave of frustrations inundated me and swept me away into a deep crisis. There was only one escape. After hanging around for a couple of months, I decided to revamp my studies. Whatever the circumstances, they had to be finished anyway. I was lagging more than two years behind, was by now a seventh year “student” and it was clear to me that I had to bring this to an end. I worked out a murderous schedule for myself. I decided to do all the exams that were technically feasible, with or without preparation. And keeping the deal with the study coordinator in the back of my head, I started writing. One series of working groups after the other was “caught up” by writing small theses. Also series of lectures were done in the same manner, and for the Russian language I read thousands of pages in order to recover all the missed lessons. Sometimes I took an exam that I prepared for, to be followed immediately by another exam for which I hadn’t even opened a book. Even before the summer of 1986, I had caught up on two years of studies and was already working on my main thesis. In search of my name I intentionally avoided any thesis theme having to do with the Soviet Union. It was a radical decision for me, because, until then, I had only

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participated in working groups or lectures that were directly or indirectly related to the USSR. I had hoped to complete my self-created studies of Sovietology that officially did not exist in Amsterdam at that time. That would have been at least a partial compensation for the fact that my work for the dissident movement had delayed or eliminated my plans to study in the United Kingdom. At this point, however, I needed to move on to other subjects. My thesis became a sort of self-therapy in order to provide some distance and recovery time from my disappointment. The theme of my thesis became Robert van Voren. Not myself, but the man who had carried my name before and whose name I had “borrowed,” my uncle. In one way or another, I had always been intrigued by what happened to him, why he had joined the resistance during the war and how he had met his end. My family didn’t know much about him; they could relate only the main lines of his life story. I remembered only a few short flashbacks, such as his picture always present in my grandparents’ home, and the tears that welled up in the eyes of my grandfather when he talked about his lost son. I decided to try to recover his life story on the basis of “oral history,” i.e. by finding people who had known him, and then to interview them. It became a mega-project at high velocity, because I wanted to end my studies as soon as possible. But it was not without success. I eventually found dozens of people, varying from fellow schoolmates and fellow students, to girls with whom he was in love and eventually even the Dutchmen who were working as forced laborers in Germany and had found him in a meadow after his escape from the concentration camp. His story was similar to many others who had been part of the resistance. Born in Rotterdam and witness to the bombardment that destroyed his beloved town in May 1940, he joined the resistance soon after the occupation, together with a number of fellow students from Delft. The first acts of resistance were rather innocent and with little consequence, but when the situation became more serious and the Germans hit back with arrests and executions, the resistance became more professional. In 1942, he had a narrow escape when most of his fellow-members of his group were arrested, and he changed his pseudonym. In the process, he made a splendid move. Before the war he had had a Finish girlfriend and he had learned Finish; his Linguahone-course Finish for beginners is still in my possession. He went to the municipality of Rotterdam with false documents that he had made himself, and told the story that his father was Dutch and his mother Finnish, that he had been born in Vyborg, but that during the

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Soviet bombardment of Vyborg in 1939 the whole municipal archive had been destroyed. He could only show some papers and his diploma from the Vyborg gymnasium – which of course he had made himself. The authorities believed him and gave him new – genuine! – papers in the name of Robert van Voren. This way he had suddenly become a legal citizen again. Simon Karel Luitse (Robert van Voren)

His splendid move was followed by a rather stupid one. In his room in Rotterdam, he collected all the police reports in which his arrest was outlined, and put them on his wall. Stupid of course, but apparently he was proud that he had been able to outwit the Germans. However, when in October 1943 the German secret police SD invaded his room, they only came for Robert van Voren, but simultaneously arrested a “Bob Klarenbeek” and Simon Karel Luitse. Bob Klarenbeek had been his earlier pseudonym, Simon Luitse was his official name, and under that name he was imprisoned in the main police station in Rotterdam; with extra

The registration card of the prison of the Rotterdam police department of Simon Karel Luitse, October 10, 1943. In the right hand lower corner it says: “Wants to escape; or commit suicide. Extra supervision. Separate.”

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supervision because, apparently, he had plans to commit suicide, as was marked on his registration card. After that he was transported to the prison in Scheveningen, the pre-trial detention center that now also houses those accused of war crimes in other countries, including Yugoslavia. Considering his “career” in the resistance, he was automatically a candidate to be shot in the dunes at the Waalsdorpervlakte near Scheveningen, where many members of the resistance were killed. However, his father managed to prevent this by bribing a highly placed SD officer with bottles of whisky. Simon Luitse was transferred to the concentration camp Vught in the southern part of The Netherlands and in September 1944, when it seemed that Holland was about to be liberated by the Allies, he was put on a transport to the concentration camp Sachsenhausen near Berlin. His brother Nico had joined the resistance some time after his brother and had

Letter from Queen Wilhelmina to Simon Karel’s parents, in which she offers her condolences.

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also been arrested and sent to the camp on the same transport. Nico stayed behind in Sachsenhausen and survived the war. Simon was put on a further transport to Gross Rosen, deep in Poland, and from there to Dora-Mittelbau in Eastern Germany, where the V-1 and V-2 missiles were produced in underground tunnels dug in the Hartz Mountains. When he was no longer able to stand on his own legs, he was moved to the “death camp” near by, Boelcke Kaserne. This camp was bombed by the British shortly after, and Simon managed to escape. Some time later, two Dutch forced laborers found him in a meadow. They took him to a nearby farmer, where he was taken care of in the horse stables by one of the women living in the house. Shortly before his death, he saw the Americans passing by; according to reports he even talked with them before he died. He succumbed after several weeks in the horse stable on April 16, 1945, as a result of starvation, dysentery and malaria. He was only 28 years old. It is a sad story, like so many other individual stories from the time of war. But discovering his story, finding people who had known him and interviewing them was a therapeutic process that helped me to cope with my own sadness. In a way this process allowed me to put my life into a broader context and gave me the opportunity to identify with my uncle much more than ever before. My grandfather had filmed his son, the footage being maybe not longer than 30 seconds, but the images locked themselves in my head and during the night during my dreams they would extend by themselves. Simon Luitse would come to life, would talk, tell me his story, and thanks to these nightly “meetings,” I was able to put his life story to paper in a way that did justice to him without turning into a glorification. When the book was presented, we organized a reunion in Amsterdam, to which all the people who had known Simon were invited, including one of the pilots he managed to save during the war. It was a unique gathering, some of the people hadn’t seen each other for over fifty years, and it was clear to everybody that this would be the only time they would be together again. I was then almost 28 years old, exactly the age of Simon when he died. It was as if the circle had been closed, at least that is how it felt. The Soviet Union calls With that feeling of satisfaction and with a new perspective, I was able to get back to where I left off in my work with the Soviet Union. The sharp edges had worn off; the feeling of having been abused was replaced with those of resignation and the understanding that Grivnina probably didn’t have a different way out than to turn against me, that she

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had been with her back up against the wall. Of course, not all the anger had disappeared, but I was able to move beyond it, to accept that this was the way things went that it was now time to move on. At that moment, it was clear that the psychiatrist Anatoly Koryagin was the one who needed the most help. Even worse, his situation was so bad that if nothing happened he might lose his life; an international campaign was an absolute necessity. Koryagin had been sentenced in 1981 to seven years of camp and five years of exile and had shown to be a steadfast man. Very steadfast, actually, because he was able to go on hunger strike and maintain it for many months, in spite of the torturous daily forced feedings that by way of a tube were forced down his nose into his larynx in order to feed him compulsorily. This sounds very distasteful, but the reality is much worse than it sounds. It is pure torture. The inside of the nasal cavity and the larynx are grazed, a lot of force is needed to be able to administer food in such a way and the victim has the feeling of drowning. And this day in, day out, month after month, only because of his convictions. His eldest son Ivan was arrested, falsely accused, and Koryagin was offered the choice: either recant or see his own son wind up in the camps as well. Anatoly remained steadfast, and thus his son Ivan disappeared in the Gulag, sentenced to three years of camp. Subsequently Koryagin was invited for a “conversation”: either recant or a new arrest. Anatoly did not budge and thus he was again put on trial, and was given a sentence of two years in addition to the earlier twelve. It was as if the authorities were determined to destroy this man who continued to challenge them in spite of all the sufferings and humiliations. Galina Koryagina and two of her two sons, Aleksandr and Dmitri. Ivan is serving a sentence of three years on basis of trumped-up charges. The campaign for Koryagin was an international one from the very beginning. That was the lesson I had learned from the Grivnina case. Open all fronts, make sure the Soviets are attacked from all continents. Make sure that wherever they show their face the name of Anatoly Koryagin is mentioned, like a big noisy fly, an irritating humming in the air, a scratch on a record. No escape, unless you release him. Everybody who had known

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him was involved in the campaign, but there weren’t so many. Apart from me only two Western journalists had met him and as a result here was only little material that I could use. With a lot of effort I managed to “stretch” it and new photos that we managed to get from his wife completed the picture. In Moscow, Irina Yakir kept contact with Koryagin’s wife, in order to keep her informed and asking questions that would help us complete our image of the man. Again, we started creating a name, an image. It was the job of a “spin doctor,” with the awareness that it might end in the same results as with Irina Grivnina. But how else can you appeal to world opinion, how else can you make sure that “your” person stays in the spotlight? And so Koryagin was “pushed,” like an American presidential candidate. By now he was an honorary member of a number of psychiatric associations, and also of the World Psychiatric Association. In 1986 he was given the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize, a prize that was created out of protest against the fact that only prominent politicians were getting the official one. The next step was to have him nominated for the official Nobel Peace Prize. Nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize could be submitted only by governments, members of parliament, professors of law and philosophy, and of course other Nobel Prize winners. So we started. We first approached Dutch parliamentarians and the Dutch government, then parliamentarians from other countries, members of the European Parliament, Nobel Prize winners and professors. To make sure that the Soviet authorities knew we were making progress we invented a new system. Two of the Nobel Prize winners were professors Lown and Chazov, chairpersons of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Chazov was, at that time, Minister of Health of the Soviet Union, and so every day we sent him a request to nominate Anatoly Koryagin, just like a reminder, and to reinforce our request we sent him the entire list of persons who already supported his nomination. Everything then went by telex, a huge machine that made a hell of a noise and every time you would send a message it would type it in again, as a result of which it would shake like a fat goose on the table. And the telex messages became longer and longer, 20 centimeters, then 40 centimeters, half a meter… Eventually it was longer than one meter – on my side of the machine, but that meant also on Chazov’s side. A very impressive list, which he undoubtedly saw and which equally undoubtedly was passed on to the relevant “organs,” that is the KGB. It would be very interesting to look into the KGB archives to see how they reacted, but I am quite convinced that the authorities became

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increasingly worried. Two of their opponents already were Nobel Prize winners: writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the dissident nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov. A third one would have been a bit too much. At the beginning of December 1986, Anatoly Marchenko died, and the very same month Andrei Sakharov returned to Moscow at the request of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. I started calling the wife of Koryagin, Galina, urged by a subconscious feeling that something was about to happen. At beginning of February 1987, the situation changed dramatically for Koryagin. Galina on the phone, completely beyond herself of excitement. “He is home!” she shouted, “Tolya (her name for Anatoly) is at home! He is sitting in the bath scrubbing off the dirt and is unbroken. He is only talking about how he is going to continue his fight with the authorities!” A few hours before, she and her sister met him on the street by sheer coincidence, when they were on their way to the post office to call me. He was just coming from the train station. They had released him from Chistopol prison, where he had been incarcerated just like the deceased Anatoly Marchenko. He had taken a train home. Nobody was waiting for him, of course, because nobody knew he had been released. But suddenly he was there, standing in front of his wife. He was very emaciated, looking years older, but unbroken and in a very good mood. It was a complete miracle. The news went around the globe, my desk in the office in Amsterdam changed into a telephone switchboard. In the morning, European press agencies and newspapers, in the afternoon North American ones. They wanted interviews, and so I got the questions, which I passed on to his wife in Kharkov, and the next day I wrote down the answers and passed them on to the newspapers. Also journalists in Moscow used me as a connection since it was, ironically, easier to make a connection from Amsterdam to Kharkov. Here my carefully developed contacts with telephone operators in Amsterdam and Moscow were a great help. In the meantime, Koryagin started issuing his first official statements, in which he called upon the Soviet authorities to release all political prisoners and indicated that he was going to continue his struggle. There they are! Koryagin did not have to wait for long. His release was a herald for what would follow: the release of all political prisoners in the Soviet Union. They came in waves, often in an unstructured manner, but the surprise and happiness was no less.

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The main address to collect information was Larisa Bogoraz, the widow of Anatoly Marchenko. The reason was that everyone understood that his fatal hunger strike had forced the authorities to initiate the release of all prisoners, and so they first reported to her, first of all to offer their condolences, and, secondly, as a sign of respect to her late husband. Thus, every day I would call Bogoraz in order to go over the list, after that I would call Kronid Lubarsky in Munich to compare our data. Subsequently, a press release would go out. Sometimes we could report dozens of names on one day, other days there were only a few or none. The way in which they were released differed from case to case. Some were released unconditionally. Others had a conversation and were warned not to get involved in politics. There were also those who were asked to sign a statement in which they promised not to become politically active again. Even at that point there was a split: some refused and were released anyway, others refused and went back to their cells, only to be released much later. Groups of released political prisoners met each other in the train from Perm, where most of the political camps were. They traveled together to Moscow, visited Larisa Bogoraz and went home from there: to the Baltics, Ukraine, or to the Caucasus. That is how “my” Mart Niklus was released, the Estonian whom I had met during my first visit to the Soviet Union and who was serving a term of ten years of camp and five years of exile. The wave of arrests had lasted two years. Most of them were released in the spring of 1987, the political prisoners from psychiatric hospitals later, mostly in 1988 and 1989. Some of the political prisoners had to wait until 1990 to be released. No clear answer was found as to why some were released and others not. It was the arbitrariness of a totalitarian system; there is no other explanation.

The return of Mart Niklus from camp, July 13, 1988. Left from him fellow former political prisoner Vladimir Prikhodko. Both are still wearing their camp clothes.

Chapter 10

The gorillas of Sakharov After completing my studies, I resumed my travels to the Soviet Union. I hadn’t been there since Grivnina’s emigration and, by this time, I was ready to resume my activities there. I booked a trip for the beginning of 1988 and I hit the road. Luckily I had been given a visa without a hitch. In the meantime, an article had been published in Izvestiya in which I had been openly marked as a colonel of the CIA. Funny enough, according to the newspaper, Robert van Voren was my real name, and my real name was mentioned as a pseudonym. However, apparently this article was not reason enough to ban me from entering the country. As usual, from the very beginning of my stay, I was followed everywhere I went, just like before. It was a comforting thought. My first stay in Moscow coincided with that of a colleague of mine, Jan Veldmeijer, who had entered the country some time before. We agreed to meet in the lobby of Hotel Kosmos, a half round hotel located on the northern edge of the center of Moscow that had been built on the occasion of the Olympic Games of 1980. The hotel had been an architectonic tour de force of French origin and a rather unusual sight in a Moscow full of grey Soviet concrete. However, in the course of the years the quality had deteriorated considerably. In the rooms, the curtains were hanging crookedly, furniture was often broken or rickety. In the fireproof doors at the end of the fire escapes big holes had been drilled through which a chain with a fat padlock had been placed. In practical terms, this meant that if ever a fire would break out, the people who would come running down the fire escapes would be trapped mercilessly. In other words, within a few years, a classy French hotel had been reduced to a Soviet monster. I met an enthusiastic Jan who had already fully tasted the new atmosphere in Moscow. He suggested that we change some money on the street in order to do shopping. I got angry: was he out of his mind? Illegally exchanging money on the street was something couriers had never done, as it could easily be a provocation leading to expulsion. “Ah, don’t worry,” Jan said, “everything is different now. You’ll see for yourself.” And indeed, everything was different. While access to the hotel had always been strictly forbidden to Soviet citizens, they were now all over the place, easily let in by the doormen. The bars were full, not only with amateur prostitutes, but also with youngsters who were in possession of some dollars as a result of small business deals and were enjoying this newly found luxury. Parties were organized in the hotel rooms and, in the evenings, we would stroll down the corridors from party to party. The control system on the guest

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traffic had disappeared. The dezhurnaya’s, the floor ladies that invariably positioned themselves in front of the exit of the elevators and noted every move by guests in their little notebooks, had disappeared. Only their desks were still standing there, as well as the usually horrendously ugly vases that were supposed to decorate the corridor and were produced en masse by Soviet “artists,” often still bearing a sticker with “Art no.5” on them. I went from one surprise to the other. The next day we hit the streets, visiting dissidents. The rather meager collection of addresses of the last few years had now been expanded enormously by the political prisoners that had returned from places of detention. The city was buzzing with life. While in 1985, I only had a handful of addresses to visit, the list was now endless. It was a combination of old friends with returned political prisoners, ‘new’ dissidents and the first politicians that formed the basis of the democratic movement. One of the first addresses was Andrei Sakharov, the figurehead of the dissident movement, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and a nuclear physicist, who had returned to Moscow at the end of 1986 after years of psychological torture in Gorki (now Nizhny Novgorod). Sakharov had been banished in January 1980 to that city and in the course of the years, his exile had changed into complete isolation and constant presence of the KGB. This isolation was only broken by the regular visits by his wife, Yelena Bonner, who shuttled between Moscow and Gorki. Upon his return to Moscow, Andrei Dmitrievich, as he was always referred, had resumed his leading position within the dissident movement and, by that time, was a Deputy to the Supreme Soviet, the Soviet parliament. The reason for our visit was the fact that for many years we had been organizing Sakharov Congresses in Amsterdam and that now, with Sakharov being at liberty and freely accessible, we had to ask his permission to continue using his name for these congresses. In his apartment, we were seated at the kitchen table, where a number of dissidents were in the middle of carrying on a very intense political discussion. We listened to the debate, here and there adding a remark of our own, and only after a long time Sakharov realized that we Andrei Sakharov, during the election campaign for the Supreme Soviet in December 1989, a few days before his death.

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had come for something specific. So what were we coming for? After having told our story and asked for formal permission we waited for an answer, either positive or negative. However, nothing really happened. Sakharov was looking in my direction, but he was clearly looking at something behind me. It turned out to be the television, with a program about gorillas, which took all his attention. A feeling of humility descended on me - the gorillas on television were apparently more important to Sakharov than the congresses we organized in his honor and defense. Eventually he gave us permission, and we were free to leave his apartment. A year later his wife reversed the decision. We were busy organizing the Ninth Sakharov Congress in Moscow, and it promised to be a big event. The organization was co-sponsored by the Historical Archive Institute, a university institution and the power base of Yuri Afanasyev, one of the leading democratic politicians. The congress would be held in “Dom Kino,” the seat of the Cinematographers Union of the Soviet Union, a well-known and striking building in the center of Moscow. Speakers had been contracted, with a travel agency special “Sakharov tours” had been organized and the first travel packages had already been sold. But, then, Yelena Bonner stirred up trouble: she wanted to organize a congress herself and claimed the name for her own event. Attempts to negotiate turned out to be fruitless. With an unbelievable obstinacy and, in my view, shortsightedness she took away permission to use the name of her husband. We were forced to cancel our congress, and, thus, a series of successful Sakharov congresses came to an end. Her congress turned out to be a singular affair. A strong “Grivnina-feeling” set in: the ingratitude for everything that had been done all these years to help them, the way we were pushed aside brought back the urge to turn our backs on them once and for all. Yuri Afanasyev, 1988 However, I had learned my lesson from the Grivnina disaster and let the unfair attitude of Yelena Bonner slide off my shoulders, knowing that her unbelievably stubborn and persistent character had probably saved Sakharov’s life and that the KGB officers who were dealing with her had probably repeatedly gone wild when facing her intransigence.

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Their irritation with Bonner may have been the same as their feelings about the booklet “How to be a witness” by Vladimir Albrekht. The book was a sort of practical manual for dissidents who were called in by the KGB for interrogation or who had been arrested. He had developed the so-called “PLOD”-method (Plod being Russian for “fruit”). His advice was to consider four main aspects while being interrogated. “P” meant “protocol,” which meant that everything said during an interrogation had to be written down in the record of the meeting. “L” meant “lichno or personal,” indicating that all questions considered to be personal did not have to be answered. “O” represented “otnoshenie or connection,” questions that had no connection with the case did not have to be answered either. And “D” meant “dostupno or permissible,” and indicated that all questions found to be impermissible could be rejected. With “PLOD” at hand, a dissident could completely frustrate any interrogation. And that is what happened, resulting in angry remarks like “when are you finally stopping with that stupid PLOD” or “That Vladimir Albrekht drives me wild.” Albrekht was eventually arrested and, because of his booklet, sentenced to three years of camp. Vladimir Albrekht Old friends and acquaintances In one way or another, the “old” addresses remained the most important. With them, we had survived the dark days of Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko, and a connection had been developed that continued during these days of new freedom and openness. At Bogoraz’s place, a regular guest was Sergei Kovalyov who had returned to Moscow after thirteen years of absence. Kovalyov was a special person for me because he had been the subject of my first signature collection campaign in 1977. In addition, I had met him shortly after his release in an empty apartment on the edge of Moscow. The fact that we had common friends in Moscow and Leningrad was then not known to me, let alone the fact that he had been arrested in 1974 in the town where I would later live myself, the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. In fact, years later, I visited the former KGB headquarters and saw the cells in which he had been incarcerated following his arrest.

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Sergei Kovalyov was originally a biologist, the typical example of a Russian intellectual of the pre-Soviet type. In the 1960s, he had been one of the founders of the human rights movement in the Soviet Union, together with Andrei Sakharov and a couple of others. He became one of the most important editors of the Chronicle of Current Events, the main journal of the dissident movement. As mentioned earlier, he was arrested in 1974 in Vilnius, where he eventually was sentenced to seven years of camp and three years of exile. The last three years had been particularly horrible. In camp, he had been together with like-minded political prisoners, which had made life a lot more pleasant. But in exile he wound up in Magadan, in a sort of hostel where the rest of the inhabitants were drunk the whole day long, from early in the morning till late in the evening. On top of that the KGB was constantly on the lookout for him, constantly trying to find a pretext to increase the pressure and convince him to sign a statement that he would refrain from political activity after his release. The pressure on Sergei Kovalyov was doubled when his son, Ivan, and daughter-in-law, Tatyana Osipova, were also arrested and sentenced. I knew the couple quite well, they were friends of Irina Grivnina and I met them in 1980 quite a few times. They were in love, politically active, with a great sense of humor and still young; in a normal society they would have had a whole future ahead of them. But their situation was very different in those days: both were arrested in 1981 shortly after one other and sentenced to respectively ten and twelve years of imprisonment. Ivan, however, had succumbed to KGB pressure shortly after his arrest and had promised to stay away from politics in the future. On the contrary, his wife, Tatyana, became one of the strongest resistance leaders in the camp for female political prisoners in Mordovia. And at the same time his father was trying to keep the KGB off his back in Magadan. A family drama in optima forma, but in a certain way Sergei had been able to learn to live with the situation, to analyze it and accept. Ivan and Tatyana left for New York shortly after their release in 1987, where they started a new life. Sergei stayed behind to try to do something about the situation in the country, first as dissident, then as member of parliament, subsequently as human rights advisor to Yeltsin Ivan Kovalyov and his and finally, after the takeover by Putin, again wife Tatyana Osipova, Moscow, 1980 as dissident.

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During these moments when the Soviet Union was opening up politically, it was still a time of testing the boundaries. For hours we would be sitting in the kitchen of Larisa Bogoraz, unhindered by the heavy blue smoke of the Belomorkanal papyrosy that Larisa chain-smoked, discussing the political situation, the opportunities, the future of the Soviet Union and what we could do about it. We decided to establish a new journal, Sobitie i Rasmyshlenie (Events and Thoughts), with mainly analytic articles that should help provide answers to the complex questions the Soviet Union was facing. What should happen with this enormous country? The Baltic nations were calling for autonomy and soon after demanded independence. The Georgians also were active, followed by other nationalities. This called for a new approach, a new élan, in which the ossified and repressive Soviet structure would be replaced by a state structure that would be acceptable to all. Sakharov was dealing with this question, and until his death in 1989 he was working on a new constitution of the Soviet Union that would transform the country into a federation of free states. Our journal never got off the ground, nor did the Soviet Union as a federation of free states. These were thoughts of intellectuals, who did not consider the political pressure from below and whose thoughts were constantly bypassed by the daily political events. They tried to find a “friendly” way out of a political crisis and avert bloodshed. The political reality was different, however, and, in the end, the limited bloodshed was due to the far-reaching decay of the political system incapable of reacting sufficiently to the political events that brought about its end.

In the center: Sergei Kovalyov, Moscow, 1985. Left of him Emi Botvinnik, her husband Boris on the right of Kovalyov. Emi belonged to the “second ring” of the dissident movement and helped many materially and morally. She was one of my regular addresses in Moscow in 1980-1985.

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Looking for traces of the terror One of my old friends was one of the daily visitors to the home of the Grivninas, Aleksandr Vologodski, Sasha for friends. He was a somewhat silent, gentle person with a very kind face and a pointy beard that he would softly pull while carefully formulating his thoughts, word for word. He was a molecular biologist and, among his colleagues, he was considered to be one of the best in the world. Molecular biology was his profession and his passion at the same time, but his second passion was the past. Sasha was, like me, interested in the terror and everything that was related to it. This interest became more prominent when the politics of “glasnost” and “perestroika” really took off and the newspapers were full of articles in which the country’s past was uncovered, layer after layer. After Irina Grivnina left the country with her family in 1985 and I returned to the Soviet Union again in 1987, the flat of Sasha and his wife Masha became one of my regular overnight addresses. During the evenings at the kitchen table, we spoke at length about the past, about the way in which the Bolsheviks had been able to murder the whole upper layer of society and how as a result the “homo sovieticus” had emerged. Aleksandr Vologodski with the author, Moscow, 1988

These conversations almost automatically led to plans. Friends of Sasha had been part of the founding process of “Memorial,” an association of former political prisoners, dissidents, human rights activists and historians who had set for themselves the goal to uncover the past. They searched for traces that could still be found: survivors, archives, mass graves, camps… Millions of people had disappeared in the camps; many were never buried and were still lying in piles in the permafrost of Siberia. The stories of the places they found continued to accumulate; here, history was written, or rather, given back to an enslaved and terrorized people.

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The urge to participate in this unmasking of the past became increasingly strong in both of us. Sasha was an ardent sportsman and every year he would go out into the endless emptiness of Siberia or Karelia to enjoy nature. Why not combine one with the other? On top of that, I still possessed the Super-8 camera with which I had recorded interviews with, among others, the disabled Yuri Kiselyov and Larisa Bogoraz. Sasha could take this with him and put his discoveries on film. Thus, together with two friends, he departed for North Siberia, in search of camps on the never finished railroad between Igarka and Salekhard. The construction of this railroad started during the Second World War and cost about one hundred thousand lives. The planned railroad went through areas with permafrost, which seriously obstructed its construction. Because of the constant moving of the earth, a straight railroad would change in no time into a slalom, or parts would be pushed into the air. When Stalin died in 1953 the project was almost momentarily halted and the camps closed. The victims had, like with many other building projects, lost their lives completely in vain. The trip of Vologodski was a great success, however. Hindered by huge numbers of mosquitoes, as a result of which one of his fellow travelers had a face swollen like a balloon, they managed to follow part of the railroad tracks. The film failed, because of the swarms of mosquitoes the image was changed into a sort of close-up of water lice. The photos were, however, very impressive, and showed the tracks that swung from one side to the other in the forest, parts of the tracks that suddenly would have

Photo of the railroad tracks, pushed up by permafrost

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been pushed meters higher into the air, as well as watchtowers that were sticking out above the trees. They also found an abundance of remnants of abandoned camps. Some camps were almost intact, and in one of them they found a complete register of inmates. This was taken home in a rucksack. Carefully we went through the registration cards. Most of the prisoners were from Ukraine, arrested between 1944 and 1947, convicted as “Banderovtsy,” named after the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stefan Bandera who had fought the Germans and the Soviets with his armies and had continued a partisan war against the Soviets until the 1950s. Most of the prisoners had been sentenced to twenty-five years, almost an automatism for anyone who had resisted Soviet rule. In our hands we had living proof of the way in which hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians had been sent to an inevitable death. Barracks of one of the camps on the IgarkaSalekhard railroad, 1988

Chapter 11

The mouse and the elephant The release of Anatoly Koryagin immediately gave momentum to the preparations of the campaign concerning the upcoming World Congress of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA), which would be held in Athens, Greece, in October 1989. The Soviets had released one of their main critics, and they were going to feel that they did just that. Koryagin left with his wife and three sons for Switzerland, where he was offered political asylum. That was the moment when I really got to know him. The meeting in September 1980 had been short, only a few hours. Now I would be spending a lot of time with him, in close relation and over a period of several years. Anatoly (Tolya for his friends), had a character that stood like a house. He had already proven his intense stubbornness during his imprisonment. He also had a clear opinion, expressed it and was even willing to endanger his life for it, and that it was damn difficult to make him change his mind. He also had an enormous sense of humor. There were moments that we were rolling over with laughter, and it was this humor that made working with him so pleasant. Apart from that he was a proud man; proud of Siberia. He wasn’t a Russian, but Siberian, I should understand. He would explain on various occasions that Siberians were actually the real Russians, not the weaklings in Moscow, as they were unspoiled and still pure. His wife was not supposed to have her own opinion or at least express it, her task was to take care of the kids and cook, and, of course, to do the rest of the housekeeping. And that attitude he also had to other women. In Washington, he regularly stayed at Ellen Mercer’s residence, and at first he also treated her as if she were his servant. But only at first, because Ellen’s was very much the wrong address for this: within the shortest possible time she had trained him, and he knew exactly where his place was. In spite of these rather archaic character traits he was a kind man, nothing bad about him. And his sense of humor and optimistic character compensated a great deal. He knew only Russian, and so within no time I became his interpreter, guide, companion and eventually his friend. That meant that I accompanied him on many of his travels, and while I interpreted for him we discussed strategy, how to deal with the WPA and what to do with the Soviets who clearly wanted to see their membership of the WPA returned.

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On Dissidents and Madness Anatoly Koryagin, 1987, with Robert van Voren on the right. Left Rudolf Jurrjens, Chairman of the Board of the Second World Center and lecturer at the Free University in Amsterdam.

Although the Soviet Union was in the grips of “glasnost” and “perestroika” and Gorbachev was gradually changing into a half-saint who was idolized in more and more circles, in Soviet psychiatry not much had changed. The same psychiatrists were in charge, most of the victims of “political psychiatry” were still behind bars and to the outside the image was still upheld that nothing was wrong. The charmer Marat Vartanyan attended psychiatric congresses where, with a mix of indignation and faked innocence, he expressed the view that everything was all right, that released “alleged victims” of political psychiatry had actually been in need of immediate treatment upon their arrival in the West, and that, if anything, there was only an issue of an academic disagreement on diagnostic issues. For that reason, our position was that the Soviets could not be allowed back into the WPA as long as they hadn’t admitted that psychiatry had systematically been abused for political purposes, hadn’t released all political prisoners and a democratic process had been set in motion within the all-Union Society of Psychiatrists and Neuropathologists. It was a position that was shared with most of the larger Western psychiatric associations, but was threatened by erosion as a result of Gorbachev’s charm offensive. The philosophical approach of Gluzman During one of my travels to Moscow I visited, as usual, Irina Yakir. It was spring 1988, morning and thus time for a cup of coffee, and at Irina’s you could always find out the latest news and gossips. By that time, I could find the nearby metro station Avtozavodskaya with my eyes closed. When I entered her flat, somebody was already sitting in the kitchen. It appeared to be a slightly reserved and shy man, with a small beard, a somewhat nasal voice and with “ants in his pants,” because he was about to visit a number of editorial offices to get his articles published. We were increasingly curious

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about each other, in particular because according to Irina we had a lot in common, and also because we shared the interest in the political abuse of psychiatry. He introduced himself: “Semyon Fishelevich.” Bells started to ring, because I knew only one Semyon Fishelevich and that was Gluzman. Indeed, it was Semyon Gluzman himself sitting in Yakir’s kitchen across the table from me. Gluzman was a big name, and, at the same time, someone who our campaigns had severely neglected. He was the first psychiatrist who openly turned against the political abuse of psychiatry by concluding that the diagnosis of the famous General Pyotr Grigorenko as being mentally ill had been purely for political reasons. For this action, Gluzman had been sentenced to seven years of camp and three years of exile in 1972. In 1974, together with Vladimir Bukovsky he had written a Manual for Dissenters during his stay in camp, in which thy offered advise to dissidents how to behave during interrogation and how to avoid being turned in a psychiatric case. However, for various reasons, in 1977 the attention in the West had shifted to the new generation of opponents against the political abuse of psychiatry, the members of the Moscow Working Commission. They had many more friends and acquaintances in the West, myself being one of them, and as a result unintentionally much more attention had been paid to their fate, while Gluzman was serving his term in camp and exile. After his return to Kiev, he had maintained a low-key profile in order to avoid a new arrest. His friend Valery Marchenko, who coincidentally corresponded with my sister, hadn’t done so and paid Semyon Gluzman in exile, just after for that with his life. his release from camp, 1979 Gluzman had to go, and we agreed to meet soon, again at Yakir’s kitchen table. It was the beginning of a long process of rapprochement, because Gluzman was a careful man, a loner who clearly kept distance in order to be able to observe. He was also different than most of the dissidents I knew. He took a philosophical approach, putting things in perspective. His articles were careful analyses of the systematic abuse of psychiatry for political purposes, not attacks and listings of human rights

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violations. In spite of what had been done to him, and in spite of the fact that he had lost many of his friends and acquaintances in the camps, Gluzman had found the strength to put all the events in perspective. Later I understood that this was part of his way to come to terms with what happened, that taking distance also meant that he took distance from the most painful emotions. But at that moment, at the kitchen table of Irina Yakir, I sensed that this man had an unusual view of the matter and that intrigued me endlessly. The reserved attitude of Gluzman changed only slightly during the following meetings. He observed me, looked from a corner in the kitchen to the interaction between me and Yakir and a certain sense of trust developed. At the same time, however, the difference in approach formed as big a barrier. I was an activist; I led a campaign to keep the Soviets out of the WPA unless they would admit their guilt. For me everything was pretty much black and white, and that was a position that was fully shared by Anatoly Koryagin and other dissidents. For Gluzman, things were much more fluid, for him black and white didn’t exist and the answer to who was good and who was bad was much less clear. For him all were victims of the Soviet system, both prisoners and guards. So, for him it was not that all Soviet psychiatrists were wrong and all dissidents were right. The latter I could understand by now, I had encountered enough to understand that being a dissident did not automatically mean that you were of good behavior, to put it nicely. But as far as the other side was concerned things were much less clear for me. I actually didn’t know any Soviet psychiatrists, apart from the ones that visited Western psychiatric congresses and defended the Soviet position there, like Marat Vartanyan. For me they were a caricature, just like “the KGB officer” had been a caricature to me. It was exactly that black and white image that Gluzman opposed. His articles were a philosophical approach to the Soviet system in general and the political abuse of psychiatry in particular. He analyzed the “scientific” works by exponents of the Moscow School who were so closely related to the political abuse, and put them into a Soviet context. Subsequently he tried, in a philosophical manner, to understand the reason why they acted the way they did. The result was a series of articles that together offered a unique insight in the phenomenon of “totalitarian psychiatry” but that were actually very much ahead of time. We were still standing on the barricades, while Gluzman was already sitting in the library working on an historical analysis. The result was a sort of intellectual split. On one hand, I worked closely together with Anatoly Koryagin, who was traveling around the West

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and called upon Western psychiatric associations in the strongest terms possible to keep the Soviets out of the door as long as they hadn’t renounced and admitted the political abuse of psychiatry. But on the other hand, I gradually developed an emotional connection with Semyon Gluzman, who constantly put questions to which I had no answer and as a result stimulated me to look at things from various perspectives. The tension between the two positions increased and it became more and more clear that the positions of Gluzman and Koryagin were irreconcilable. It was my task to avoid open conflicts and to maintain one front for the outside world at least until the next World Congress of the WPA was behind our backs. Apart from the regular meetings with Gluzman, an intensive contact developed with another group who opposed the state of affairs in Soviet psychiatry. The leader was a certain Viktor Lanovoi, a psychologist who was waiting for many years for an exit visa to Israel and had now developed the plan to establish a new psychiatric association. He was surrounded by a group of psychiatrists and psychologists who supported his initiative. At that moment, the Soviet Union knew only one psychiatric association, the Al-Union Society of Psychiatrists and Neuropathologists of the USSR. There was no alternative. Setting up an alternative psychiatric association was the ultimate challenge, because this would break the monopoly of the All-Union Society. Together with Ellen Mercer of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), we set ourselves to work. During several meetings the statutes of the Independent Psychiatric Association were developed and an activity plan was written. The APA functioned

One of the meetings during the founding of the Independent Psychiatric Association. From left to right: Robert van Voren, Christine Shaw (British board member of IAPUP), Viktor Lanovoi and two members of the IPA.

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as an example, and Ellen provided an organizational chart that could be used by the initiative group. During a next visit, it turned out that they had used the example quite literally. The APA had within its structure at least forty commissions and departments, and that format had been copied in its entirety. However, the Independent Psychiatric Association had at that moment hardly forty members, and thus all the members were in more than one commission or department and were having multiple tasks. It was quite hilarious and cost us considerable effort to convince them to reduce it all to an acceptable structure. The reaction of the authorities was surprisingly calm. Members were being followed and every now and then they were pestered, but there was no persecution of the type we had known before, not even when the Independent Psychiatric Association applied for membership of the WPA. Lanovoi, however, was given an exit visa, something he undoubtedly had hoped for. After his departure his position was taken by a psychiatrist, Yuri Savenko. Politically speaking this was better, as a psychiatric association should be led by a psychiatrist and not by a psychologist. Practically speaking, however, the change of leadership was not a step forward, because Savenko turned out to be a much more rigid leader who maintained a strong black and white image. In his view, the members of his association were good, the other Soviet psychiatrists were not and everybody who in one way or another held a position of leadership within Soviet psychiatry was, hence, automatically part of the repressive system. It was exactly the position that Gluzman rejected, and that Anatoly Koryagin supported. On our way to Athens In the meantime our temporary confederation had become a more permanent entity. After Gérard Bles had stepped down as leader of the International Association on the Political Use of Psychiatry (IAPUP) in 1984, Catherine Kuhn from Geneva assumed the role of General Secretary. Catherine had been one of the founders of the first committee against the political abuse of psychiatry, in 1974 in Geneva. The call for a more permanent secretariat became louder, in particular because the campaign in connection with the World Congress of the WPA in 1989 in Athens had to be started. In December 1986, I was urged to assume the role of General Secretary, and, as a result, the seat of the organization moved in early 1987 to The Netherlands. IAPUP had at that moment actually nothing: no official statutes, no registration, no board and not even a bank account. In

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order to be able to develop the campaign more professionally this had to change. At the same time, we wanted to leave the structure as it was so our notary set about the task of developing official statutes that, on the one hand, fulfilled all the requirements of Dutch legislation and, on the other hand, met all our wishes and demands. The result was draft statutes discussed during exhaustive meetings, commented upon by a Swiss lawyer and eventually found themselves again on the desk of our notary. Eventually in 1988, we agreed on a final version, and while the structure was completely unworkable, we were able to register ourselves officially. Shortly after registration, we received our first official subsidy, $40,000 from an American foundation, enough to finance our campaign. Our approach with regard to the World Congress in October 1989 in Athens was much more extensive than before. We wanted to keep the Soviet association outside the door as long as the political abuse of psychiatry had not come to an end. We also wanted the Independent Psychiatric Association be admitted to the WPA. And finally we wanted to do everything possible to facilitate the election of a new WPA executive committee that would prioritize medical ethics and would support our campaign against the political abuse of psychiatry. The latter was of great importance, as we had seen again how an executive committee of the WPA had been infected by “WPA-itis” the moment it had been elected and that from that moment onwards there was no trace of any moral positioning. The Greek President, Costas Stefanis, was of the opinion that a return of the Soviets should be no problem because the Soviet Union was changing and that this reform process should, in fact, be supported by admitting them into the WPA. The Danish General Secretary, Fini Schulsinger, did not only support this point of view, but also wondered whether the alleged victims of political psychiatry were, in fact, psychiatric patients who had sought treatment after their arrival in the West. His attacks became increasingly personal, he accused us of having been financed by the CIA and in the end he exclaimed that we were linked to the anti-psychiatric Scientology Church. The latter was not only wrong but also very stupid, because we were supported by many prominent psychiatrists who did not appreciate being insulted in such a manner. In order to be able to lobby successfully, we made sure that we were represented at all the important psychiatric congresses. Usually our delegation consisted of four or five persons, supported by a number of influential psychiatrists and invariably by Ellen Mercer as our secret weapon. Ellen was still the image of international psychiatry: she knew everybody and everybody knew her. She had no problem whatsoever expressing her

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opinion, whether asked or not; but because of her straightforwardness and enormous drive she was respected by many if not most. Those who could not bring themselves to respect her and treated her with contempt immediately found her imposing boss on their way. Melvin Sabshin, then-Medical Director of the APA, was imposing both in a physical and intellectual sense, someone you could not ignore and for whom you immediately developed feelings of respect. He was also somebody who had worked with Ellen for many years and supported her in every situation and every possible way and who strongly supported the campaign against the political abuse of psychiatry. That does not mean that he automatically agreed with our actions, to the contrary. Sabshin had to be convinced, and that would cost a lot of talking, arguing and providing ample evidence. At the same time, he could make a clear distinction between friendship and political positioning. Even when he did not agree with us, he still felt that we had the right to express our views, and that was something he would continuously promote. One of the ways he did this was to allow Ellen Mercer to work with us to a large degree as she saw fit. Thus, it was possible for Ellen to introduce us to leading psychiatrists and potential candidates for the executive committee of the WPA. On the basis of these meetings, we would consider whether to support their candidacy or not, and gradually an image was formed in our heads of a future executive committee of the WPA that we thought would be steadfast and continue to consider medical ethics as a priority. This is how we were introduced in the spring of 1988 to a short and passionate Brazilian, Alberto Costa e Silva. He was a rather hyperactive fellow, a chatterbox with arms that he would wave around wildly, but somebody who knew exactly how so say the things that we wanted to hear and managed to wind us around his finger in no time. Within a few hours, I had become his good friend and, to my dismay, I was called shortly “Bobby” instead of Robert. And when I met him at subsequent congresses he would come running in my direction, loudly exclaiming “Oh, Bobby, so good to see you!” and would then embrace me with his short arms. It all seemed sincere, but, in fact, he had realized that our influence was considerable and that our support would greatly strengthen his chances of being elected to the presidency of the WPA. Thus, without knowing it, we concluded a “deal with the devil” and decided to promote his candidacy, convinced that with his election the WPA would finally stay on track as far as “our” issues were concerned. We also found good candidates for other positions on the executive committee and started to lobby for them. That we were being used to further personal careers was something we did not even consider. At the

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same time, we were surprised as to how our influence had actually grown. It was the story of the mouse and the elephant that walk across a bridge, during which the mouse looks up to the elephant and says proudly: “Aren’t we nicely marching or what?” Only in our situation it didn’t only turn out that we nicely marched along, but it also seemed that we decided on the rhythm. It was a very strange realization. Traveling with Koryagin One of the standard members of our delegation was Anatoly Koryagin, who because of his strong personality and clear opinions was widely admired. It could have hardly been different: here you had a man who had been sentenced to twelve years of camp and exile because of his resistance against the political abuse of psychiatry, who came out of camp unbroken and who personally had examined a lot of victims of political psychiatry and had declared them mentally healthy. His presence ended all doubts: it was impossible to deny that the Soviets were using psychiatry as a means of repression. Koryagin was an honorary member of the WPA, but also of a number of other Western psychiatric associations, and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Free University in Amsterdam. Wherever he entered the room, he immediately attracted all attention and, within a few moments, he would explain in clear wording what conditions the Soviets should fulfill before being allowed to reenter the WPA. And those demands were clear enough: all victims should be released and an official acknowledgement should be provided that the systematic political abuse of Anatoly Koryagin receives his honorary psychiatry had taken place. doctorate from the Free University of Nothing more, nothing less. Amsterdam, 1988 As his personal guide, I traveled around the world with him, from congress to congress, from meeting to meeting. He was also regularly invited to give speeches, and where possible we would do that together. Usually this involved psychiatric congresses, but sometimes other types of meetings when the political abuse was put on the agenda. Thus we were invited to give a lecture tour in Greece. The invitation came from a young parliamentarian, the future prime-minister Kostas Karamanlis, a cousin of the “old Karamanlis” who had reinstalled democracy in Greece after

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the colonel regime of 1967-1974. The young Karamanlis was building his political career, elections were around the corner and thus a lecture tour with the internationally renowned and respected Koryagin was an excellent way of promoting himself. For us, it was a nice way to get the support of public opinion in Greece and to develop a network of contacts with the Greek press, so we could make use of that during the upcoming World Congress. The tour was carried out by a small delegation: Koryagin and myself, Kostas Karamanlis, a female associate of his and a man who was designated to become the head of Greek national radio if Karamanlis’s party won the elections. Greece was in fact a two-party system, with, on one hand, the conservative “Nea Demokratia” of Karamanlis and on the other the socialist PASOK, first led by father Papandreou and, subsequently, by his son George. Every time there was a change of power, the whole upper layer of society would change, not only the ministers but also the whole top of the state bureaucracy, heads of radio, television, etc. Everything was politics and so your career was completely determined by the success of the political party you supported. Thus the allies of Karamanlis already knew beforehand what their positions would be if Nea Demokratia won the election. As far as the supposed future head of Greek radio was concerned, this didn’t bode very well, because he had very strange ideas. For instance, he tried to convince us that one’s face adjusted itself to meteorological circumstances. If, for instance, a Westerner lived for a longer time in China, he/she would slowly develop slant eyes, he assured us, or in Africa the face would develop African features. Also he was convinced there were many more Greeks than the world wanted to believe. Many Russians were in fact Greeks, he asserted. “Look at Sakharov. Everybody thinks he is Russian, but actually his name is Zacharis. So he is a Greek!” Koryagin couldn’t stop laughing when hearing this. He altered my name into “Vanvorenis” and would roll over of laughter. He told me the story of an Armenian in his camp, who was suffering from the same “syndrome”: he saw Armenians everywhere. One day the guy had taken Koryagin aside and told him: “You know, actually your name isn’t Koryagin. Your name is Koryagyan, you are an Armenian!” And so I became “Vanvorenyan” and again he would roar of laughter. The lectures were followed by long dinners in restaurants in Athens, Thessaloniki and some other towns, where, in addition to us, the local leadership of Nea Demokratia would join the table. We were offered a fantastic view of political life in Greece. During the private dinners in restaurants or discothèques, the personal interests of those present were mapped out and the political positions were divided, followed by lengthy

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toasting. Koryagin and I were sitting there as if being the audience; it sometimes appeared that the Greeks had forgotten the two guests who were the original reason for the dinner. Koryagin, especially, was flabbergasted; he had come straight out of a totalitarian Soviet Union only to wind up in an open form of political horse trading. A wonderful lesson in politics in the cradle of democracy! The dinners would last until the early morning hours, and the next day our circus would hit the road again, on to the next city. The choice of the hotel we would use as a base in Athens also was made in this way. Because of Vladimir Bukovsky, we wound up in the Caravel Hotel. This hotel was owned either by Nea Demokratia or a person closely associated to the party. The director was a great admirer of Ronald Reagan and strongly anti-communist, and so we were warmly welcomed. For our stay in the hotel during the congress, we were offered a suite on one of the top floors with a huge discount, which we could turn into our headquarters. The associate of Karamanlis, who had accompanied us on our lecture tour, was hired to be our local coordinator. Step by step our logistical preparations were finalized. In the meantime the intellectual split in my head continued. The articles that Gluzman had written were published in a collection On Totalitarian Psychiatry. It was a nice and balanced publication, that was well received, but Koryagin didn’t like it at all. He preferred our other materials, such as the leaflets in which psychiatrists like Marat Vartanyan were lambasted, materials that, in turn, Gluzman disliked. For Koryagin everything had to be clear and straightforward, without disturbing nuances. For instance, during a visit to Amsterdam he saw in an Amsterdam café the well-known poster of the client organization “Pandora,” on which a mirror was printed with the text, “Have you ever met a normal person?? And did you like it?” Koryagin considered this to be a very strange poster with a weird question, however much you tried to explain that “normal” was a relative notion and to a large degree dependent on how you looked at human beings. For him, a person was either crazy or not, he considered these nuances dangerous philosophical small talk. As a result of this difference in position, it became increasingly difficult to maintain unity, and it became more and more an issue of careful meandering between opposing views.

Chapter 12

Playing chess in Athens In many respects, the WPA World Congress in Athens was an historic event. The world was changing at high velocity; and while the Soviet psychiatric society was trying hard to return to the WPA while we were trying hard to keep them out, the Soviet Union succumbed to a rapidly developing disintegration process. This political context made all of the issues of psychiatric abuse even more complex as we could not foresee the ultimate outcome. On the eve of the World Congress, the US State Department decided to institute an official investigation in an attempt to establish whether the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union indeed took place, had ended or still continued. For the Americans, the issue had become of great political importance, because it constantly interfered with positively developing political relations between the Soviet Union and the West and it repeatedly put the issue of human rights violations back on the political agenda. It was their hope that a careful investigation would solve this issue once and for all. Long negotiations preceded the visit of the delegation. While the official head of the delegation was a U.S. State Department official, the psychiatric leader of the delegation was Loren Roth, a professor of psychiatry from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and a complete workaholic. A small delegation consisting of the State Department official; Dr. Roth, Drs. Darrel Regier, Sam Keith, and Saleem Shah from the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health; and Ellen Mercer from the APA traveled to Moscow in order to negotiate the terms of the agreement that would form the basis of the visit. Dr. Roth made several trips along the way and his perseverance and hyperactivity alone must have driven the Soviets to completely insanity. The negotiations were outlined in minute detail which included plans for sending the names of psychiatric prisoners or former psychiatric prisoners to be examined, conditions as to the examinations, including taking urine samples from each person interviewed. In addition, there was to be a hospital visit team and the names of the hospitals, including Special Psychiatric Hospitals, were to be sent a week before the visits. Eventually the Soviet authorities (the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) agreed on virtually all points and in 1989 the group of about 25 people traveled to the USSR. This group consisted of the State Department official who led the delegation, Dr. Roth as head of the psychiatric team, psychiatrists from the National Institute of Mental Health,

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four émigré Soviet psychiatrists living in the U.S., and Dr. Harold Visotsky from Chicago, Illinois, as head of the hospital visit team. In addition, there were State Department interpreters, two attorneys, Ellen Mercer and Peter Reddaway. The delegation visited a number of psychiatric institutions, examined a number of alleged victims of Soviet psychiatric abuse together with Soviet colleagues and subsequently compared joint conclusions with those reached by Soviet psychiatrists in the past. For this purpose, a long list of persons was handed over, who the Americans wanted to invite for such an examination. Apart from that meetings with dissidents were planned. The Soviets had admitted to most issues, but couldn’t refrain from constantly sticking sticks into the wheels. Persons on the American’s list were threatened and told not to go to Moscow, or the Americans were told that some people could not be found. This constant obstruction even continued while the Americans were in the Soviet Union.

Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Washington D.C., 1988. From left to right: Robert van Voren, Anatoly Koryagin, Ellen Mercer and Harold Vysotsky. That is where we came in. We were in constant communication with both the Americans and with dissidents in Moscow, in particular Aleksandr Podrabinek who had become politically active again and was publishing an independent newspaper, Express Khronika. During telephone conversations with members of the American delegation, mainly Ellen Mercer and my second “godfather” Peter Reddaway, we collected information on the persons who, according to the Soviets, had disappeared without a trace or had refused to appear, and passed the information on

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to Podrabinek. He, in turn, went out to find them, and via his network the people were traced. Often it turned out that the people had been threatened or never even contacted, or had indicated that they wanted to be examined and the information had not been passed on by the Soviet authorities. This information was in turn, again passed on to the American delegation, who, the next morning, confronted their Soviet hosts with this information. The Soviets were repeatedly speechless. Day after day, Podrabinek would bring former psychiatric prisoners to the psychiatrists for their day-long examination beginning with the signing of a consent form, which they had never experienced in a Soviet examination, and a urine test. After a visit of more than two weeks the delegation returned home and wrote its report. From confidential sources we knew that the report was pretty damaging to the Soviet authorities. Not only had the delegation established that there had been systematic political abuse of psychiatry, but also that this abuse had not ended, that there were still victims of the political abuse in psychiatric hospitals and that the Soviet authorities – in particular the Soviet Society of Psychiatrists and Neuropathologists – still denied that psychiatry had been used as a method of repression.

Aleksandr Podrabinek, 1988

In our opinion, the report had to be published as soon as possible, but for unclear reasons it was constantly postponed. It was as if the US Government didn’t want the publication of the report to worsen the position of the Soviets and reduce their chances to a return into the WPA. I increasingly had the feeling that higher interests played a role here, and that the interest of the fight against the political abuse of psychiatry had been made secondary. Remarks that I made in that direction during a Congressional Hearing in the US Senate in Washington D.C. resulted in a fierce reaction on the part of the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State for Human Rights, Ambassador Richard Schifter; in a way, his fierce reaction to me only confirmed the accuracy of my suspicions. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the Soviet media had become active as well. Until that time, the Soviet media had supported leaders of Soviet psychiatry unconditionally; however, this began to change. Gluzman was not the only one who published articles about the

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political abuse of psychiatry; also others became involved in the debate. The television studios in Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg) decided to make a film on the subject and contacted Semyon Gluzman. Through him, they came to me and in the spring of 1989 the film crew stood on our doorstep in Amsterdam. A long list of former victims of political abuse of psychiatry had agreed to be interviewed and traveled to Amsterdam. This list included the well-known Ukrainian dissident, Leonid Plyushch, who had been released in 1975 after the intervention of, among others, the French communist leader George Marchais and was now living in France; the poetess Natalya Gorbanevskaya from Paris and, from Hamburg, the Bashkir poet Nitzametdin Akhmetov.

Nitzametdin Akhmetov being filmed by the Sverdlovsk film studio crew, Amsterdam, 1988 Akhmetov had been in psychiatric hospitals for a total of eighteen years and had emigrated to the West in 1987. He had, however, a huge problem: immediately after his arrival in the West he had lost his poetry vein. There was no production whatsoever and he was increasingly unhappy. He would have preferred to return to the USSR, but he had lost his Soviet citizenship. He was stuck and saw no way out of this predicament. A year after his visit to Amsterdam, Nitzametdin disappeared, only to resurface again months later in the Soviet Union, having been arrested on charges of high treason. It turned out that he had tried to flee back into the Soviet Union via Finland, had been arrested at the border and accused of crossing the border illegally and charged on the basis of article 64 of the Criminal

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Code of the Russian SSR, “high treason” that carried, as a maximum, the death sentence. It took a long time for the trial to be scheduled and it had not even started when the Soviet Union fell apart in August 1991. Thus, the accusation lost its basis and Nitzametdin was released: how can you betray a country when the country no longer exists? The television crew from Sverdlovsk also did a large number of interviews in the Soviet Union, not only with well-known victims of political psychiatry but also with the leaders of Soviet psychiatry. They appeared on film in a good mood, sure of their cause and also of their eventual success in Athens: they were already celebrating their victory. The confrontation I departed for Athens more than two weeks before the World Congress. This seemed a bit early, but the idea was that I would prepare the groundwork, activate the network of contacts in Greece and prepare the local press for what was about to happen. Our earlier experiences with Greece were enough reason to take the time: everything went slowly, promises were repeatedly ignored or their fulfillment postponed, for everything we had to pay extra under the table and sometimes political support from Karamanlis’ party was necessary to get things done. Hiring his associate as our representative turned out to be a crucial decision: she knew immediately how to get things done. Every morning I would take the elevator down to drink coffee in the office of the hotel’s director. That way he remained abreast of our “anti-Communist struggle” and I remained assured of his political support. You never knew when it would come handy. The congress in Athens attracted almost ten thousand participants, among them a sizeable Soviet delegation led by professor Nikolai Zharikov, chairman of the All-Union Society, the flamboyant Marat Vartanyan, the young Moscow psychiatrist Pyotr Morozov and a whole list of psychiatrists, about twenty of them. Our delegation consisted eventually of about fifteen people, among whom Anatoly Koryagin, Semyon Gluzman and the Lithuanian psychiatrist Algirdas Statkevicius who himself had been hospitalized for political reasons in the Special Psychiatric Hospital of Chernyakhovsk and who was now living Semyon Gluzman, 1989

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in Chicago. Gluzman had arrived straight from Kiev, his first international trip. We picked him up from the airport and in the taxi to the hotel he studied the city from behind the window. “What a mess,” he said. “Just like Tbilisi” and with that he had given the city a place in his frame of reference. All the members of our delegation stayed at the Caravel hotel, and every morning after breakfast we met for deliberations. The latest information was exchanged, strategies were discussed, meetings and events planned, and after that we all went our way. It didn’t take long for Koryagin to disappear into thin air. He didn’t like these tactical discussions and soon found the fitness center and the swimming pool more interesting. Gluzman had observed us during the first days in his own typical manner. He would sit on a chair next to the door of the office, observing our activity and probably analyzing for himself whether he wanted to be part of this or not. Slowly he defrosted and started making jokes. Usually they were word games, or dry remarks, but it was for the first time that he showed his funny side, and it was an enormous relief to us. Gluzman had found his place. The last day before the conference the past participants in our campaign arrived. Ellen Mercer, as usually very much present, humorous and organizing things in her way, full of news and background information. Jim Birley, the President of the British Royal College of Psychiatrists and also their delegate to the WPA General Assembly in Athens, a typically British intellectual with an excellent reputation, friendly and without any pretence, but at the same time direct and sharp when he had to be. And Roelof ten Doesschate, the first Dutch delegate who really had an interest in the problem of Soviet psychiatry and who had been instructed to act as he saw fit, which he immediately did. Around them many other participants and delegates to the General Assembly circled, more or less identifying themselves with “our cause.” Some of them came to the regular brainstorming session in our office, where the daily state of affairs was discussed, the division of votes among the delegates was assessed and we also checked how “our” candidates for the executive committee were doing. It was going to be a close call, so much was clear. The Soviet delegation benefited from the political climate, the democratization in the Soviet Union was, for many delegates, reason to vote in favor of a return of the Soviet All-Union Society. Here the hard-line reaction of Anatoly Koryagin could not be the necessary answer. The time of black and white was gone; this called for a subtle and balanced response. That answer could only be provided by Semyon Gluzman, and, thus, he moved from being a witness to becoming the most important actor in the game.

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That was also clear to the WPA Executive Committee, as well as the people whom we supported as candidate members for that body, such as the hyperactive Brazilian Jorge Costa e Silva. “Bobby” was invited to a confidential meeting, where it was made clear that their hope was now with Gluzman to broker an agreement between the two sides. Costa e Silva wanted to become president, that was clear, and the Soviet issue should not cause any trouble. There should be a compromise, and preferably one brokered by him, so he could triumphantly become the leader of the WPA. “WPA-itis” is had already infected him. The next day, I came with Gluzman to a closed meeting with the leadership of the WPA. Not present was the current General Secretary, Fini Schulsinger. Apparently they had decided that his presence was not so clever, considering his earlier attacks on us. Present were WPA President Costas Stefanis, candidate for presidency Jorge Alberto Costa e Silva, executive committee member Felice Lieh Mak from Hong Kong, and Harold Visotsky as delegate of the American Psychiatric Association. On the other side were Semyon Gluzman and myself as his interpreter. The latter was a precondition: I was not supposed to have an opinion and if I had one I should keep it to myself. I was only to translate the thoughts of Gluzman; a ridiculous and rather insulting situation. Ridiculous because Gluzman and I constantly discussed tactics and politically shared, by now, the same views, as any normally thinking person would have understood. Insulting, because I was pushed in the corner as a sort of dog: come on, move it, under the table! It was, however, not the first time that this happened to me and I had learned to swallow, to pretend nothing was happening and just continue with what I intended to do. The meeting had only one purpose: how could the Soviets be guided in via the backdoor without us creating a big stink. It was a shameful performance. This was pure politics, basically over the backs of the victims of the political abuse of psychiatry. Costa e Silva wanted to become president, and not of a castrated association but of one that had welcomed the Soviets back into its fold. How Lieh Mak had wound up in this horse trade I don’t know, in the case of Visotsky, I think he very well knew what was going on and tried to make the most of it for us. There just was no chance to get more. The WPA delegation proposed to organize an Extraordinary General Assembly where Gluzman would have a debate with representatives of the Soviet delegation. Thus they would cross swords, in presence of all the delegates, and those present could draw their own conclusions. Gluzman agreed to the duel and took up the glove.

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The next day, the Extraordinary General Assembly took place. If it hadn’t been so serious and if so much had not been at stake, it would have been hilarious. The situation was pretty unbalanced, to put it mildly. On stage were six or seven members of the Soviet delegation sitting in a row, like a line of puppets in a puppet-theatre. As a result, there were no more places on stage, and so Gluzman and I, as his interpreter, had to stand at the bottom of the stage, at least a meter lower. There were seven against one, and optically a lost battle. Either this was done on purpose or the organizers had been incredibly short-visioned. A strange feeling took possession of us: here we could only win. It was the feeling of the underdog - the only way forward is up. On top of that, the Soviet representatives made a very bad impression. Some repeated the standard Soviet propaganda, others were clearly lying. Modest Kabanov, director of the Bekhterev Institute in Leningrad and in the West considered to be one of the enlightened figures in Soviet psychiatry, was feeling uncomfortable, moving around on his chair and only watching the tip of his shoes. He clearly felt deeply ashamed that he had to participate in this charade. Gluzman, to the contrary, was in the best possible form. His story was not only loud and clear, he clearly felt good being in the role of the underdog and even showed pity on the Soviet representatives who were sitting on stage high above him. The setting and the message made the farce even worse, and made Kabanov repeatedly wince. The WPA probably hoped that the debate would cause the opinions to change in favor of the Soviets. The opposite happened. It strengthened the opinion of the opponents that too little had changed in Soviet psychiatry to allow a return of the Soviet Society and that their statements were still dominated by lies. Negotiations with Moscow and the climax The case reached a climax. The head of the Soviet delegation, unhappy about these developments, banned Marat Vartanyan from the World Congress and ordered him to stay the remainder of the congress in his hotel room. Many years later, we heard from a former member of the Soviet delegation that the same counted for the larger part of the delegation. The leadership role was now openly taken up by a diplomat rather than by a psychiatrist: Yuri Reshetov, deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union. It was clear that the game was now being played at the highest possible level, with direct involvement of the

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Politburo in Moscow. On our side, a small group of negotiators was formed consisting of the earlier mentioned Jim Birley, the Dutch delegate Roelof ten Doesschate, the American Harold Visotsky and the German delegate, Johannes Meyer Lindenberg. We had met and gotten to know Johannes at earlier congresses and soon a close friendship evolved. He was from a German aristocratic family, son of a diplomat who Johannes Meyer once was Germany’s Ambassador to Spain. He Lindenberg was a very friendly and gentle person, a real gentleman, with a strong sense of justice. Johannes had a special reason to support our struggle and he made no secret of it. He felt that being a German he, in particular, had the duty to fight the political abuse of his profession - because of the war and especially because of the euthanasia program of the Nazis in the framework of which thousands of mental patients and mentally handicapped had been murdered. In his view, it was totally unacceptable that the WPA might draw a veil over the political abuse only to be able to have as big an association as possible. For him it was, therefore, only logical that he joined the other three in order to convince the Soviets to end the political abuse and admit that it had taken place in a systematic fashion. The situation that developed was unique. While the World Congress continued, the press waited with suspense; the WPA Executive Committee had been mostly pushed to the sideline; and the four delegates negotiated with Yuri Reshetov, who was in continuous contact with Moscow in order to receive his instructions. The negotiations continued while the General Assembly already started. Also that meeting itself was quite unique. In the back of the meeting hall sat on the left hand side Anatoly Koryagin, honorary member of the WPA and former political prisoner, with me next to him as interpreter. On the other side of the aisle sat, more or less at the same height, Nikolai Zharikov as delegate of the Soviet delegation and Pyotr Morozov as his interpreter.

Pyotr Morozov, standing, with Nikolai Zharikov during the WPA General Assembly, 1989

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As usual, the WPA Executive Committee had moved the Soviet issue to the end of the agenda. This was clearly on purpose, done in order to first fatigue the delegates and to subsequently push the hot potato down their throats. First they debated at length about a whole range of procedural issues, small amendments to the statutes and other issues that had nothing to do with the one vote that dominated the whole congress. After that came the elections to the executive committee of the WPA. Fini Schulsinger, the current General Secretary, had decided to run for the presidency, against the Brazilian Costa e Silva whom we supported. Candidates were asked to promote their candidacy with a short statement and to explain why they were the best choice. Schulsinger went first. His statement began calmly, but soon he became agitated, in particular when he reached the issue of Soviet membership. To the surprise of the delegates he went completely out of his mind, accused us of having been financed by the CIA and directed by the Scientology Church. All his frustrations of the past years found their way out, as if a volcano erupted. The audience was totally silent; they had never seen anything like that before. For Costa e Silva, it was a won race. With an overwhelming majority, he was elected President of the WPA. Schulsinger hardly got a vote. In addition, most of the other people whose candidacy we supported were elected. In that sense all went smoothly. The General Assembly was adjourned, the session had taken many hours and it was time for a break. Also during this break, the negotiations with the Soviets continued. They were offered their last chance: if they wanted to return they would have to read a statement and admit their guilt; otherwise, they would not make it. The communication with Moscow was intense, the negotiations started about the content of the statement. Every word was debated. After the break, we returned to the meeting hall, oblivious of the fact that negotiations were going on in secret. On the Soviet side, the puppets had been changed. Professor Tiganov, a somewhat boorish psychiatrist from Moscow whose nose clearly indicated his strong interest in vodka, had been substituted for the stiff Zharikov. The rest of the group remained the same. Tiganov sat there, silent and surly staring into the distance without understanding a word of what was being said. Pyotr Morozov was next to him but not translating but, rather, shifting nervously from one side of his chair to the other. Finally, almost at the end of the meeting when the interpreters protested and threatened to leave the meeting, the issue of Soviet membership was raised. One delegate after the other took the floor, one

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defending a continued exclusion of the Soviets and the other promoting exactly the opposite. Johannes Meyer-Lindenberg took the floor and read a balanced and emotional statement in which he referred to the crimes of the Nazi regime and the fact that the world had looked on for a long time and stayed silent. That should never happen again, he said, and thus he opposed the return of the Soviet society. Suddenly, Harold Visotsky stood up, the somewhat short and cheerful American delegate. He said that the Soviet delegation had a statement that they would like to read. All heads turned in the direction of the stock-still Tiganov and the nervous Morozov, hopeful and somewhat surprised by this sudden turn of events. Morozov got up, with a paper in his hand, and started to read the said statement at high speed and with a soft voice. Afterwards, he quickly sat down. Nobody had understood a word. Visotsky stood up again, said that this was far too quick and soft and urged Morozov to read the statement once again, and this time loud and clear. With a reddened face, Pyotr Morozov got up again. He now read the statement slowly, word for word. The Soviets acknowledged that systematic political abuse of psychiatry had taken place, promised that all political prisoners would be released and that democratic changes would be carried out within the Soviet society. Indeed it was now loud and clear, also for Harold Visotsky. He knew the text word for word, because, as it became clear later, he had been the author of the text since the Soviets couldn’t or didn’t want to put anything to paper. The die was cast. The Soviets were admitted back as members of the WPA, and the same counted for the Independent Psychiatric Association. Before we knew it, the meeting was over, and the hall emptied. Like a Napoleon the new WPA President Costa e Silva strode down the aisle to the doors. He walked by at less than half a meter distance, but no “Bobby” passed his lips. He had his victory, his “friendship” with us was no longer necessary. I met him only once later, at a conference in Paris. He had by then succumbed totally to “WPA-itis” and was only busy with his Marvelous Himself. His presidency of the WPA was a disaster, a longlasting narcissistic trip. Anatoly Koryagin was deeply shocked. He hadn’t thought that the Soviets would be allowed to return and, rightly so, considered the statement by the Soviets as completely insincere and hypocritical. Accepting a compromise was not an option for him. Out of anger he renounced his honorary membership of the WPA on the spot, in spite of attempts by many to change his mind. It was also a breaking point in our relationship. He

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Chapter 13

The Soviet Union in 1990 This totalitarian state, closed for 70 years while serving as a superpower co-determining the agenda of international politics, had changed at the end of the 1980s into an “Eldorado” for pioneers and adventurers. The country was wide open and all measures of control of the past seemed to have disappeared. The Soviet population enjoyed the newly acquired freedoms thoroughly. The press had been liberalized completely and State monopoly on radio and television had disappeared. Newspapers and journals were full of articles about the dark Soviet past; more and more monuments were established for the victims of Soviet terror. Gorbachev had acquired enormous international respect. He was immensely popular in the West, often more popular than local politicians. During his travels, he was usually welcomed as a mix between a national hero and a film star. In particular, his popularity was endless in Germany, especially after he agreed in January 1990 to the reunification of Germany and subsequently announced the withdrawal of more than half a million Soviet troops from Eastern Europe. The crumbling of the communist power bloc was in full swing; Eastern Europe was liberated from communist dictatorships at an incredible speed and, with the departure of Soviet troops, a future return of Soviet domination became extremely unlikely. The developments were so fast that it was almost impossible to keep up with them emotionally. For many people it was and remained unreal, a sort of dream from which they hoped never to wake up. The reduced tension between East and West and the new policy of openness increasingly led to a hype in the West. Key words of this policy were “glasnost” (openness) and “perestroika” (reform), and soon these terms were used in the West as well. Everywhere these key notions of Gorbachev’s policy were repeated. In The Netherlands, the travel agency “Perestroika Travel” opened its doors and the “Foundation Glasnost and Perestroika” was founded. Especially after Gorbachev published his book, “My Vision on the World”, it was an unstoppable process. In reality, it was a terrible book, long-winded and full with empty phrases, but after the Collected Works of Lenin and Stalin and the Memoirs of Leonid Brezhnev, the book was an enormous relief. Finally, we had a Soviet leader who was three-dimensional and not a retouched state portrait.

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The Soviet Union on sale It was noticeable on a daily basis that the Soviet Union was the latest fad. The newest fashion made use of Soviet symbols or just elements of the Cyrillic alphabet. Whether it made sense or not was not important, it just looked slick. People walked around with Soviet pins without knowing what they meant. The head of Lenin as a small child on the pin of the Pioneers was “cute” and the military insignia of the Red Army “exciting.” There was no thought given to the dictatorship and terror of the Soviet regime. For those of us who had witnessed this terror, it was as if people were happily walking around with swastikas around their necks; but if you dared to say something in that direction, people would look at you as if you were from another planet. Instead of resisting these trends, we decided to make use of the situation. Our advantage was that the shop of the Second World Center was located next to the international call center of the Dutch telecom service on the Raadhuisstraat in Amsterdam, behind the Royal Palace on Dam Square, and foreigners who were hanging around waiting for their international call would enter our shop. The books by dissidents were not really of interest to them, but the Soviet rubbish attracted them like flies. We decided to expand our collection with all sorts of Soviet items. As we were still traveling to the Soviet Union and were accustomed to bringing suitcases full of material aid to the democratic movement and the independent press, the empty suitcases could be used very well to bring items back to Holland. Thus, we went on a shopping spree. First to the bookstores, where fat rolls with Soviet posters were bought, as well as pre-printed diplomas and certificates with Soviet symbols, and all kinds of propaganda materials and the first official publications on the Soviet terror. We brought back complete cartons of Soviet cigarettes and “Papysosy”. Papyrosy, Soviet cigarettes with on one end a long carton filter, were in high demand, because they had a model that was not for sale anywhere in Western Europe, and because it was a perfect tool for smoking marihuana. The tobacco was carefully removed from the top, mixed with marihuana and then put back. Bingo! We also went to shops with wooden souvenirs and Soviet pins; the department store “Voennitorg” of the Red Army could now be freely visited even though previously it was only accessible to Soviet military. We bought as much military insignia as we wanted and also it was stocked with household goods such as dinner service, cutlery and a variety of kitchen tools. Heavy Soviet quality specially made for the Soviet military establishment could be purchased for very little money. Every visit was a real feast.

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In The Netherlands our assortment was further expanded with goods delivered by traders from the Soviet Union. It started with a few individuals, but eventually there was a constant stream. Soviet ships regularly visited the port of Amsterdam. As soon as a ship would arrive, the traders would be standing in front of the door when we came to open the shop the next morning. They brought bags of goods, especially bottles of vodka and cans of black caviar. These cans of caviar were unbelievably big: half a kilo was no exception. After some time, the refrigerator in the office was full of cans of caviar and we couldn’t even force ourselves to eat more. The big cupboard behind Jan Veldmeijer’s desk was not full of files and documents, like in an ordinary shop, but it was loaded with bottles of vodka in all sorts and sizes. Opening of the Second World Center at the Raadhuisstraat by Hans van den Broek, Minister of Foreign Affairs and the later Commissioner of External Relations of the European Commission. From left to right:: Robert van Voren, Henk Wolzak, Hans van den Broek. The goods were paid for in cash and the order for the next visit was placed immediately. Thus, the content of the bags of the traders adjusted themselves to the wishes of our customers. One time there was a higher demand for lacquer boxes and painted eggs, the next time it would be Soviet medals and other military insignia. The vodka and caviar were excellent items for the Queen’s Birthday. In Amsterdam, the free market was blossoming and sales started earlier every year, sometimes already at six o’clock in the afternoon before the actual birthday party. We had a guaranteed top location with our offices and shop being on the Raadhuisstraat. At the edge of the sidewalk, we put long tables on which we placed our goods. Apart from Soviet cigarettes and Soviet rubbish, vodka and caviar were the main attraction. We sold sandwiches with large amounts of caviar for five guilders. We had twelve varieties of vodka and customers were urged to try several and then compare. What they didn’t know was that we had twelve different bottles, but usually only one or two types of vodka. When a bottle was empty we would take it inside and fill it up secretively with one and the same. Still

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our customers could clearly distinguish the difference between the various vodkas, or at least that is what they asserted. The problem was that we couldn’t resist toasting with our customers, which led to our diminished state by early morning when the actual party was scheduled to start! The income from this business was enormous. The Queen’s Birthday resulted in a profit of sometimes up to six thousand guilders, enough to pay the rent of the shop for a while. Thus, the collapse of the Soviet Union contributed to the survival of our foundation. In time, the business slowed down since the market was saturated and the Soviet Union was no longer exotic and unknown. The travel agency “Perestroika Travel” had to close its doors and also we were hit: we were left with large quantities of Soviet memorabilia. The only things that we still easily sold were vodka, caviar and Soviet cigarettes, but also that ended when the tax police dropped by. Did we have a license? Of course not; we never thought that we needed one. We were offered a choice: either pay taxes, or stop selling. The tax was ridiculously high, and so we decided on the latter. As a result of the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the Second World Center found itself in an identity crisis. Fighting the KGB and the Soviet machinery was no longer necessary, so what to focus on then? Also, when the sales went down to such an extent that we couldn’t afford the rent, we decided to move to smaller premises. Part of the inventory of the shop would be moved to the new location but at least half had to go because of lack of space. We only managed to sell a small part of the surplus inventory and, thus, a large container was ordered and put outside the shop. Boxes full of books ended up in this container; while it took a while for the public to understand what was happening, within half an hour, it looked like an ant pile. When the last adventurers had departed the container was almost empty again. It looked a bit like the Soviet Union, which had also been emptied of everything of value in a very short time.

Chapter 14

The doors are opened While Athens meant an undesired end to my friendship with Anatoly Koryagin, it was, at the same time, the beginning of a long lasting friendship with Semyon Gluzman. He had started in Athens with a lot of reservations, had watched us from a distance, but had eventually involved himself to the full extent in our chess game with the WPA and had clearly enjoyed it. In the course of our stay in Athens, a close friendship had evolved. The same counted for a number of other members of our core group who had become his friends, among them Ellen Mercer, Jim Birley and Johannes Meyer-Lindenberg. Immediately following the Athens congress, Gluzman traveled to Washington D.C., where he was the guest of Ellen Mercer and was introduced to the whole psychiatric establishment. Shortly after that he traveled to Germany, where he was presented with an honorary membership of the German Psychiatric Society. For Johannes Meyer-Lindenberg, this was an important event. He had really pushed for this and was of the opinion that the Germans should finally choose sides. Until then, the Society had kept itself largely out of the campaign, and the German representation of our association had struggled for many years to convince the society to take an official position. On top of that, Johannes had fallen seriously ill and knew he did not have much time to live. Our feelings of happiness because of this important event were overshadowed by feelings of sorrow and impotence. Johannes had become very dear to us and it was clearly visible from his appearance that his life was coming to an end. It really was an emotional event. Several months later, Gluzman and I traveled once more to Germany, for a last meeting with Johannes in Aachen. Full of surprise, Gluzman was sitting in the train, looking out the window, no border to be seen. “Now we are in Germany,” I said. “How do you know?” he asked astonished. “I notice it by the number plates on the cars.” This was too much for Gluzman: for him this was the ultimate sign of freedom. A Europe without borders was for him still a fata morgana. The ceremony in Germany also exposed the tensions that had arisen between our German representative, Friedrich Weinberger, and us. Friedrich was a bit of a strange man and on top of that quite ambitious. With his rolling eyes and his persistent staccato-way of talking he had the ability to drive us crazy. He had the tendency of turning a mosquito into an elephant. That also happened now. Friedrich was of the opinion that the German society was rather late with the recognition that was now offered to Gluzman and insisted on making remarks about this during the ceremony. We didn’t want him to do this, in particular because Johannes was seriously ill and we didn’t want to disturb the good atmosphere. Our

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irritation increased when we realized that it was his own self-interest that was determining Friedrich’s actions. It was his personal frustration about the reluctance of the German society towards him that he was ventilating, and it had nothing to do with Gluzman. In addition, we felt that he was actually jealous of Gluzman and probably felt that he should have been given the honor. It led to an open difference of opinion, an angry exchange of words, and eventually to an angry and surly Friedrich who managed to spoil much of the mood. He accused us of being weak, not only with regard to the German Society but also with regard to the Soviets. His position was to a large degree identical to that of Koryagin, and of the Independent Psychiatric Association in Moscow: all leading psychiatrists in the Soviet Union were, by definition, guilty. Our position was much more pragmatic, and by then very much influenced by Gluzman’s view that it was mostly impossible to answer the question of guilt, and that in these cases, a black and white picture couldn’t be maintained. Friedrich left our association and spent the coming years fighting us, and in particular, fighting me as a sort of personification of evil. The issue became a bit more painful a few years later when it turned out that it had been Friedrich who had unknowingly been the “mole” within our organization. All these years we had wondered who the “mole” amongst us was; in other words, the person in our midst passing information to the KGB. We knew that the Soviets might try to infiltrate us and in order to reduce such risks, we refused to hire former Soviet citizens or involve them in the preparations of our campaigns. We were even careful with people who had ancestors from that region. However, from the archives of the Stasi, it turned out that it had been Friedrich. Looking back, it was actually not such a surprise, but maybe that is exactly why we never thought of it. It could have come straight out of a cheap espionage novel. Friedrich was single and had a crush on Porsches and blond women. In the beginning of the 1980s, he regularly brought ladies to the meetings of our committee of representatives. From the Stasi archives, it appeared that one of his ladies was a colonel of the Stasi, a Dr. Gisella Otto, who was designated with the codename “Jutta,” and who was selected to draw Friedrich out. Considering the fact that she was described as being good looking and very convincing with men, there is little doubt she succeeded in using all her charms on Friedrich, who promised to share all his information with her. According to Stasi reports, she even managed to convince Friedrich to help her meet with members of the Working

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Commission during a visit to Moscow. He gave her the addresses, and asked her to pass on his best wishes. She met with Vyacheslav Bakhmin and his friends on several occasions during a December 1978 visit, and, of course, all the information she gathered found its way to the KGB. The operation was apparently so successful that a year later she was ordered to convince Friedrich, whom she met regularly, to send her to Moscow once again. This time she was not only given addresses, but was even used as a courier for material aid, letters and notes. Once again, she managed to pass on a good deal of information to the KGB, and considering the fact that Bakhmin was arrested less than three months later, one can imagine how successful she was. The information gathered by Friedrich’s “comrade in arms,” as he called her, was used in the trial against members of the Working Commission. A year later, she was given the Silver Medal of Honor for her service by the head of the Stasi, General Mielke. The investigation of the Stasi archives also showed that WPA Executive Committee member, Jochen Neumann, had been a Stasi agent, but that his friendly relations with Ellen Mercer and her boss, Melvin Sabshin, led to increasing admiration for the Americans and the American Psychiatric Association. At the same time, his criticism of the Soviets and the political system in his own country became increasingly strong, and he even voiced support for those who left his country, a very grave political sin in those days. Yet, at the same time, during a conversation with a colleague, he asserted that he would not leave the DDR himself. This probably saved him from a travel ban, which would have been difficult considering the fact that he was then on the Executive Committee of the WPA. He was present in Athens, and two months later, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. Ukraine as an alternative In the course of 1990, Gluzman started to “massage” me. He knew I was continuously traveling to Moscow, but wanted to convince me to come to Kiev instead. His argument was that Ukraine offered many more opportunities; everybody was concentrating on Moscow and Ukraine was more or less undiscovered territory. It took some effort, but, indeed, his arguments held and in December 1990 I arrived for the first time in Kiev. It was an extraordinary experience. Kiev was in those days a provincial town without any serious foreign community, because all embassies and foreign correspondents were based in Moscow. For me as foreigner immediately all doors went wide open, also because a number of former political prisoners had become prominent political figures and Gluzman

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was the perfect intermediary. I was introduced to leaders of the national movement Rukh, to journalists and human rights activists, and every time a conversation ended Gluzman would conclude: “Do you see how much you can do here?” It turned out that Gluzman had not been idle. The World Congress in Athens had apparently shown him that Ukraine needed its own psychiatric association, but it had also convinced him that this should not become a “dissident” psychiatric association, like the Independent Psychiatric Association in Moscow. With this in the back of his mind he decided to involve leading psychiatrists in its founding. One by one he managed to convince a small group of crucial figures in Ukrainian psychiatry to join, among whom Valery Kuznetsov, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry in Kiev, Yuri Yudin, chief psychiatrist of Ukraine, and Oleg Nasynnik, chef psychiatrist of Kiev. His philosophical and nonconfrontational approach managed to win them over. For these gentlemen this was far from being a small step, because the Soviet Union was still the Soviet Union and Gluzman was a well-known opponent of Soviet psychiatry who had served a sentence of ten years because of his views. To a certain degree he was still considered an “enemy of the people” and to join him in his efforts was for the above-mentioned persons a difficult and, above all, courageous decision. That Gluzman subsequently appeared with an anti-Soviet activist like me made it undoubtedly even more difficult. I was known all over the Soviet Union because of my criticism of Soviet psychiatry, because of my attempts to keep the Soviets out of the WPA, and was not really seen as the person who would help them connect to the outside world. The first meeting with them was difficult. Like real Soviet citizens, they didn’t show any feelings and said nothing of content, they stayed at as much distance as possible and more than a few friendly words back and forth did not materialize. Still this meeting was crucial, because for the first time they saw that anti-Soviet activists were also human beings and I saw that also Soviet psychiatrists were concerned about the fate of their patients. It was the beginning of a long process of rapprochement and the development of mutual understanding and, gradually, friendship. In January 1991 the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association (UPA) was founded. It was the first national psychiatric association of one of the Soviet republics, and it was also the first independent psychiatric association that had leading psychiatrists on the board. This combination of factors meant that the UPA triggered, much more than the earlier founded Independent

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Psychiatric Association, the demise of the All-Union Society of Psychiatrists and Neuropathologists. Although many had pushed him to do so, Gluzman refused to become chairperson. He deemed it to be tactically unwise for a former dissident to hold that position. Instead, Valery Kuznetsov was elected as President. Gluzman became executive secretary, but behind the scenes he clearly led the association. Also Yuri Yudin and Oleg Nasynnik were elected to the board, just like the young hospital director from Zhitomir, Viktor Shumlyanski, who would later succeed Valery Kuznetsov. A representative of the Moscow School in Ukraine, Anatoly Revenok, dominated psychiatry in Ukraine at that time. Revenok had his headquarters in the Pavlov psychiatric hospital in Kiev, usually referred to as “Pavlovka.” The hospital was located almost next to Babi Yar, where in 1941 tens of thousands of Jews had been killed by the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators and where most of the patients of the Pavlovka had been sent to be exterminated. Revenok ruled from the Pavlovka like a Stalinist leader. The hospital was his fortress. In one of the buildings, he had built a large swimming pool on the ground floor, with all kinds of treatment rooms for water therapy, massage therapy, etc. The swimming pool, however, remained empty, because the construction of the building was so bad that if it were filled with water, the foundations of the building would crumble and the fifteen top floors would sink into the swimming pool. In addition to being director of the Pavlovka, Revenok was also head of the Ukrainian department of the Serbski Institute in Moscow; thus, he was a member of the small nomenklatura that dominated Soviet psychiatry completely. In the summer of 1991, a delegation of the WPA visited the Soviet Union in order to check whether indeed an end had come to the political abuse of psychiatry. The delegation was chaired by Jim Birley, the British psychiatrist who had led the negotiations with the Soviets in Athens. In addition to Leningrad and Moscow, the delegation also visited Kiev, at the request of Gluzman who by then had become close friends with Jim Birley. During a tour

Visit of the WPA delegation to the Soviet Union. From left to right: Jim Birley, interpreter, Parameshvara Deva, Gery Low-Beer

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of the Pavlovka, Birley wanted to see the psycho-gerontology department, located in the cellars of one of the buildings on the huge territory. Revenok refused to give permission and eventually he even blocked the entrance by personally standing in front with his arms spread wide, in order to keep Birley and his colleagues out of the door. A month later, I was in Kiev and Revenok was on holiday. In his absence, the hospital administration agreed and we were allowed to go down into the cellars. What we found there was horrendous. More than seventy old age patients were locked up in two subterranean wards. The stench was terrible; no fresh air entered the rooms. The beds were pushed close together, sometimes two next to each other in order to have three patients sleep on two beds. Mattresses were torn, and in some cases there were no mattresses at all and patients were forced to sleep on metal bed frames. Their pajamas were dirty and torn, some were walking around half naked. Sanitation was only partially available: only cold water and toilets in which the excrements were coming out of the openings. I had never seen anything like it. When we came outside, Oleg Nasynnik had tears in his eyes. He too was moved by his terrible misery that we had just witnessed. Our visit to this department was a turning point. Revenok had known how terrible it was and that is why he had kept Birley out of the door. He had to go, that much was clear to everybody. The representative of the Moscow School in Ukraine had to be removed from his post. Politics helped a little in making this possible. Shortly after my departure from Ukraine, a coup was carried out in August 1991 in Moscow. The coup failed, but led to the demise of the Soviet Union. Ukraine became independent from one day to the next, the links with Moscow were suddenly cut off. This also had consequences for the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association. From being a “provincial” psychiatric association it had suddenly become a national one, and thus they could apply for membership of the WPA. Yuri Yudin was now suddenly the highest psychiatric authority in the country. Revenok had lost his backing, and when the demand came that he relinquish his positions, he barricaded himself in his office. He was removed from the location only after several days. His office turned out to be a complete apartment, where he received his lovers but also where an endless amount of patient files were lying in disorganized heaps. Revenok used only two diagnoses: psychosis or neurosis, and on the files the diagnoses had been marked with large letters. On my return to Ukraine a few weeks later, I visited Revenok’s thieves’ den. I was given Revenok’s Collected Works of Josif Stalin as a souvenir, a nice memento of Soviet psychiatry.

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A new wind and much of the same After the departure of Revenok, a new wind started to blow at the Pavlovka. The doors of the departments were opened to Western visitors and step-by-step an inventory could be made of the current state of affairs. A new director was appointed, Vatali Lisovenko, a typical example of a Soviet director who loved endless banquets with endless and empty speeches, during which he would have all the possibilities to show his servile attitude. He buttered us up as much as he could and did everything possible to accommodate Gluzman and his “foreign guest.” The Director of the now independent Research Institute of Psychiatry became professor Chuprikov, a psychiatrist with a rather dubious reputation as a researcher. The situation became very clear when Jim Birley visited Ukraine again. Chuprikov welcomed him with all respect and soon moved the conversation to his pet theme: his fantastic discovery that would change world psychiatry fundamentally once and for all. Chuprikov believed that he could cure psychiatric patients with colored glasses. The system was quite simple: Chuprikov had developed a sort of empty frame, or had copied it from an optician, in which he placed colored glasses. When a patient was, for instance, depressed he or she would be given a rose glass on the left hand side, but if he or she was manic the rose glass would be placed on the right hand side. Schizophrenics needed blue glasses, etc. Chuprikov started to explain his system in detail, without noticing that Jim Birley’s eyes were becoming bigger and bigger. He had written down his theories in a monograph and now he wanted to get a worldwide patent on his discovery. He also proposed to Birley that he become his Western commercial representative. That way they could share the profit and both of them would become rich! It was an easy step to appoint a man like Chuprikov, but when it became clear that he was no better than his predecessor and, on top of that, actively started blocking reforms, it turned out to be rather more difficult to get rid of him. He could count on the support of all the psychiatrists, high and low, who were afraid of reforms and saw them as a threat to their own positions. With Lisovenko things seemed to work out better at first. He showed himself to be willing and supported the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association in opening the doors and windows. The association was given a floor in one of the buildings on the territory, in order to have adequate premises for both the office and the library. In the United States, we started

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a campaign among 6,000 medical libraries to donate used literature. This literature was of great importance, because Soviet psychiatry had been isolated from world psychiatry for many decades and even literature from before the Second World War was unknown to Soviet psychiatrists. We, therefore, had to start at zero, and all the literature that was already outdated in the United States was new and a revelation to the Soviet Union. The reaction to our campaign was overwhelming. Our collection point in the United States was Freedom House in New York where dozens of parcels arrived each day. The books were collected until there were several cubic meters to be shipped by boat to Amsterdam. There we initially wanted to catalogue them, but there were so many that eventually we decided to send them on by truck to Kiev and let the UPA do the job itself. At the same time, in The Netherlands, we started a collection of material aid. Beds, bedside cupboards, tables, chairs, kitchen equipment, everything was welcome. All psychiatric hospitals and institutions were contacted in The Netherlands, and some offered us complete pavilions of equipment. In Amsterdam and The Hague, we were given storage space in schools and universities, and every now and then these were emptied, the goods loaded in trucks and sent to Ukraine and other destinations. Many trucks were initially offered free of charge or with steep discounts, and we loaded them ourselves. Within a year, most of our associates were seeing a physiotherapist. In particular, the electric beds were a real back breaker! Most of the trucks went to Ukraine, others to Romania and Lithuania. In Kiev, we established a distribution point at the Pavlovka. Thanks to Revenok, we inaugurated the swimming pool as main storage area. Again it wasn’t filled with water; but, rather, it was filled up with humanitarian aid. The author in the swimming pool of the Pavlovka during the arrival of a shipment of humanitarian aid.

The arrival of the first trucks in Ukraine was major news and was even shown on national television. Full of pride, we saw the first huge trucks

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enter the territory of the hospital, after which the Westerners emptied them together with a group of patients. Ukrainians watched us with complete surprise: executives unloading a truck was, for them, unheard of! At first they stood by with their arms crossed, after a while they started to help as well, feeling rather uncomfortable in front of us. In the swimming pool, we checked everything and counted the goods, because the lists of goods had to be provided to the customs officers and registered as “humanitarian aid.” No matter how well we guarded everything, during the short walk from the truck to the swimming pool, some found the opportunity to nick a couple of boxes with shoes. Lisovenko reacted angrily and started lambasting his subordinates, but the shoes remained missing. Patients, instructed to help unloading a truck, take a rest on one of the delivered beds.

A large part of the goods went to the wards, and are currently still being used. The books went to the library of the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association, which, with more than 20,000 Western books, became the most extensive and modern of the Soviet Union. The fate of the warm clothes, shoes, coats and other necessities was less heroic. It appeared that Lisovenko sold it all to market salesmen and pocketed the proceeds. His anger was apparently not caused by warm feelings for his unfortunate patients who should have received the shoes, but by warm feelings for his own wallet. From trucks to Fokkers Gradually our organization moved into a different area of operation and, as a result, also its profile changed. From a group of activists, it changed into a development organization that tried to trigger and stimulate processes of change. In order to emphasize this and to increase it efficacy, we decided to change both its name and organizational structure. We

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changed the association into a foundation, as a result of which we were able to trash the unworkable statutes that we had. Changing the name was more complex, and resulted in the usual Babel-like confusion. At first, we wanted to call ourselves the Paris Initiative on Psychiatry, referring to the city where we were founded in December 1980. The Germans protested, however. Pariser Initiative was for them unacceptable, because the word “Pariser” was in German synonymous to “condom.” Eventually it became the Geneva Initiative on Psychiatry, because the first association against the political abuse of psychiatry had been founded in Geneva in 1974. One of the supporters of our campaigns for the release of political prisoners, Joris Voorhoeve, had by then become Minister of Defense of The Netherlands and offered his help. He offered two free flights with a Fokker Friendship of the Royal Dutch Airforce to transport humanitarian aid to Ukraine. A television crew of the Dutch broadcasting corporation NCRV came along on the first flight in order to make a program on psychiatric hospitals in that country. The attention of the Western press was at that time considerable, although usually the programs were quite superficial and their depth didn’t go beyond the search for scandals and inhumane living circumstances. One of the crews that we had taken to the psychogerontology departments of the Pavlovka had left the building disappointed. “Is that all? There is not even shit on the walls,” the cameraman had said. “In Romania it was all much better,” meaning that there the shit was indeed on the walls and he had been able to take some wonderful footage. To our dismay, these members of the press were not interested at all in hesitance or objections on the part of the medical staff or in maintaining fundamental civilized manners. With their huge equipment they would barge into wards and start filming close-ups of patients who were withering away, dressed in a torn pajamas and lying on beds with smelly mattresses. Maybe these were nice shots for the cameraman, but all this was very bad for our relationship with our new partners. In 1992, we decided to break off all relations with the press and continue working in silence. This had negative consequences for our popularity and thus also for our fundraising, but it very much furthered the trust and working relationship between us and our Ukrainian partners. Finally we could work unhindered. The Fokkers departed from Welschap Airforce Base near Eindhoven in the south of The Netherlands after being loaded by us. They couldn’t take much, because the plane was not so big and the round fuselage made it almost impossible to load beds and large furniture. But, with great effort and manipulation, we managed to include quite a lot of smaller equipment. For the military at the Airforce base, we were a completely

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anarchistic lot, a kind of flea circus that was almost impossible to contain. With the first flight all went well. The journalists of the NCRV were nice company and although the flight lasted eight hours with stopovers in Berlin and Poland, time went by rapidly. Upon arrival at Borispil airport in Kiev, a beautiful picture emerged in front of our eyes. As soon as our plane landed, a gate was opened at the edge of the tarmac and a long line of Ladas, Volgas and Soviet trucks entered the area and drove in our direction. After stopping next to the plane, the doors of the first car opened and Gluzman and the director of a hospital near Kiev jumped out, fervently waving at us as if we had just come back from a long expedition to the interiors of Africa. Out of the other cars jumped journalists, television crews and porters. The first that came out of the plane was an old photocopier. The director of the hospital outside Kiev gesticulated where it had to go: to the trunk of his car. As soon as it was put in he slammed the trunk closed, jumped in his car and drove off. He got what he came for. Arrival in Kiev of one of the Fokker planes: Gluzman and the director of Glevakha psychiatric hospital welcome us.

Our arrival was a national event. We were the main item on the evening news and journalists were all around us. If I am correct, it was the first NATO plane that had landed in Ukraine and nobody cared that it was only a small Dutch “cigar.” Without going through any document checks, the gate opened again and we were allowed to leave the airport. We had entered the country without any control, for (post-) Soviet standards something unheard off. At Gluzman’s place, a large banquet had been prepared, and all our friends were already waiting for us. As part of our “humanitarian aid,” we brought the wine ourselves, knowing the quality of the local wines of that moment and we decided not to risk it. The next day we were sent off as VIPs. Two weeks later, we were back with the second Fokker. This time the commander of the Welschap Airforce Base traveled with us as far as

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the second stopover, in Poland. He was planning to deliver something to a humanitarian project that he supported and couldn’t stop talking about it, as well as about himself. He was real military, well groomed and careful to do everything by the book, and we clearly did not fit. We considered him to be an inflated frog, and for him we were rabble and he found our jokes clearly to be irritating. Undoubtedly, he couldn’t understand how Voorhoeve could have loaned us one of his planes. Just like before, after delivery of our goods, we returned to The Netherlands. To our dismay, we heard that on the way back we would pick up the commander in Poland. By then we had started playing an old game in order to kill time and to have some fun during the eight hour flight: “foot off the floor.” It was quite hilarious, first in the Fokker with the pilots visibly enjoying themselves. Upon arrival in Poland, we continued our game, but now outside on the tarmac next to the plane, while the astonished Polish military were watching. The commander, who felt that we were discrediting the image of the Dutch military in front of their Polish colleagues, clearly did not appreciate this. His remarks had little effect, however, and by the time we arrived in The Netherlands we were no longer on speaking terms. From Fokkers to Ilyushins A short while later, we received a phone call from the Ministry of Defense. The Dutch government had decided to close the so-called MIBO storages. These gigantic warehouses were full of a wide range of necessities that would be of use were the Soviet to invade The Netherlands, including large quantities of medical equipment and related goods. But because the Soviet Union didn’t exist any longer they had become redundant and thus all the goods needed to go. The question was whether we could use some of it for our humanitarian transports. Initially, we selected materials from a list that was faxed to us, but when we sent in our choices we received the answer that it was not a matter of choice: they were complete packages and we had to take them in full. Each packet was a complete twenty-bed field hospital. Sizes were not indicated and after some internal discussions, we informed the Ministry that we would gladly take 90 packages, which were immediately donated. Only when we were invited to see the MIBOstorages ourselves did we realized that we had taken an immense problem on our shoulders: in total we were supposed to transport three thousand cubic meters humanitarian aid to Eastern Europe, and all that within a relatively short period of time.

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It was clear that with trucks this would become an expensive and time-consuming operation. With Gluzman’s help, we contacted the Minister of Defense in Ukraine for help. The Ukrainian Airforce had a large fleet of Ilyushin-76 cargo planes left over from the collapsed Soviet Union, which were regularly used to ship humanitarian aid to countries in need, such as in Africa. The answer was a positive one, but on the condition that we would pay the kerosene. A donation of 50,000 dollar from the Dutch foundation People in Need saved us and as a result we were in business. Within a few weeks, a full-scale military operation was organized. The goods first had to be transported to the Dutch Airforce Base Soesterberg, where the Ukrainian Airforce would pick up the cargo. This was only possible with support of the Dutch Army. In Kiev, the goods would have to be transported to the various hospitals that had been selected without running the risk of having the goods stolen, and so the Ukrainian army was needed to guard the cargo and to transport it to its destination. In The Netherlands, we took care of coordination; in Ukraine, it was all coordinated by the people’s movement Rukh that was led by a number of former political prisoners such as Gluzman’s friend Vyacheslav Chornovil. It was by way of this same Chornovil that we were asked a year earlier to teach the Ukrainian army the basics of democratic government. The Army had appointed a new head of the psychological department, General Volodymir Mulyava. Until shortly before that time, he had been a lecturer in Marxism-Leninism at the University and had no military background at all, but he had quickly managed to adapt himself to the new situation. His features were almost an exact copy of Taras Shevchenko, the Ukrainian writer and humanist who is considered to be the founder of Ukrainian literature, with, of course, the same characteristic moustache. The transition from Marxism-Leninism to democracy was, however, a bit more difficult for Mulyava and his endless monologues were, as a result, more a hotchpotch of “new speak” than anything with a clear line of thought. In addition, Mulyava lacked a sense of humor. That became clear when he visited Gluzman’s home for dinner. In full uniform – he was, don’t forget, now a General! – he was driven up to the flat’s entrance in his government car and equally graciously he strode into the building, only to find himself in a pitch-dark portico where the elevators smelled strongly of urine. Dressed in his hot and heavy General’s coat, he must have searched for a light switch, fruitlessly feeling the walls with his hands. Subsequently he had to go to the tenth floor in an equally dark elevator, because, in those days, all the functioning light bulbs were stolen within seconds of installation. At one point during dinner, he went to the bathroom

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and we jumped into action. Gluzman’s wife put on his uniform jacket and his huge cap, like a big pancake, while Gluzman pulled a gas mask out of a cupboard and put that on and waited for Mulyava in the living room. General Mulyava was not amused. Making fun of Mulyava’s uniform. Wearing a gas mask is Semyon Gluzman; his wife is wearing Mulyava’s uniform. The man in the middle is Viktor Grigorenko, at that time director of the treatment center for torture victims in Kiev.

With the Ukrainian Minister of Defense, we agreed that twelve Ilyushin-76 planes would fly to The Netherlands, one per day. They would land at Soesterberg Airforce Base, pick up the humanitarian aid, and fly back to Kiev the same day. Everything was prepared in Holland. The arrival of Ukrainian Ilyushins at Soesterberg was a unique occasion. For many people, Ukraine was still a completely unknown country and the planes were seen as Soviet, with pilots who several years before had flown military missions to an Afghanistan occupied by Soviet forces. The image of the enemy had not yet disappeared, also not among the Dutch military. In addition, the planes made a hell of a noise and a wave of complaints by the neighbors was expected. I will never forget the first day. On our way to the Base, we encountered long columns of Dutch military trucks, filled with MIBO field hospitals also on their way to the Base. Also the Deputy Minister of Health Hans Simons had arrived, together with the leadership of his Ministry and a car full of Dutch journalists. It was a “high profile” action and everything had been done to have the media present. After a while, we heard the roaring sound of plane engines. Nothing to be seen, but the sound became louder and louder. Suddenly, it appeared. Skimming the tree tops, a big bastard of an Ilyushin with turrets and all. It was a majestic sight. After the huge tail opened like the mouth of a whale, a large group of Ukrainians stepped out: representatives of the Ministry of Defense, journalists and Rukh politicians. The humanitarian aid was officially handed over and after Deputy Minister Simons departed, the big wooden creates were loaded onto the plane. After that, the Ukrainian crew was invited to dinner in the mess of the Base. A huge

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pile of used tires on the side of the road immediately caught their attention – could they take these? Undoubtedly they immediately thought of some small business to earn some money and with hands and feet they tried to convince the Dutch to give them permission to take the used tires with them.

The deputy Minister of Health of The Netherlands, Hans Simons, officially hands over the MIBO units to us. We also joined them for the trip back to Ukraine, planning to return the next day with the second Ilyushin. We entered the immense plane that was full almost to the ceiling with crates containing field hospitals. But in the front, close to the cockpit, was a load of used tires piled up: they had managed to get their goods, time to fly back! We sat down on the bunks fixed to the sides of the plane next to the cargo and put on our seat belts. The Ukrainians had found a better spot: they were sitting on the pile of tires, smoking cigarettes and already with bottles of vodka in their hands; in this way, we left for Kiev. It was party time on board the plane. We took the opportunity to examine the plane and saw how the navigator yelled his instructions to the pilot. You could easily imagine that a few years earlier the same plane had flown over Afghanistan, bringing military equipment and picking up coffins. When the plane landed in Kiev, we were lying in the turret under the nose of the plane – it was as if your nose was pushed into the tarmac when the plane finally touched the ground. In Kiev, once again a group of journalists was waiting, as well as a considerable number of armed military to guard the plane and its contents. Just as before, we entered the country without any control, through the gate at the end of the tarmac. Officially we were not there.

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We spent that evening with Gluzman. By that time, the economic crisis had become so grim that there was no heating, no warm water, and also no electricity. We spent the evening sitting around the stove in the kitchen with the burners lit and with candlelight, an almost romantic atmosphere. The next day we went back to the airport. Since we hadn’t entered the county officially, we also couldn’t leave officially. But it was completely unclear how we could get to our plane. The Fokkers had been standing at the civil part of Borispil airport, but our Ilyushin had disappeared without a trace. After a lot of phone calls back and forth between us and the Ministry of Defense, we were picked up to be taken to the military part of the airport. After a drive of fifteen minutes, we turned into a side road and, after a while, came to a place with buildings on both sides of the road and a nonfunctioning half open gate in between. The remainder of the entrance had been closed with a bicycle. After explaining who we were, the bicycle was moved aside and we were allowed in. We saw an unreal picture. On both sides of us partially dismantled Ilyushins and Soviet helicopters were standing, with gaping holes in their fuselage, like slaughtered whales. The spare parts were taken off one by one to keep the still functioning planes in the air. The combination of an Airforce base with a bicycle as gate, and the partially cut open Ilyushins, was a perfect illustration of the decay of what had once been a super power. After the first two flights to The Netherlands, things started to go less smoothly. We would usually report at Soesterberg Airforce Base at ten in the morning, and then the long waiting started. If after a few hours still nothing had happened, I would call Kiev. “No, today there will be no plane” or “Today there is no kerosene.” Every day, it was the same story. And every day I had to threaten with our Minister of Defense, their Minister of Defense, with the press, and then we would hear the somewhat reassuring message: “It left, it is on its way!” Four or five hours later, we would hear the roaring sound of the engines in the distance. We managed it again. The plane once had a surprise for us. After it landed and the tail opened up, we saw an amazing image. The orchestra of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense was sitting in the back of the plane, and on the tailboard stood General Volodymir Mulyava, in full glory and with his big Shevchenko-moustache, like the captain of a battleship. In the manner of a real warlord, he strode towards me, embraced me and said with full conviction: “Bravo, my Ukrainian nationalist!” I was deeply impressed. One of the last planes came in very late. We had almost given up hope and were tired of waiting. By playing the game “feet of the floor” – and

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this time with the military base personnel participating enthusiastically – we kept ourselves busy. But only at dusk we heard the heavy sound of the engines in the distance. However, when we finally saw the plane, we were shocked: it was flying far too high. The military personnel turned white with fear, this was going very wrong. The plane touched the tarmac only half way down the landing strip and raced on, in the direction of the villas at the end of the landing strip. It seemed it was going to race straight into them. Just before the end of the strip the plane stopped, turned around and then came towards us. The door next to the cockpit opened up, a ladder was pushed out and the pilot left his plane. He walked towards us, saw the white faces of the Dutch military and with a huge grin on his face he raised his thumb and said “No problem. Good plane!” In Afghanistan, things had undoubtedly been more difficult.

An Ilyushin 76 at Soesterberg Airforce Base After two weeks the operation was completed. Three thousand cubic meters of humanitarian aid had changed ownership and had been transported to sixty hospitals in Ukraine. A control commission of the Ministry of Health visited the country six months later and concluded that the major part of the aid had reached its intended destination. They were received with open arms everywhere they went. The best reception was in Poltava where the mayor of the town first showed the local ice cream factory. There, a fat ice cream sausage was pushed through a pipe and pumped into bags. Suddenly a bag broke and the ice cream fell on the ground in big chunks. Without blinking an eye, one of the employees grabbed a shovel and put the ice cream back into one of the bags. Ice cream with a special taste.

Chapter 15

Ukraine on the map The reaction of Moscow friends to my constant trips to Kiev was not always full of understanding. “What are you doing there?” was maybe the most neutral remark; others were clearly more negative. They didn’t understand what I had to do in a provincial capital like Kiev; for them, Ukraine was an indivisible part of Russia and its so-called independence wouldn’t last long. Moscow was the center, and why would I allow my network there to disintegrate? But Gluzman was right. Even though Kiev was a bit provincial, Ukraine was an extremely interesting country and it was wonderful to start somewhere anew. Pioneering again, developing new contacts with new challenges, and above all, being active in a country that was still undiscovered. That was the case for the activities I was involved in but also for the entire country. In a way, it was a kind of Wild West, but going through a deep economic crisis. Air travel between Moscow and Kiev had almost stopped and it took quite some effort to get a seat on a plane. In addition, it was not very safe. I remember that once just before departure we had to wait outside the plane until they had finished filling the tank. According to safety instructions, passengers were not allowed to board a plane at such a moment. However, we had already been taken to the plane, and so the group of more than one hundred passengers were hanging around in groups under the wings or leaning against the wheels. Half of them were happily smoking a cigarette, even while the plane was being tanked. At other moments, too many boarding passes would be issued and some of the passengers had to find a place in the aisle. This was still holy, I knew from colleagues, because in the Caucasus passengers were sometimes standing in the aisle for the whole duration of the flight. You could hardly speak of a functioning governmental bureaucracy in Ukraine. The country was being ransacked by bureaucrats and by former Soviet officials who made maximum use of the lack of control. The old leaders were gone, the new ones did not know yet what the country possessed and many others made use of that complete lack of overview. This was a particular problem in the military where large amounts of military equipment were knocked off and resurfaced somewhere else on the globe. Ministries had no overview of the areas that they were supposed to govern, because the important files and statistics were kept in Moscow and those files had, of course, not been handed over when Ukraine declared itself independent. The chief psychiatrist of Ukraine, Yuri Yudin, had no idea how many psychiatric hospitals Ukraine actually had, and also couldn’t tell how many psychiatric

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patients there were in the country. The economy came screeching to a halt, because Soviet politics had been focused at making the republics totally dependent on each other. A republic like Ukraine, for instance, made spare parts for a product that was assembled somewhere else, or needed spare parts from another republic in order to complete the assembly. Communication had stopped abruptly, however, and so many factories couldn’t function. At the same time, attempts were made to develop the country as a national unity. That was quite a task, because a considerable part of the population didn’t know Ukrainian at all. The Eastern part of the country was Russian and Russia-oriented, and the West was oriented toward Ukrainian nationalism, thereby creating a threat that the country could fall apart. In order to Ukrainize the country at high speed, the government developed a program to stimulate the Ukrainian language. The Kiev Mohyla Academy, a new Western-oriented university in Kiev, became the cradle of this policy of Ukrainization. They carried this to an extreme in that even though I was a foreigner and didn’t speak Ukrainian, they refused to speak Russian with me. The vice dean of the University was a psychiatrist from Eastern Ukraine who had been educated in Russia and owed his position to Gluzman. During a television debate, he started speaking to me in Ukrainian, knowing full well that I didn’t speak that language even though a year before he had spoken Russian, his mother tongue, fluently in a conversation with me. This policy of Ukrainization also forced us to print our first books in Ukrainian, because printing in Russian was punished with extra taxation. We could print in Russian unhindered only after 1994. Still it was an exciting and interesting time. The Soviet ruble had been replaced by the “kupon,” of which initially banknotes of 1, 2, 5, 10 up to 100 “kupony” were printed. However, because of hyperinflation these banknotes became unusable; in order to pay something you needed a fat pack of bills or even a bag. So they started to increase the denominations: first to the ten thousands, then the hundred of thousands and eventually millions. Many products were rationed, and even if you had ration cards,

A banknote of 1,000,000 Ukrainian kupony

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there was no guarantee that the product would be available. Every car was a taxi and by raising a certain number of fingers you could indicate how much you were willing to pay for a ride: a “two” meant that you were willing to pay double the normal fare, a “three” triple, etc. In the evenings, the city seemed dead, the suburbs hardly had any street lighting, as if the city had been blacked out in anticipation of a possible hostile attack. Nightlife consisted of here and there a restaurant in one of the Soviet-style hotels, where the first Western adventurers mixed with ladies on sale. Constantly electricity and heating would be switched off, as a result of which the atmosphere became even more hopeless. In our flat on the tenth floor in the suburb Obolon, we looked out to a whole district full of Soviet constructions, and behind many of the windows we saw a bluish flickering light. These were apartments inhabited by people who, like us, were heating the kitchen with the burners of their stove and lightened the rooms with candles. During those times, a whole new generation of Ukrainians must have been conceived. The first projects Apart from the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association, Gluzman had founded another foundation, the American-Ukrainian Bureau for Human Rights. The “American” had been added in order to satisfy funders in the United States to make it sound more reliable. However, in other places, the prefix was preferably taken off in order to avoid the perception that the foundation was a kind of front of the American government. Financing came from a variety of American sources. Initially they were mostly Jewish foundations, but they didn’t like Gluzman very much. They were mostly interested in data on anti-Semitism in Ukraine, and Gluzman’s position didn’t fit their image. He was of the opinion that there was not so much antiSemitism around and that the government was combating it actively. On top of that he felt that the money could better be used for a proactive policy, like in a Ukrainian edition of the “Diary of Anne Frank” and similar writings. The foundations kept pushing him for reports on anti-Semitic Gluzman, his wife Irina and their cat, 1992

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incidents, but Gluzman remained steadfast, even if it would cost him money. Thus, his work was increasingly financed from The Netherlands. Looking back, these days were absolutely fantastic for fundraisers. First of all, the region was in the center of attention and there were plenty of donors who were willing to support projects. It was a bit more difficult for mental health, but for human rights and democratization it was quite easy. The European Commission had a special budget line for democratization, which was not often used. Once every six months, I would travel to Brussels to meet the responsible civil servant, who was sitting completely alone in his office administrating the whole budget line, from application to monitoring and considering final reports. I would go over the possible projects with him and, if he liked any given idea, it was almost certain to be funded. In North America, we had developed links with the Ukrainian diaspora hoping that we could raise funds there too. But as with Jewish organizations, Gluzman had a problem with them as well. They were often Ukrainians who considered the country to be “theirs” and thought that they had the right to dictate how things should be done. They behaved in an arrogant way in Ukraine and considered the “local population” backward and underdeveloped. It was actually quite tragic to watch. For decades, they had tried to keep Ukraine in their hearts while living in America. Whole villages had been Ukrainian, kids went to Ukrainian schools and on Sundays they would go to the Ukrainian Orthodox or Ukrainian Catholic Church. These were not small groups of people: in Canada and the United States there were millions of Ukrainians. If you left the train station in Winnipeg, the first advertisement you would encounter was in Ukrainian. Then, suddenly, the almost mystic country had become independent and was open; it turned out to be less mystical. It was just a regular dilapidated former Soviet republic, with a Soviet population of which a large part didn’t speak a word of Ukrainian and where a lot of people were only interested in nicking as much as possible and as quickly as possible. It was quite a disappointment, to put it mildly. One of the American Ukrainians we had in our focus was the owner of a series of thirteen psychiatric hospitals that he managed together with his sister. George Chopivsky was a slick guy, and his history was both as funny and tragic as the situation of Ukraine at that moment. His father had been Director of the Ukrainian National Bank of Ukraine in 1918-1922, when the country was independent for a while before it was taken over by the Soviets. When the Soviets arrived he had fled to Warsaw, taking the treasury with him. In Warsaw he had stored all the banknotes in a huge warehouse and had spent his days counting the money, waiting for the restoration of Ukrainian

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independence. On September 1, 1939, the Germans invaded Poland and bombed Warsaw. The warehouse of grandpa Chopivsky suffered a direct hit and within moment the whole Ukrainian treasury went up in flames. Chopivsky junior was interested in supporting Ukrainian psychiatry, but the more we told him and the more documents we showed him, the more distant he became. Probably this was not the Ukraine he had been told about during his youth. Eventually we ended communication, it cost us more than it delivered. Many of the non-psychiatric projects we developed with Gluzman were focused on developing a civil society in Ukraine where the media was supported. The country had a blossoming independent press, which was, however, completely dependent on financial support from outside. It was not unusual for entire publications to be offered for sale. For instance, we were given the opportunity to buy the former KGB-newspaper Vesti z Ukraini for only 40,000 dollars, including the whole editorial board, an offer we gently but persistently refused. For us 40,000 dollar was a lot of money, although looking backwards it would have been a good opportunity to start a serious publication. We did, however, make use of the widespread practice of buying articles. For very little money, a whole page of a newspaper could be bought so that an article would be written any preferred way. In addition, we translated and published an increasing number of books. The Kiev Mohyla Academy received thousands of books from libraries in the United States and The Netherlands and during the first years after independence, we distributed dozens of used photocopiers to the Kiev Mohyla Academy, governmental institutions and ministries. These photocopiers were still a miracle for the recipients. In Soviet times, they had been forbidden, every photocopying machine was in those days registered and inaccessible for ordinary citizens. We had managed several times to smuggle a portable copier into the Soviet Union, but the quality was bad and it took quite a while before such a machine would joltingly excrete a copy. Now it was the best bribe you could offer: one used photocopier, and a whole Ministry was ready to collaborate. Where is Ukraine? Ukraine had become an absolutely normal place for us but most people knew nothing about it. They had heard about Kiev, but in their perception, this was in Russia. If they knew the word Ukraine, they thought it was a small province of Russia. It was difficult for most to imagine that

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we were working with a country the size of France with a population of more than fifty million inhabitants. We decided, together with Gluzman and his political friends, that this perception in the West needed to change. Ukraine needed a public relations office in Western Europe, not like the Friendship Association Netherlands-USSR that uncritically disseminated all the Soviet propaganda, but one that would report honestly and critically about the developments in the country. With Ukrainian press agencies and editorial offices, we agreed that we would get their information free of charge, in order to be able to target the international press from Amsterdam with news about this new country in Europe. In shops and markets, a huge amount of Ukrainian books, crafts, national costumes and other typically Ukrainian goods were purchased and transported to Amsterdam. In time, we were ready to open the Ukrainian Information Center in Amsterdam. Even the nameplate on the door had been made in Kiev, by the same firm that made the plates on the entrances of governmental buildings and ministries. It all looked very real. The opening of the Ukrainian Information Center would be done by the Deputy Prime-Minister of Ukraine for Humanitarian Affairs, Mykola Zhulinsky. Zhulynsky was quite a nice man, a former literary critic who had belonged to the Soviet nomenklatura but had the luck of having been an expert on Ukrainian literature and thus had, politically speaking, the right background. I had been in touch with him for a while and in the course of our contact I had been appointed Permanent Representative of Ukraine in the Benelux for Humanitarian Affairs. Nobody knew what this meant, but it sounded great and on top of that I could use it whenever I saw fit. It looked like a diplomatic status, which, of course, it was not; but I did not intend to explain this openly. Zhulinsky came to The Netherlands to open the Center, but, at the same time, we used his presence to bring attention to Ukraine among the general public and the Dutch government. It was officially a private visit, but it had some official components, including, among others, having an official meeting with the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Peter Kooijmans. In addition, a number of universities would be Mikola Zhulynsky opens the Ukrainian Information Center, 1994

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visited, a meeting would be arranged with Dutch foundations and there were a number of other items on the agenda. The meeting with Kooijmans was not easily arranged. Here the attitudes of the Dutch with their strict protocol differed considerably from that of the anarchistic Ukrainians. Zhulinsky had asked us to negotiate all the details of his visit and everything we decided was acceptable to him. The Dutch, however, wanted the meeting to be totally according to protocol and believed that we should not be present. Zhulinsky thought that was nonsense. Wasn’t he coming at our invitation? He felt that, as the Permanent Representative of Ukraine in the Benelux, I should be present. He was determined that the four of us would be at the meeting: he himself, Semyon Gluzman, my colleague Jan Veldmeijer and me. In spite of all the objections he refused to budge; eventually the Dutch agreed. It was quite a spectacle. Zhulinsky was driven to the Ministry in the rickety and lopsided Fiat Ritmo of Jan Veldmeijer. To the astonishment of the officials that were waiting for him the Ritmo, hanging low because of its weak suspension system, drove past the VIP entrance and parked on the other side of the Ministry building. This caused Zhulinsky to enter the building through the wrong entrance – and gone was the carefully organized VIP treatment and the protocol. We were shuffled around a bit and then taken up in a special elevator for the official meeting. On one side of the table were Kooijmans, and, looking disapprovingly in our direction, the head of the political department who had tried to ban us from this meeting, as well as some other unknown officials. After a series obligatory friendly remarks back and forth Kooijmans apparently wanted to offer some help to his foreign guest. He explained that a new program had been started, called MATRA, that would support projects targeted at strengthening civil society in Eastern Europe, including Ukraine. If Zhulinsky had a few interesting projects, the Ministry would consider them sympathetically. Zhulinsky turned to Gluzman and myself and said: “These gentlemen will undoubtedly have no difficulty producing them.” Our first two projects were submitted shortly after and were accepted without much hassle. A long lasting relationship with MATRA was born as a result of this meeting. From SBU to BVD The contact with the Ukrainian secret service SBU also put me for the first time in touch with the Dutch secret service BVD. The Deputy

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Chairman of the SBU, Volodymir Pristaiko, had asked us to organize trainings for his staff on the role of a secret service in a democratic society, and he thought that the Dutch service might be of assistance in this. In Holland, I contacted the BVD and, after having been put through several times, I was connected to somebody to whom I could tell my story. He promised to consider the issue and inform Pristaiko of the decision “via the appropriate channels.” I didn’t hear from him again. After my return to Ukraine, Pristaiko told me that, indeed, he had been contacted via the Dutch Embassy. He thanked me wholeheartedly, but had another proposition for his Dutch colleagues: perhaps they wanted to collaborate in combating international drug trafficking. Back in The Netherlands I called the BVD again, and was connected to the same person, but this time he was rather irritated. Why didn’t Pristaiko use the appropriate channels? “No idea,” I said, “apparently he trusts this communication channel.” My interlocutor didn’t like it at all and again he promised to contact Pristaiko, via “the appropriate channels.” This back and forth was repeated several times, until collaboration had started and apparently “appropriate channels” were used for communication. One day a young man was at the door of the Ukrainian Information Center. He wanted to speak to me confidentially, and so I took him to the cellar of the building. It was not very confidential, because our offices had moved to the Rosmarijnsteeg in Amsterdam, in a centuries old building in the very center of the city, and consisted of three floors of thirty square meters each. It was pretty noisy, because when people were talking on the top floor, it could be heard all the way downstairs. The cellar was used for the archives, and two people were usually working there. Also now that was the case. The man sat down opposite of me, looked around rather uncomfortably and asked if this was the most confidential place we had. Unfortunately I had to confirm that it was, since there were at least five associates working on the top floor and in between was our shop. With a reddened face, he pulled out his identification and started his story. It turned out that he was working for the Dutch secret service BVD and was very interested in our contacts in Ukraine. It had become clear to them that we maintained contacts with highly placed officials and knew people like Zhulinsky and the Chairman of the Ukrainian secret service, Radchenko, personally. That was very interesting for them, because these Ukrainians were new and relatively unknown figures. Would I be prepared to write something for them? This sounded like a proposal to collaborate, and that

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is not what I was waiting for. I had never worked with any Western secret service and didn’t intend to do it now. It is likely that they never tried to recruit me or use me as an informer, knowing that my answer would have been a direct “no.” Why they thought that I would react positively this time, I don’t know. Anyway, it was a completely wrong estimation. In the meantime, the head of the agent had become even more red, because my two colleagues were openly listening in. The situation was not really favorable for recruitment by a secret service. The head became even dark red when I offered him the opportunity to subscribe to the various publications of the Ukrainian Information Center, because that is where we published all our information: “If you subscribe to our publications, you will know everything in detail.” It was not the answer he had wanted or expected. The conversation clearly led nowhere. Quickly thereafter, he was outside going away from the center. It was the first and the last attempt by the BVD to establish contact. End to my “diplomatic status” Step by step, Ukraine was accepted in the world community. More and more businesses found their way to Kiev, and also diplomatic representations were opened. The Netherlands opened their Embassy in a prefab building on ulitsa Turgenivska, a novelty, because I don’t think the Ukrainians had seen such a structure before. Shortly thereafter, Ukraine opened an Embassy in Brussels. The new Ambassador was the later Minister of Foreign Affairs Boris Tarasyuk, an intelligent man with a good sense of humor. Being “Permanent Representative,” I was supposed to come to Brussels at regular intervals in order to discuss with him humanitarian aid to Ukraine, collaboration and exchanges and other ways of putting Ukraine on the map. The Embassy was housed in a nineteenth century building on the southern end of Brussels. After announcing my arrival, I would be admitted into the main lobby, where I could wait for the ambassador. Members of the Embassy staff were walking around, continuously speaking Russian until they found out that I was a visitor, then they would change to Ukrainian. This wasn’t so strange. This generation of diplomats had graduated from the Institute for Diplomacy in Moscow, just like Tarasyuk himself. Russian was probably their first language. To the outside world, they kept up the Ukrainian image, but on the inside they were still Russian – or Soviet. For two years, I traveled back and forth between Amsterdam and Brussels, exchanging information and informing Tarasyuk of what was

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going on. The line via his Embassy was used regularly to increase pressure in Kiev on the Ministry of Health. Like in most former Soviet republics, this Ministry belonged to the most resistant bulwarks against reform. Being a fortress of Sovietism it tried to block all attempts to reform the health sector. By way of the Ukrainian psychiatric association, we regularly received information on unacceptable conditions in institutions or situations where psychiatry was being used for non-medical purposes. I reported these cases in Brussels to Ambassador Tarasyuk. Because these reports damaged the international image of Ukraine as a democratic society, he reported this information in his communication with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Kiev. When deemed necessary, the Minister of Health was subsequently questioned, and that completed the circle. One of our opponents in Kiev once tried to play the same game. Vitali Lisovenko, the director of the “Pavlovka” with whom by now we were in a state of war, had taken up his pen and written a long letter complaining about us. In a letter to the Ukrainian Embassy in Geneva, he protested strongly against the anti-Ukrainian propaganda of Geneva Initiative on Psychiatry, an organization that was being led by agents of Western secret services. In the letter, he asked the Embassy in Geneva to intervene and silence us, because we discredited his beloved fatherland. Apparently our name had given him the impression that we had our headquarters in Switzerland. The letter wound up on the desk of Tarasyuk, who showed it to me, loudly laughing. It was a pathetic letter, especially because Lisovenko was one hundred percent Soviet and used every opportunity to praise the “old days” and the Soviet Union. In the middle of the 1990s, it became clear that my role as “Permanent Representative” was finished. The anarchistic times when everything was possible were gone. Ukraine had become a well-established state and slowly but surely everything took on an official and organized structure. An independent “Permanent Representative” who did not have to report to anyone did not fit that image. During my last meeting at the Embassy in Brussels, I offered my official letter of resignation, which was immediately accepted. When leaving the Embassy I overheard two diplomats speaking Ukrainian. Indeed a period had ended.

Chapter 16

The Romanian Marsh As early as 1988, we started focusing on Romania, using a sister organization, “Second World Center” housed with us in the same office, as a base. The country was a strictly orchestrated communist dictatorship ruled by the megalomanical couple, Nicolae and Elena Ceaucescu’s. While the Ceaucescu maintained a ruthless, repressive machinery at home, they were welcomed with open arms by many countries in the West. Ceaucescu followed a policy independent from Moscow, and that was enough to reap recognition, support, medals and awards from Western governments and royalty. Because it gradually became less and less necessary to support the dissident movement in the Soviet Union through couriers, our small team of associates had the chance to focus their attention on a different country. At the beginning of 1989, we decided to take the chance and try to establish contacts with dissidents in Romania to see how we could best provide assistance. The very first time things went immediately wrong. After a meeting with one of the few well-known dissidents, Silviu Brucan, our courier was stopped by the police. He was released some time later, but with the clear instruction that he had to leave the country. The Romanian authorities, however, did not count on the persistence of the Dutch Ambassador; Coen Stork was not a regular Dutch diplomat. He had a very clear opinion, had no problem expressing it, and organized weekly meetings with other ambassadors in Bucharest to discuss the human rights situation in the country. Coen Stork proposed to our courier that he could stay with him as a guest. Every morning “our man” left the Embassy, and every evening he returned. He couldn’t do much, because the Securitate was watching him very closely, and, therefore, meeting dissidents without prior warning had become too dangerous. However, Romania was such a closed society that even impressions of everyday life were of interest both for our Western perception of the situation and for determining our own policy. After his return to The Netherlands, a plan of action was developed. We decided to organize a big campaign around Christmastime, during which a large group of youngsters would be sent into the country by train to hand out food parcels in various cities. It was a daring plan that eventually partially succeeded. Part of the participants were removed from the train and sent back, but another part managed to reach their destination and hand out their humanitarian aid. They belonged to the last foreigners to leave communist Romania. A few days later, the Romanian revolution started and the Ceaucescu’s were executed after a short show trial.

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Convoys with humanitarian aid The revolution in Romania started a few days before Christmas 1989. All aid organizations in The Netherlands had closed their offices in connection with the upcoming long Christmas weekend, and had put on their answering machines. We were also sitting at home and followed the events on television. To our enormous surprise we suddenly saw one of our associates on TV. She was standing in the corridor of her home in The Hague and piling up bags with humanitarian aid. Neighbors were ringing the doorbell and delivering more goods. With the same overwhelming enthusiasm with which she had led campaigns for dissidents for so many years, Maya s’ Gravesande called upon the Dutch population to collect material aid in order to help the poor Romanian population. It was as if all the locked gates had been opened. The very same evening we were already back in our office in full force and a crisis center was established. Two boys, who were studying logistics, offered their help as volunteers, reorganizing our office completely. Soon the walls were covered with big maps of Romania and Holland. The telephone ran constantly; everywhere in the country, coordination points were established where goods could be delivered. Before Christmas was over, we had more than a hundred of these coordination points throughout the country. Transport firms offered free transportation. Volunteers came to us offering free transportation with campers and small vans, wanting to join the convoys. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs offered its support by providing a considerable financial donation to cover all the costs. The police offered a full set of recently replaced radio equipment. We were stupefied. Coordination Center in Amsterdam, Second World Center, Christmas 1989

A few days later, the first convoys left for Romania. We tried to make sure that they traveled in large convoys, because according to some

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reports, drivers had been shot and killed by Securitate officers on the run. We established contact with the Romanian Army in order to guarantee the safety of our transports. The beginning of the first convoy was in The Hague on the central Malieveld Square. With the mayor waving the trucks goodbye, a huge convoy of trucks, vans and campers left for Romania. All arrived in good order without any serious trouble; the donated communication equipment was immediately put to good use and facilitated the further distribution of the material aid. Following this transport, many others followed; first every few days, then every few weeks. In June 1990 a large convoy left with necessities for the new political parties. The goods had just arrived when a “spontaneous” demonstration of miners swept through Bucharest. It was an organized protest, planned by the new president and former communist Iliescu in order to take control of the country. Within a few days, all the offices of opposition parties were raided. All the material aid that we had just delivered was reduced to scrap metal; it was as if they systematically had followed our delivery list to make sure that nothing was spared. Our chairman returns At that moment, Geneva Initiative on Psychiatry had a Romanian chairman, the psychiatrist Ion Vianu. Ion had been forced to leave Romania in 1977 after he had protested against the fact that on the eve of communist celebrations busloads of undesired people were delivered to psychiatric hospitals to assure that they would not disturb the festivities. Romania was, apart from the Soviet Union, the only country where the political abuse of psychiatry had developed a systematic character and Vianu’s remarks were met by an angry response from the authorities. They at least gave him the chance to leave on his own; they also could have arrested him immediately and sentenced him to a term in prison. Ion Vianu Immediately after the Romanian revolution, Vianu returned to Romania to establish the Association of Free Romanian Psychiatrists with some old friends who had remained in the country. He succeeded within weeks. The leader of the association became the psychiatrist Aurel Romila and the Secretary, a former official of the Ministry of Health, Valerian

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Tuculescu. Tuculescu was said to have protested against the political abuse of psychiatry while working at the Ministry, but had never been arrested. However, he had been unable to progress to higher positions at the Ministry. Romania was a country rotten to the core. Ceaucescu had turned a considerable part of the population into informers; some estimates even mentioned numbers as high as ten percent of the population. Suspicion, sneakiness and denunciation of other people had become integral aspects of human interaction. Like Vianu told us time and again: “You only see the tip of the iceberg, and exactly at the moment that you think you understand, you are fooled. What you don’t see is much more important.” In a strange way, Romania seemed even more tragic than the Soviet Union of my experience. It was hard for me to explain why that was the case. One element was the fact that part of the population had known the country before it turned communist and was longing for those days. This older generation of people no longer existed in the Soviet Union after 75 years of communism. Also other factors should have played a role. Why had the Stalinist terror, for instance, been much worse in Romania than in any of the other Eastern European countries? Here the intellectual upper layer of society had been eradicated through terror, like in the Soviet Union. In the prison of Pitesti, intellectuals had been forced to beat each other to death with sticks, a barbarianism that other countries in the region had not gone through. Whatever the reasons, it made working in Romania very difficult. I visited the country for the first time in 1991. The very trip itself was a nightmare from the beginning. We left Budapest in an extremely dirty train. Initially we sat on the edge of the seats in order not to have to touch anything, but gradually this inner resistance faded away and eventually we surrendered to the filth. We kept the door of the compartment closed as much as possible, because the stench of urine from the toilets was overwhelming. Unfortunately, the door of the compartment swept open regularly because one of the windows in the corridor was open, and with every sweep a wave of stench enveloped us. After we crossed the Romanian border, it soon became dark. The train had no lighting and we slid through the ghostly countryside like a dark snake. Every now and then, we saw sparsely lighted houses, or trucks that meandered on the pothole filled secondary roads in the direction of the capital. There were no highways. We arrived at the train station of Bucharest at about midnight, where, to our relief, Tuculescu was waiting for us. He guided us out of the station, insuring that the street children who were pulling at us and our bags were

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kept away. We managed to reach the taxi in one piece and, after a quick ride through a dark Bucharest, we reached the hotel, where we took a deep breath of relief. Our Hotel Bucuresti was located next to the square where the revolution had started. Looking out of the window we saw in the twilight the holes in the walls of the buildings across the street that had been hit by bullets or grenades. Superficially, it seemed as if the hotel belonged to an American hotel chain, but, at the same time, you knew that it was different. The fridge didn’t work; the curtains were hanging only partially on hooks and could not be closed; the service was one hundred percent communist; the buildings across the street showing all the signs of the revolution and the street were completely empty. In front of the door, some shady characters were huddling together in dark jackets. We questioned ourselves as to what had we done? I would rather have gone to the Soviet Union a hundred times, even during the darkest days of the 1980s. The next day, Tuculescu took us to the first appointment. We crossed the square; on the right side we saw the burned out building of the National Library that had been consumed by flames during the revolution. The city was desolate, people evasive and grey, absolutely no sign of a jubilant atmosphere. Our first appointment was the union of former political prisoners. We were welcomed by a few survivors of the terror of Pitesti, lawyers who had been arrested immediately after the communist takeover in 1948. Their story was as depressing as the atmosphere outside. The new regime of Iliescu consisted mainly of former communists, opportunists who immediately had changed color when it became clear that the rule of Ceaucescu had ended. For them, the former political prisoners had no value whatsoever. In spite of the alleged political changes they were still as much unwanted as they had been under the communist regime. Their positive stories about Romania before the war were, to put it nicely, a bit colored and probably not fully in accordance with reality. However, that was not the issue: the issue was that for them the revolution had changed anything for the better. Monument for people killed during the revolution, Bucharest, 1990

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Following our meeting with the union of former political prisoners, we met psychiatrists, visited psychiatric hospitals and tasted our future field of work. It was different than in the Soviet Union. The level of education of the psychiatrists was clearly higher, the influence of French psychiatry was noticeable everywhere and the regime of Ceaucescu had never resulted in a total isolation. The living conditions were, however, terrible and what was worse: nobody cared. One of the members of the new Association told us without even blinking an eye that he administered electro shocks without any anesthesia, because the anesthesiologist was located in a different building and he otherwise would have to walk too far. Another hospital director showed the departments of his hospital, where dozens of half dressed and filthy patients were spending their days on broken beds. And while he was standing in the middle of this enormous pool of misery, he started a long lecture about a private hospital that he wanted to set up in one of the empty buildings, and where one would have to pay big money for treatment, of course. During the evening, the gap became even bigger when we were invited to Tuculescu’s home. The family lived in a house in a pre-war posh residential area on the edge of the old city center, a building that must have looked gorgeous in the old days but was now subject to considerable neglect. The living room inside was full of art, with beautiful paintings on the walls and a table covered with a wide variety of dishes. It was hospitality in full glory, but at the same time a difference of light years with that what we had seen during the day. The wife of Tuculescu was part of the artist scene, as soon became clear to us, and was dressed like a Marlene Dietrich. It was as if a time machine had whisked us back to the 1930s. The wine was consumed in large quantities, both that evening and the following ones. It was young wine, not bottled, of which Tuculescu seemed to have an unending reserve. You could drink as much as you wanted, you became a bit lightheaded and a lot more joyous, but never drunk. It also loosened the tongues a bit. Tuculescu appeared to be coming from Bessarabia, but had fled to Bucharest with his parents in 1940 when the Soviets claimed “their part” of Romania on basis of the MolotovRibbentrop Pact. Also his thinking was dominated with the longing for the old days, when Romania was not yet communist and the district where he lived had undoubtedly been the Bayswater of Bucharest. Our next trip was six months later. It was now early summer the time and season had given Bucharest a more pleasant appearance. Here and there, one could see the beginnings of private initiative: small terraces,

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kiosks and farmers who were trying to sell some of their own produce. This time we did not stay in Bucharest but also traveled to Alexandria, about seventy kilometers into the provinces. Our driver, the director of the psychiatric hospital that we were going to visit, drove like a maniac, constantly overtaking other cars, especially when a car from the opposite direction was approaching. Each time this happened, at the key moment, he would hit the brakes and steer his car back onto our side of the road, causing all his non-Romanian passengers to release a sigh of relief. Tuculescu was looking straight ahead, fully undisturbed, either with his mind somewhere else or already numb because this style of driving that was so prevalent. The hospital was bad, but not worse than what we had seen before. After repeated visits to these institutions you develop a strange type of disinterest, a subconscious form of self-defense in order to avoid becoming too much upset. As we left the hospital, they suggested making a visit to a subsidiary department, about twenty kilometers down the road in a village. Upon arrival, we climbed out of the car more dead than alive, and without any mental preparation we entered a kind of barn. This turned out to be the department in question. About sixty women were here, completely abandoned. Only once a day a nurse would drop by, apart from that there was no staff. Some women walked around naked, others were dressed in rags or were sitting on their heels, shaking back and forth against the wall. Every now and then one would scream uncontrollably, another was just staring into nothing and moaning. And then the stench. The stench was terrible. This is something that in no way you can put across, however much one tries with photos or film. The stench. It enters everything, as if being cigarette-smoke. It results in a deep feeling of nausea, grabs your throat and by way of your nose, it even seems to afflict your sense of taste. And the worst is that it gets stuck, you can’t get rid of it. And during the evening, hours later, you have the feeling that this stench is still enveloping you. And even when you eat, you think you still recognize the stench among the fumes that rise from your plate and enter your nose. These are visits I will never forget. They had the same effect as meetings with dissidents who were subsequently arrested. It is impossible to stay indifferent; you can’t shake it off your shoulders. It demands action; it demands involvement and only by really doing something about this situation, you seem to be able to earn the right to enjoy life gain. During the evening in Bucharest we tried to drink the impressions away with large quantities of Tuculescu’s wine. The stronger the impressions, the more lively the conversations, and an outside observer would likely think

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that there was nothing wrong. His son Rezvan had visitors, friends, and at the end of the evening, they formed a choir and started singing romances, first in the house but later on the street, under the balcony where we had gathered. The street was empty, the street lanterns emitted a strange orange light, almost a fairish setting. One after the other neighbors appeared behind the windows and on the balconies, listening to the melancholic songs that were supposed to help forget the harsh realities of life. Toy During the first years after the fall of Ceaucescu’s regime, we maintained close contacts with the Association of Free Psychiatrists. A psychiatric congress was organized, which attracted a large group of foreigners. It was a circus: speakers who could not stop talking and completely disrupted the program; Romanians conducting a fierce debate without translation, a bishop sitting next to me on stage at the opening session and seemingly in a trance during his speech, reciting it as if he were an actor in an opera. But also Octavian Paler participated, a poet who in an exceptional manner and through his poems professed his moral complicity to the Ceaucescu regime and made it clear to all those present that they too had been part of the system. During the evening, at a reception organized by the American Embassy, we entered a heated debate about the good and the bad, black and white, with a growing number of Romanians around us who increasingly interfered in the discussion. And there it was back again, the revolutionary fervor, the desire to get rid of the communist elite. The political reality, however, was already quite different and Iliescu and his gang were already in full control of the country. Slowly tensions developed between GIP and the Association of Free Psychiatrists of Romania. While the name depicted free thought, their opinions and ways of behavior were, in fact, just as totalitarian as those of the original Romanian Psychiatric Association that was still led mostly by old supporters of Ceaucescu and alleged members of the Securitate. This was not so strange, because they were also products of this society and afflicted by the perfidious system. Disagreements followed; for example, the issue as to whether all politicians should be compulsorily examined by a psychiatrist before they could run for office. Our Foundation could not accept this approach as we deemed that a form of political abuse of psychiatry. We demanded that Romila and Tuculescu, who, by then, had become members of the Board of Geneva Initiative on Psychiatry, distance themselves from this position. They refused, and this refusal led irreversibly to a break in our relations.

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Tired of all the rumors, insinuations and petty games, we decided to give up. We refused to be a toy between two sides that were willing to kill each other. Romila and Tuculescu were asked to leave the board and all activities in Romania were ended. Only one project was left behind: the journal “Connections,” edited by a psychiatrist who had been trained in France and the United States and was not a member of either Association. The goal of the publication was to be a forum for all innovative initiatives in the field of mental health. The journal filled a gap, and showed that a lot was actually happening outside Bucharest. It would eventually for the basis for our return to Romania, three years later.

Chapter 17

Change of course in Bratislava In the course of 1992 Geneva Initiative on Psychiatry had become active in an increasing number of countries and step-by-step we developed quite a network of contacts. In Romania, we worked with the Association of Free Romanian Psychiatrists and, in spite of some disagreements, there were no indications yet that a break was looming in the future. In Ukraine, we collaborated with the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association of Semyon Gluzman and via him the first new contacts were established with Russia. These contacts were different types than those of the Independent Psychiatric Association in Moscow, people who had been part or were still part of the existing system but who had earned the necessary respect in the past through their work. One of them was a psychiatrist from what again was called St. Petersburg, formerly Leningrad, Professor Yuri Nuller. The other was a lawyer from Moscow, and senior researcher at the Institute of State and Law, Svetlana Polubinskaya. Both regularly stayed at Gluzman’s home, and while deliberating at the kitchen table, I got to know them better and better. From left to right: Vladimir Tochilov, Robert van Voren, Yuri Nuller and Jan Veldmeijer, St. Petersburg, 2002.

Yuri Nuller belonged to the “second ring” of the dissident movement, the layer that supported the dissidents and political prisoners where and whenever possible, but never signed a statement themselves. He had good reason for this: after the Second World War, he spent eight years in the camps of Kolyma. Nuller was the son of a prominent Bolshevik and, as a small child, he even sat on the lap of Nikolai Bukharin, one of the leaders of the Bolshevik Party who had been executed in the 1930s. Nuller’s father had been People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade and had subsequently been sent to Paris to lead the trade mission there. Yuri had been born in

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Paris in 1935. In 1938, his father was called back, arrested upon arrival and incarcerated in the cellars of the “Big House” in Leningrad. The Big House was the euphemistic name for the headquarters of the NKVD in Leningrad, the predecessor of the KGB. After a show trail, his father was shot in the cellars of the building. The family survived the Great Terror under great stress and fear, but after the war Yuri was accused of having been recruited by the French secret service at the age of three. He was sentenced to fifteen years and transported to the death camps near the river Kolyma. He told me later that when reading the book by Varlam Shalamov, Tales of the Kolyma, he realized that they had been in the same transport. In one of the stories Shamalov tells about a Dutch communist who dies in the cattle wagon but because of the lack of space keeps “hanging” between his neighbors. Nuller had been, like Shalamov, one of those neighbors. And just like Shalamov, he was one of the very few survivors of the camp, which belonged to the category of camps that prisoners usually left horizontally. After the death of Stalin, Nuller was released, returned to Leningrad and studied medicine. He became a successful professor of Monument to the victims of the psychopharmacology at the Bekhterev death camps at Kolyma Institute in Leningrad. In Soviet times, Nuller had known many dissidents, but knew he should not sign any statements himself. He was, however, not able to withstand KGB interrogation and recanted, just like Pyotr Yakir. The experiences of the camp period were too traumatic. He moved on to do other important work, supporting the families that had been left behind after an arrest, sending parcels to prisoners in camps and exile, and visiting prisoners who were serving the last years of their terms in exile. In the course of the years we developed a close friendship, in which humor played an important role. But apart from his sense of humor and his ability to see things in perspective, Nuller was also a very wise man. The camp period had provided him with a unique chance to see mankind in all its extremes, and, as a result, removed many illusions. In spite of

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that, he still preferred to believe in the good intentions of people. Jokes were intermitted with philosophical thoughts and, suddenly and sometimes completely out of the blue, terrible stories from his time in the camps or the time when his family was waiting for their arrest. After his father’s execution, the family continued to live in the ”Partinyi Dom,” the apartment complex for the elite of the Communist Party. Every night he would wait with his suitcases. Prisoner vans and NKVD cars would pull up in front of the building, boots would reverberate through the hallways and corridors. Would they stop at their door, or would they continue? The tension would remain until dawn, when the danger was gone and the inhabitants could go to sleep, exhausted by the long and fearful night. One day, Nuller told, a young couple had been taken away, but the NKVD had forgotten their baby sleeping in it’s cradle. In the morning, the child woke up and started crying out of hunger. The crying lasted the whole day, but nobody dared to go in, afraid it would result in arrest. When it grew dark the crying stopped. Everyone knew what that meant: the baby had lost consciousness because of hunger and dehydration, and subsequently died. The lawyer of the Institute for State and Law in Moscow, Svetlana Polubinskaya, was a feisty lady who at first seemed to be rather sharp, but in relaxing situations – like at Gluzman’s kitchen table – showed her soft side. She was one of the key authors of the new law on psychiatric care in the Soviet Union, which had been adopted in1989 and for the first time guaranteed the rights of mental patients. I met her earlier during a dinner at Ellen Mercer’s in Washington D.C. Like myself she was attending an Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), where we campaigned against the return of the Soviets in the WPA. Svetlana worked together with Richard Bonnie, a legal advisor to the APA and professor of law at the University of Virginia. Bonnie was an active supporter of our campaigns and had together with Ellen Mercer been a member of the delegation to the USSR of the US State Department to investigate the political abuse of psychiatry in 1989. Through their collaboration, Richard and Svetlana put détente to practice and met each other regularly; they were the experts among us on Soviet law. Svetlana Polubinskaya and Richard Bonnie, 1994

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Ellen had invited another person to this dinner, which was held in honor of Anatoly Koryagin. The man was much more silent than the other participants, and knew Ellen from earlier meetings, but gradually he loosened up and followed with great interest the discussions about the Soviet Union, the issue of “political psychiatry” and the development of the campaign. For him this was clearly a new area. It turned out he was from Bulgaria, his name was Toma Tomov, and he had worked in Tanzania as psychiatrist in his early years. He told us that many Tanzanian psychiatrists spoke Bulgarian, because of the investment of Bulgarians in the development of psychiatry there for many years. During political discussions, he kept a bit aloof, not so strange considering the fact that his country was still under the iron rule of Todor Zhivkov; thus being careful was his second nature. After dinner we maintained some contact, but this did not lead to any activity in Bulgaria at the time. Apart from the above-mentioned persons we also maintained contact with a number of Lithuanians, among them a young child and adolescent psychiatrist, Dainius Puras. The communication started by way of Jim Birley, who had met Puras in 1991 and had been deeply impressed by his enthusiasm and activity. Lithuania had just become independent and the people were full of pride because they had the feeling that they had been the ones who had triggered the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1990, that country was the first to declare restoration of their independence, an independence that Gorbachev rejected as being completely unacceptable and against which he had sent his tanks in January 1991. The thirteen persons killed by Soviet military during the attack on the television tower of Vilnius only strengthened the Lithuanians in their determination, in spite of the constant provocations and the economic blockage that had brought the country almost to a standstill. Almost half a year later, the Soviet Union was a matter of the past. Puras took the initiative to establish a Lithuanian Psychiatric Association and, a year later, the association “Viltis,” an organization of relatives of persons with mental disability and mental illness that soon became the largest non-governmental organization in the country. Puras was the inspiration and engine behind the development of an innovative approach to child and adolescent psychiatry in Lithuania, which was focused primarily on community- based services and only in extreme cases would resort to short term hospitalization in the Child Development Center in Vilnius. He derived his ideas from models in various Western countries and a broad collection of schools and approaches, carefully using models that could fit in a Lithuanian context. In addition, the issue

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of political abuse of psychiatry had his attention. Within the Lithuanian Psychiatric Association, a debate was ongoing about the hospitalization of dissenters. The abuse was confirmed as a fact, but the association was not able to come to an official condemnation. Puras had been a member of the commission to examine the self-immolation of Roman Kalanta in 1972. Kalanta had, like Jan Palach in Prague in 1968, burned himself in protest against the Soviet occupation and had been dubbed mentally ill by the authorities. The investigation would rehabilitate Kalanta politically, by that time a national hero. Our foundation also maintained contact with psychiatrists in Estonia and Czechoslovakia, and somewhat later with a professor in Azerbaijan. The remainder of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union was, for us, still undiscovered territory. In spite of that, we needed to expand our focus. All the reformers with whom we were in touch in the region looked exclusively to Western Europe and had no contacts amongst themselves. Nuller, for instance, had been a professor of psychiatry at Tartu University, but since Estonian independence, there had been no contact whatsoever. There was no understanding that there might be expertise available in the region that could be much more accessible and whereby one could make use of the common knowledge of Russian. Everything from their own region was considered bad, the salvation had to come from the West. The wheel had to be reinvented in each and every country. Stroganoff with peas In 1993 we left for Bratislava for a prolonged stay. My then wife was doing research on Slovak nationalism, which at that time was very much an issue and had led to a separation of Slovakia from the Czech Republic just a few months earlier. It was for me an excellent moment to take the time and think about the situation and make some decisions about the future policy of the organization. Soon the idea came to me that it would be good to bring together a group of representatives from the various countries in order to brainstorm over the situation and to see if we could agree on a common course. The costs were still very low then and Slovakia seemed to be relatively easy to access for all of them. Bratislava must have been a beautiful city some time in its past, but the communists had shamelessly ravaged it. The old center had been partially torn down and a huge bridge had been put across the river and dumped right in front of the cathedral. On paper the bridge might have looked quite futuristic, but in reality it was completely out of place. The main

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pillar of the bridge ended at the top in a sort of UFO, a rotating restaurant that looked down on the city. Parts of the old city were complete ruins, on both sides of the bridge, empty areas allowed the wind to blow relentlessly. The bank of the Danube River had been adorned with a museum of modern art that could best be compared to a huge red painted pillbox. For more than forty years, Czechoslovakia had been cut off from its Austrian neighbor, of which it still had been a part at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Habsburgs and at that time a tram could take passengers from Bratislava straight to the opera house in Vienna. At this time, however, there was a sort of no-man’s-land between Vienna and Bratislava, with villages that seemed half-dead. One had a very fitting name: “Maria Elend,” which we translated into Maria’s Misery. From Austria, on the other side of the Danube River, one could see a perfect example of socialist high-rise, the suburb Devin. The communists had undoubtedly put it up in order to impress the capitalist bastards on the other side of the river, but for the Austrians it must have been a permanent beacon of misery, not Maria’s misery but socialist misery. Bratislava had not yet been touched by any drastic Western influences. The department store Prior – now a standard department store of the British Tesco chain – was still a real socialist junk shop with completely useless and rickety household equipment. I had the chance to satisfy my nostalgic heart completely; there were, for example, plastic hand-mixers from Eastern Germany, too weak to even mix a chunk of dough. Also one could find poisonous green salad bowls of cheap plastic, unpolished tools for almost nothing, dinnerware with socialist motives and almost for free. The first days we carried big bags home, full of stuff “just to have” and not for use. In the streets you could still smell the specific smell of coal burners, something that was already hard to find West of the Oder-Neisse line. And everywhere we could hear the simmering sound of the little East-German Trabants and their homemade Skoda’s, that were so ugly that they were almost beautiful.

“Slovak” banknote, 1993

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The banknotes were still Czechoslovak and had been given a Slovak sticker. The exchange rate changed by the day to the detriment of the Slovaks, because the Slovak economy was mainly based on agriculture and heavy industry, and in particular the latter had almost stopped functioning. In their offices, the nationalists were fulminating against the Czechs; in particular, the nationalist party SNS and “Matica Slovenska” had produced a whole lot of creepy figures who explained at length that the fascist Slovak leader Tiso hadn’t collaborated at all with the Germans but, rather, he had just been slandered by the Czechs. After a conversation with these gentlemen, a bad taste would remain in our mouths, one that could only be washed away with cheap white wine in the typical wine cellars of Bratislava. The restaurant business hadn’t adapted itself to the new times either. Bratislava had quite a lot of these cozy wine cellars, often named after a monastic order, but food was quite terrible then, even by Eastern European standards. To our happiness a new restaurant opened its doors during our stay in the city, with a very promising menu. “Beef Stroganoff” turned out to be real beefsteak, but the Stroganoff sauce had changed into a large quantity of peas in cornflour sauce. It took a while to get used to it. A pessimist becomes an optimist Soon the preparations started for the planned meeting of reformers from the region. The Open Society Institute of George Soros had agreed to cover a major part of the costs and the rest of the necessary funding came from a variety of smaller donors. A congress bureau was found with the help of a local partner - more or less a one man business, and I had his full attention, because Bratislava wasn’t really known as being a congress city and business was slow. For us this was good news. Because the budget was very limited, we looked outside the center for a fitting congress hall. We soon found one in the suburb Ruzinov, an endless combination of socialist flats with shopping malls and Houses of Culture. The hall was a huge theatre, of which the seating and the stage could slide into the walls. The walls were painted black and without the furniture the hall looked more like an immense funeral parlor than the meeting place where the reform movement in mental health in Eastern Europe should be given a strong jolt. In addition to the price, the size of the hall was acceptable since we planned to organize a round table meeting so that each participant could see everyone else. Now it was time to put together the list of participants. That was quite a job, because we wanted an equal representation and at the

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same time to have as many countries as possible represented. Apart from the persons and organizations I mentioned earlier, we also found two Albanian psychiatrists who were said to be reform minded, and so we invited them as well. Nuller would take somebody along from St. Petersburg, the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association would come with a delegation of five and also brought Tatyana Kozhurina along, the founder of the first association of relatives of psychiatric patients “Nadezhda.” Together with the Western participants and the speakers, it totaled about sixty persons. For most of the Eastern European participants the trip took quite a lot of time. The connections were bad or had ceased to exist altogether, and so people had to make multiple stopovers or travel by train. Most arrived on schedule, but in two cases it went completely wrong. Yuri Nuller had taken the train together with the young professor of psychiatry Vladimir Tochilov, and wanted to reach Slovakia via Ukraine. At the Russian-Ukrainian border, there were no problems whatsoever, but things went wrong at the Slovak border. They never realized that they needed a transit visa for Ukraine, for them Ukraine still felt like it was the same country as Russia. They were immediately arrested and thrown into a cell. Here they spent the night, together with black marketers, illegal border crossers and other dubious people. For Tochilov, it was the first time he was locked up in a cell, and he didn’t like it at all. For Nuller, however, it was the first time since Kolyma and a great experience. He enjoyed it to the max, and spent the night talking to his fellow inmates. The next morning, they were brought to the head of the border police. By coincidence he saw in Nuller’s passport that the latter was a professor. Now things were completely different, a professor from Leningrad! The guy jumped up, ran away and, before they knew it, Nuller and Tochilov were sitting in the official car of this gentlemen on their way to the Slovak side of the border. Here they took the train to Kosice and then on to Bratislava. Late in the evening, they wound up at the hotel desk, exhausted but satisfied. And for many hours Nuller was telling his story to anyone who wanted to listen. The two Albanians had decided to travel by plane, via Italy and Hungary, but lost their way in Budapest. Wandering around the airport they met a fellow Albanian, who was on his way to Nitra in Slovakia where he was studying. He took them along and in the morning of the conference they were suddenly standing at the hotel reception. Here a new problem evolved: they knew only Albanian and a few words of Italian, and thus communication was impossible. The Albanian student agreed to stay and function as interpreter and participated in all of the conference.

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For quite a few years, he would attend our meetings and interpret for the Albanian delegations. The Albanian delegation at the First Meeting of Reformers in Bratislava, 1993, with their interpreter Artan Quineti

The idea of a round table conference might have been good on paper, but in reality it was a disaster, because the size of the table was so big that you could hardly see the other end. On top of that the national delegations stayed as if glued together; Romanians flocked with the Romanians, Ukrainians with Ukrainians, Lithuanians with Lithuanians. There was hardly any interaction, and also the discussion didn’t really take off. One of the board members of Geneva Initiative told me later that her Ukrainian neighbor had been grumbling all the time. Apparently he disagreed with the speakers, but was afraid to say so openly. Maybe it is hard to believe right now, but this was only four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and less than two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The fear of openly showing a dissident opinion was still very strong and it would take years before a real discussion and open disagreements were possible. The program was also not a great success. In particular, a contribution by the British philosopher and psychiatrist Bull Fulford was for most of the participants three bridges too far. But, at the same time, it was a stimulus, because here was a man on stage who was philosophizing offhand. He broke down one holy house after the other, questioned everything and challenged the participants to put some fundamental questions themselves. His performance was impressive, it was a completely different way of presenting than what participants in Eastern Europe were used to, and this combination made him the centerpiece of the event. The content was only of secondary importance.

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And more innovative steps were made. Ellen Mercer gave a presentation on racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia, subjects as taboo and as big as the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square. It evoked a careful question by one of the participants: “Do you really mean to tell that homosexuality is not a mental illness?” And then there was Steve Corea, a psychiatric nurse from England, who promoted a more professional equality between psychiatrists and other mental health professionals. In the highly hierarchical system of Eastern Europe, where the psychiatrists held all the power and took all the decisions, this was almost a call for a revolution. And finally the farewell dinner, where several toasts were said and where Dainius Puras took a politically very significant step by giving his toast in Russian, at a moment when that language was very much associated with the Soviet occupation. It was a momentous event. During the first day, Nuller had expressed his somber feelings and had said that he was a pessimist. “And you know what a pessimist is?” he added: “A well-informed optimist.” Yet at the last evening he had to admit that maybe an optimist was a wellinformed pessimist. The program might have been too high-level and we hadn’t seen enough real discussion. But what we had managed is to end the centrifugal forces, and make the participants agree that collaboration gave them the best chance for success. The “Network of Reformers in Psychiatry” had been born.

Chapter 18

From Black and White to Shades of Grey The meeting in Bratislava was the beginning of a long series of conferences and seminars, where a selected group of reformers from Eastern Europe gathered in order to discuss a certain theme, make plans and exchange experiences. More than visits to institutions in the countries themselves, these Network meetings offered the possibility to get insight in the way of thinking of the average Soviet psychiatrist. During threefour days they would congregate in a conference center, far away from civilization in order to avoid the distractions of shopping or meeting friends. This intense time facilitated a very rapid relationship of trust building with some of the participants. This bond not only resulted in a reliable working relationship, but also the opportunity of discussions and questions arising from all participants not possible in their own countries. During one of the conferences I spoke with a psychiatrist from Vinnitsa in Ukraine about whether Soviet psychiatrists, who declared dissidents to be mentally ill, had known what they were doing. In other words: did they know that these dissidents were not suffering from a mental illness at all, or did they believe in the diagnoses they established? The psychiatrist had been a prominent member of the Communist Party and at a certain moment even head of the party organization in her district. In 1985, Gorbachev came to power as Party leader, for the first time in many years a young person at the helm of the Party. The three previous Party leaders – Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko – had died while being in power, no longer able to utter a sensible word. Following the first Party plenum after Gorbachev’s ascent to power, the documents had been sent to her, as usual, and they concerned the new Party policy. These documents contained instructions how to act, how to respond to certain situations and how to answer challenging questions. When reading them, she said she was first surprised, then concerned and, eventually, shocked. Something was wrong with the new leader. As she learned more, the image of Gorbachev was clearer to her and she had a diagnosis: this man was suffering from delusions of reform, he was persistent, had a garbled image of reality. To her these were clear symptoms of sluggish schizophrenia. And to think of your almighty leader in such a way was in those days was quite something! For her, the developments after 1985 confirmed her earlier diagnosis, time and again. Until 1991, when the failed coup in Moscow led to the immediate collapse of the Soviet Union and Ukraine became

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independent, from one day to the next. The windows and doors opened up, a fresh wind blew through the country. What she had dismissed all those years as symptoms of mental illness and had refused to believe, now turned out to be true and “normal.” It was a shock from which she had not yet fully recovered when we met. During the same period, the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association started an investigation into the political abuse of psychiatry. For Semyon Gluzman this was a complex issue: on one hand it was clear that such a discussion would lead to tension within the association; but, on the other hand, it shouldn’t be ignored as had been the case in most of the former Soviet Republics. The Association had adopted a resolution shortly after its founding, in which the political abuse was acknowledged and condemned, but that was quite something else than an open discussion and a thorough investigation in the background of how and why such abuses occurred. In 1994, we organized a conference on the theme, to which representatives from various former Soviet Republics were invited. Representatives from the Baltics attended, and also from Russia, Belarus, the Caucasus and some of the Central Asian Republics. Dainius Puras gave a talk on the situation within the Lithuanian Psychiatric Association, where a discussion had been held but no resolution had been adopted. Yuri Nuller discussed how in Russia the wind was gradually changing its course and starting to blow from a different direction and where the systematic abuse of psychiatry for political purposes was again being denied and degraded as a “scientific disagreement” or an issue of “hyperdiagnosis.” It was particularly notable that the Director of the Serbsky Institute, Dr. Tatyana Dmitrieva, was an active proponent of this position. This was not so strange, as she had been a close friend of the main architects of “political psychiatry.” The discomforting issue was, however, that she was increasingly powerful and that her opinion became more and more influential. The delegate from Belarus, Roman Evsegneev, showed the most innovative way out of the dilemma. “We carried out an extensive investigation,” he said, “and did not find any proof of even one dissident who had been put in a psychiatric hospital in Belarus.” To the answer that this was not so strange, as Belarus hardly had any dissidents and that one of the most prominent ones, Mikhail Kukobaka, had lived in Moscow and not in Belarus and had been hospitalized in Special Psychiatric Hospitals in Russia, he responded with a grin. He knew very well that he was just playing with words. The conference was merely a first step. A commission was formed to systematically and scientifically investigate the political abuse of psychiatry

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in Ukraine. The plan was to re-examine all Ukrainians who were still alive, who had been arrested on the basis of one of the political articles in the Criminal Code and who had, after having been declared non accountable, been hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital in Ukraine. This choice was made because this would allow access to all the relevant files that were needed in order to complete the picture of the past. We wanted to try to understand how the system had worked, where decisions had been made, why one person had been sent to a camp and another person to a mental institution, and whether there was any correlation between the type of institution and the accusation, and between the length of hospitalization and the possible sentence if convicted. The investigative commission consisted of three Ukrainian experts: a relatively young psychiatrist, a psychologist who had worked for the KGB in Soviet times and a retired forensic psychiatrist who used to work at the Serbsky Institute in Moscow. The research program took several years, approximately sixty persons were traced and psychiatrically re-examined, after which the diagnosis was compared with the original Soviet diagnosis. The conclusion was clear in all cases: their hospitalization had had no medical justification and had been purely on political grounds. But the investigation had an additional consequence. Especially for the older forensic psychiatrist, it became a catharsis, a painful confrontation with her own past. The people she examined were broken physically, often disabled because of the long years in imprisonment. But mentally they were unbroken, and clearly without any mental disorder. At the same time, she saw the original diagnosis, often concluding that the person concerned was suffering from “sluggish schizophrenia” or was suffering from paranoid delusions. The diagnoses were of the type that she herself used to write, and the signatories were her former colleagues, sometimes even friends with whom she had collaborated so many years. How do you digest this, how can you live with this? More and more questions came up within her, questions such as “Did I also send dissidents to psychiatric hospitals?” or “Am I also guilty?” In some cases, psychiatrists joined us for the very reason to come clean, to rid themselves of their feelings of guilt. For many years, the head of the investigation committee for cases of abuse of the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association was a psychiatrist who had sent a well-known Ukrainian dissident in the 1980s to a psychiatric hospital. She felt guilty, and for many years she listened to more than 1500 complaints per year of people who felt that they had been treated incorrectly or unjustifiably. And subsequently she would organize legal and social support for them. Another psychiatrist had been involved in the case of a couple of followers of the Hare Krishna movement

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in Armenia. He found his name in the “Biographical Dictionary of Political Psychiatry,” that we had published in 1989. At every possible occasion, he would show this to people, as a sort of over-compensation for his feeling of guilt. Only several years later he was able to put the case to rest. However painful, these conversations and investigations were not only important in getting a clearer picture of the political abuse of psychiatry that we had been dealing with for so many years, but also helped to take away the emotional barrier between “us” and “them.” We had demonized them for so many years that this was a profound moment for us. They turned out to be normal human beings, with their own fears and convictions, who had been offered a certain image throughout their lives of the world around them and had been trained as a psychiatrist in a way that had very little to do with world psychiatry. And also the reverse happened: we became normal human beings to them, instead of agents of world imperialism. We humanized each other. Black and white In Soviet times, things were very simple. It was particularly clear for the adolescent that I was coming into the human rights movement: the dissidents were all good, the Soviets were all bad. It was a black and white image that made life quite easy and avoided the necessity of questions. That millions of other Soviet citizens also existed next to the dissidents and the repressive state machinery, having nothing to do with all of this, was easily forgotten. Especially in the beginning, when I just started traveling to the Soviet Union, every person on the street was a potential enemy, a potential KGB agent. My upbringing had always centered on the issue of differentiating between “good” and “evil.” This was, of course, influenced by the Second World War, which had serious consequences in particular on my mother’s side of the family. Although I was born fourteen years after the end of the war, it remained a daily issue, much more than in the case of my classmates. I constantly read books about the war, I built fighter planes and tanks out of carton and wood and had turned an old pram into a tank in which I could hardly fit myself. It was an interest that I shared with my father. His attitude towards the war and the Germans was unambiguous and, of course, much more sophisticated than my own. Because of his age he had not fought against the Germans when they invaded his home country The Netherlands in 1940, and later he had not participated in the Resistance. The last winter of the war he had survived with a sign “Cholera - Contagious!” on the

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door. The Germans were scared to death of contagious diseases and stayed away from the house. As a result he escaped and was not sent to Germany as a forced laborer. After the war he started to work as a journalist. He then married my mother, also a journalist, of whom two brothers had been members of the Resistance and only one had returned from the camps. I sometimes had the feeling that my father was a bit ashamed that he had been standing on the side during the war. His unusual interest in the consequences of Nazism, and in particular in what had happened in the camps, was possibly a result of this. When being in Austria for winter holidays and seeing a German with either one leg or one arm, he could not keep himself from saying “Good shot – Eastern Front!” - but on the other hand, he absolutely was not anti-German and maintained good relations with many of them. He was intrigued how a populist dictator like Hitler had been able to drive a whole nation into madness. And when the first books about the Gulag appeared, his extensive library about the camps was enlarged with a The author as a baby, with his father – Canada, 1959 new collection. My parents were in fact cosmopolitans; the world was their home. Immediately after getting married they emigrated, and wound up in Canada more or less by coincidence. They had been locked up in Holland during the war, were journalists by profession and felt that they had to see the world in order to be good professionals. In those days the prevailing atmosphere in The Netherlands was one of petit-bourgeois narrow-mindedness, in which pre-war norms and values had been mixed with a tendency to repress everything that had happened during the war. Work hard, don’t complain and especially don’t look back to the past, was the general attitude, and the fact that the Germans had been able to kill 80% of the Jewish community was not a subject for self reflection. The country had to be rebuilt. Both parents had grown up in a reformed Protestant environment that excelled in enforcing norms and values that were imposed from above, and the best way to escape this was emigration.

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It turned out to be Canada, where they spent ten happy years and gave birth to three children. In the beginning of the 1960s, they returned to The Netherlands temporarily, but because my father was offered the job of a lifetime, they decided to stay longer. That temporary became forever, but, in my memory, it took many years before my father finally accepted the inevitable. I was raised as a small American, with an American crew cut and every Sunday going to an American church in Dordrecht. The parking lot was full of huge Cadillacs and Chevrolets, in fantastic colors such as pink, light green, or sea blue and with real wood on the sides. My first memories are very much influenced by this: learning the Canadian national anthem (“Oh Canada, we stand on guard for Thee”) and the memorial service for John F. Kennedy in an overcrowded Pilgrim Fellowship Church in Dordrecht. Without realizing it, my father’s stories about how beautiful Canada was prevented me from settling in Holland. I was, as it were, standing with my suitcase next to the door, ready to leave the country again. Also for me the world had become my home. My motherland was somewhere in the ocean, somewhere between The Netherlands and Canada. Everywhere and nowhere. This combination of a deep interest in the injustice committed by dictatorships and the absence of a personal national connection, made it possible for me to identify myself quite quickly with the Soviet Union. Emotionally, the Soviet Union became my home, and in spite of the constant tension and fear of being arrested I felt myself mostly at ease while being there. The fate of the dissidents had become my own fate, and as a result a longing developed to be allowed to serve my own sentence. I wanted to be part of them, not to remain an outsider. Sliding panels The meeting with Semyon Gluzman in the kitchen of Irina Yakir in the spring of 1988 was in a way a catalyst and happened exactly at the right moment. I had started having doubts about the white side of the black and white image, having discovered long before that not all dissidents were pleasant and fantastic people. In a way, they had gradually become normal human beings to me and had lost their idol status. The way in which Grivnina had dumped me, literally from one day to the next, had an enormous influence on me, but also other events had played their role in this development. In a number of cases, I had allowed myself to be misused and in doing so had crossed my own borders. At a certain moment, for instance, I had been asked to inform people in Moscow that a certain dissident in the West was actually a CIA

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agent and that it would be better if they discontinued their contact with him. I don’t mention any names, if the shoe fits wear it, but it was a very nasty trick. It was 1984, the dissident movement in the West was divided into two camps and the few dissidents in the Soviet Union who were still at liberty hardly had any contact with the outside world. As a result, they were completely dependent, and a message like the one I was asked to pass on would hit them like lightning. If the man indeed had something to do with the CIA and the Soviets found out, the dissidents in contact with him could pack their bags since arrest and accusations of treason were then just around the corner. I strongly felt that something was amiss, but didn’t dare say no and I passed the message on. Within a few weeks, I was approached in the West: was I the one who had told this, and who had ordered me to do so? I kept my mouth shut out of loyalty, but knew I had made a terrible mistake. The next time in Moscow, Larissa Bogoraz showed me all four corners of the room, how could I have been so stupid? I felt deeply ashamed, and was very grateful to her that she didn’t kick me out of her house and ended our friendship. It was a good lesson, one that I never forgot. Through his philosophical attitude, Gluzman triggered a mental process within me, which helped me to put certain events in perspective, and, at the same time allowed me to open myself up to contacts with people who I previously considered enemies. His remarks and way of reasoning were completely different than what I had heard or read until then. For instance, the years in camp he considered as the happiest ones of his life, the time that he was freer than at any other given time. I could not imagine that this was possible. Weren’t you behind bars? Gluzman explained that outside the camp it was also a camp, in fact the whole country was one huge camp that was surrounded with barbed wire. But in the “small camp” you were together with people who shared your opinions, who thought independently and who had rid themselves of the Soviet Union, in particular because all the “dangerous” political criminals were incarcerated in separate camps so they could not “infect” ordinary criminals. It was a kind of university, he said, because most of your fellow prisoners were writers, poets, artists or scientists, and you had all the time of the world to think about everything and discuss it. And even though the living conditions and the food were bad, you didn’t have to cook: full boarding, and free education! Gluzman repeatedly philosophized about his own role as a dissident. He wound up in this role while being a young psychiatrist, because he had taken his upbringing and education seriously. Having grown up in a Jewish Ukrainian family that belonged to the intelligentsia, he acquired norms and values that did not in any way match with Soviet

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ideology. During his studies, he had been taught to take his role as doctor seriously. The Hippocratic Oath was his guide, and not the Oath of the Soviet Doctor that had been introduced in the Soviet Union. There was quite a difference: for the Hippocratic Oath, medical ethics was the central issue, for the Oath of the Soviet Doctor, the Communist Party was key. “A Soviet doctor needs to know when to put down the stethoscope and take up the pistol,” as a dissident doctor had once been told. Gluzman became friends with writers and poets who were part of the Ukrainian dissident movement and he hardly had a choice of action when he subsequently set his eye on the case of Pyotr Grigorenko in 1970. Grigorenko was a Soviet general and a well-known dissident, and was at that time hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital for political reasons. Gluzman wrote a psychiatric report “in absentia,” in which he concluded that the hospitalization had been purely on political grounds. He followed the Hippocratic Oath. The Soviet authorities punished him severely: seven years of camp and three years in exile, and by doing so they took away his youth. When he was released at the age of 34, he was no longer allowed to work as a psychiatrist and was marked as an “enemy of the people.” He was not a revolutionary, and did not want to be considered as such. He made a clear distinction between him and people like Vladimir Bukovsky and Aleksandr Podrabinek. During the years in camp he did not harden, but, rather, he softened, although the pain of losing friends like Valery Marchenko was a constant companion. His answer to the pain and sorrow was to try and understand while maintaining some distance.

The author and General Pyotr Grigorenko, 1980

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It was because of my conversations with this remarkable man that my image regarding those who had been part of the system changed. It was like peeling an onion as I gradually changed my black and white images. The founders of the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association were really nice people and with a number of them a close friendship developed, even though they had been part of the system. Yuri Yudin, chief psychiatrist of Ukraine, had also been in Athens at the WPA World Congress, but as a member of the Soviet delegation, the “enemy.” He turned out to be a very kind man with his heart in the right spot. When we were discussing the deplorable living conditions in psychiatric hospitals, his indignation was at least as great as mine. It was because of such experiences that one sacred image after the other cracked and a much more balanced view emerged of what had happened in these countries. The ultimate confrontation with the other side was the contact that Gluzman had with members of the Ukrainian secret service, in which I became involved almost automatically. The first reason for this contact was a project that we developed in Kiev, to set up a Center for Victims of Totalitarianism and Civil War. The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs financed the project. In the Kiev suburb of Obolon, we bought three apartments on the ground floor of an apartment building and turned these into a clinic. The chairman of the municipality of Obolon was, however, and old communist who had not yet surrendered to the new era. He promised to do everything possible to keep this “center of imperialism” out of his district. After some consideration, Gluzman decided to ask the help of the only governmental service that could change the state of affairs: the SBU, the Ukrainian successor to the KGB. I think the contact was established via the KGB agent who had to monitor Gluzman during the last years of the Soviet regime. Things started moving and after some time a link was established with the head of the SBU, Volodymir Radchenko. One day, we were invited to a meeting with him. Radchenko had been head of the dissident department of the Ukrainian KGB and, hence, personally responsible for the arrest and conviction of quite a few of Gluzman’s friends. Even worse, Gluzman was convinced that it had been Radchenko himself who had arrested him on a Kiev street in 1971, starting his ten years of imprisonment. It may seem absurd that we were seeking the help of the man who arrested Gluzman for a project aimed at helping victims of the Secret Service. This was the perfect example of Gluzman’s position - members of the SBU were citizens of a democratic Ukraine and therefore it was their responsibility to help with the establishment of the center. In addition, we thought it a good way of doing something positive in exchange for all the sorrow they had caused.

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It was a strange meeting. Here we had three gentlemen around the table: the hangman, the victim and the anti-Soviet activist. Radchenko was in civilian dress, even though he was a General of the SBU. He had bright eyes, which radiated very little warmth, and wet lips. Not really a person for whom you would immediately develop sympathy. I started to introduce myself and tell my story in an abbreviated form, but he immediately cut me short and said: ”I have read your file.” He listened to our story and promised to support the project. That happened indeed, and the Communist head of the Obolon municipality probably wondered for a very long time how it was at all possible that international imperialism had managed to conspire with the Ukrainian Secret Service. It may have been that his longing for the “good old days” was strengthened even further. The contact with the SBU continued and intensified, not so much with Radchenko but with his deputy, Volodymir Pristaiko who was an interesting fellow. As a young boy, he lost his father and had been raised by his mother alone. The family was extremely poor and when he was provided the opportunity to go to the KGB academy, it was a chance in a million. Pristaiko made a quick career and wound up in the legal department of the KGB. He graduated from law school and, as he said himself, never participated directly in interrogations. He sometimes tried to start a conversation about these times with Gluzman, but for the latter this came too close – he may have wondered whether he may have betrayed his dead friends by having contact with the SBU. During the night that Ukraine became independent, shortly after the failed coup in Moscow, Pristaiko quickly wrote the Constitution of Ukraine. By doing so he committed himself to a democratic Ukraine, a commitment that endured. He wanted me to help him organize trainings for SBU officers on the role of a secret service in a democratic society. He also started writing articles and books about the terror under Stalin even though he made slight changes in the history in order to fit it the boundaries of his own conscience. The writings were about the terror under Stalin, not about the time when he himself was working for the dissident department, but specifically about the terror as inflicted by the Russian occupants of Ukraine, stressing that the Ukrainians themselves – and therefore he himself – had no part in it. This was, of course, complete nonsense; Soviet leaders such as Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev had been as Ukrainian as anyone could be and had participated quite happily in the repressive machinery. It may have just been too difficult for Pristaiko to acknowledge this fact. However, his books were shocking enough and he made a very important contribution to the documentation of the terror.

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In particular, a series of three books left a lasting impression on every person who received them. They contained lists from the archives of the KGB, execution lists of thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals who, in 1937, had been shot by one and the same KGB colonel. The lists provided names and personal data of all the victims, data about party membership, the article of the Criminal Code on basis of which they had been charged, date of arrest and conviction and then the punishment: “EXECUTE.” After each “execute” there was a mark with a red pencil. The colonel had marked each person off the list after he had killed him with a shot in the neck. He was sitting at the table and one by one the persons were led in to their execution. He used two pistols, so he could switch them when they became too hot to the touch. There were thousands of dead on the conscience of one man. When he died, like so many other hangmen, he was in freedom after enjoying a “well-deserved” pension. That a KGB officer could publish this, that he was able to take this step, made a deep impression on me. The regular contacts and various conversations all raised more questions than that they provided answers, but at the same time they helped nuance my black and white image. For Pristaiko, the contact with Gluzman was of great importance. For him, it may have been that the recognition, even the friendship with Gluzman, that became an important factor in the process of coming to terms with his own conscience. He wanted to give Gluzman his KGB files but Gluzman refused to accept them. He didn’t want to know who had denounced him and what had been told about him during the interrogations. There is beautiful footage in a film by the Dutch cinematographer Aliona van der Horst in which Gluzman enters the office of Pristaiko. On the long table stands a box, the file at issue. “Here, Semyon Fishelevich, your file. Take it home, it is yours.” Gluzman pushes it back and says he does not want to have it. Pristaiko tries again, and again, but fails to convince the other. The box remains on the table and eventually is taken back to the archives. Some time later, they both concluded that it should be transferred to the National Archives, embargoed until after Gluzman’s death. On the day of the ceremony, during which it will be handed over officially, we drove there, sitting in the back of the car, all three in a row. To the left of me Gluzman, to the right Pristaiko. On the way Pristaiko puts a hand on my knee: “You are a real Ukrainian.” Complete nonsense, of course, but it was a remark out of sincere appreciation.

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Shades of Grey The intermezzo of 1985-1986 that enabled me to finish my studies and during which I examined the life of my uncle, subconsciously contributed to the development of a more balanced image. During my youth, the impression had been given time and again that the Dutch had resisted German occupation courageously, and that the Dutch had had a very clear image of what was “good” and what was “bad.” That image started to change during my studies at the university, being particularly influenced by one of my lecturers, Hans Blom. This scholar, the later director of the Government Documentary Institute of the War (RIOD), was one of the first to challenge the black and white image of the war, which often resulted in very strong protests both by those who had been in the resistance and the older generation of historians, who themselves had lived through the war. But when searching for the history of my own uncle, I myself met members of the former resistance, former prisoners of Nazi camps, and the image started to shift even further. I found out that during the first years of the war, a large part of the Dutch population was not at all happy with the Resistance. In fact, each act of resistance resulted in a German reaction, and, thus, an ongoing vicious cycle. A larger part of the Dutch population continued their previous life as much as possible, and the disturbances caused by the Dutch Resistance’s actions were not welcomed at all. On top of that, a considerable group of Dutch citizens belonged to the Protestant Church, and for many of them it was God who provided the earthly rulers. That meant that God had also provided the Germans, and thus there was no other solution than to follow their orders. The Resistance consisted, as a result, mainly of communists and reformed Protestants, and during the first years of the war some members of the Resistance considered their own population even more of an enemy than the Germans. The high percentage of Jews that had been deported and never returned was food for thought. It was the Dutch head of the civil register, Jacob Lentz, who had made an internal passport at the order of the Germans. The passport was of unusually good quality, much better than the German internal passport, and very difficult to falsify. This way, it became much easier for the Germans to separate the Jews from the rest of the population and subsequently deport them. The Dutch Jews who did survive the war were not exactly welcomed upon their return. Nobody was waiting for them; their houses and possessions had often been plundered because nobody expected them to return. These were issues that I had never been told in school, and learning about them while writing the book about my uncle quite radically changed my views.

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Thus, gradually black and white changed into shades of grey. Of course, there were crooks and charlatans among the dissidents and people who worked hard and had a conscience among the KGB officers, however strange that might sound. The perception of Gluzman, that all were victims of the system, became more and more my own. But this also had consequences in the opposite direction. Dissidents were a product of Soviet society and many were in every day life just as Soviet as the ordinary citizens around them. Sergei Kovalyov repeatedly pointed out to me that dissidents were in a way people who had been born in the wrong country, a type of “alien” in a hostile environment. I could imagine that this image would fit with some people, but that was only a small group. Most of them were not “alien” at all, they just had a character that made it impossible for them to follow directions and obey orders without any opposition. An inner urge made them resist, made them have a different opinion. Others were against the grain, and it didn’t really matter against what: “when everybody says A, I will say B.” If they had lived in Britain or in The Netherlands, they would have done the same; but then they would have just been considered bothersome or impossible, whereas in the Soviet Union, they probably ended up a camp. A nice example of this is a Ukrainian dissident, Hanna Mikhailenko. She spent more than seven years in the Special Psychiatric Hospital of Kazan for teaching her students the history of Ukraine. Even though she was tortured with medicine and lost her health and all of her teeth as a result of bad nutrition, she remained unbroken. She was a sturdy strong woman, not afraid of anything. She, too, was filmed by Aliona van der Horst, and became the main character in the film “Lady with the White Hat.” The film shows Hanna Mikhailenko going to the market, followed by the film crew, where she is asked at the entrance for her documents. Every “normal” person would give it without even a consideration, but not Mikhailenko. She immediately starts to interrogate the man: who does he think he is, why does he want to see her documents, why at all should she identify herself; and immediately she turns things around and starts demanding his documents. In the meantime, more and more people gather around her. They start to curse her, shout “you quarrelsome woman!” And then suddenly one of them says “and she also has a strange white hat on.” The scene shows the difference between a normal citizen and a dissident, between the average Dutchman at the start of the occupation and a member of the Resistance.

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Sometimes I wonder in hindsight what I would do if I again faced the choices of twenty-five years ago. Would I go to the Soviet Union again as a courier, knowing that I would risk the chance of being arrested and sentenced to a term in camp? It is a difficult question, to which I have no real answer, like many other people until the moment is there, and the choice has to be made. However it is not a wholly unreal question, I realize that very well. The political developments can be such that sooner or later I will be facing this choice and will have to make a decision: stay on the sideline, or again join the barricades. It is a devilish dilemma.

Chapter 19

From humanitarian aid to structural aid In order to build a new mental health care system from the bottom up, the non-governmental sector was indispensable. Only nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can get things moving at the grassroots level, initiatives that subsequently can be, hopefully, supported by national governments and forged into a national policy. In the Soviet Union, that was of particular importance, because the absence of this sector in even its most rudimentary form had been a crucial factor in the development of the systematic abuse of psychiatry for political purposes. If we wanted to create a barrier against the return of these abuses, an independent psychiatric profession was an absolute precondition. By 1991, a number of psychiatric associations had been founded in former Soviet republics and the power of the all-Union Society of Psychiatrists and Neuropathologists had been broken. It all ended a bit tragically, or rather tragicomically, because the Soviet delegation had returned to Moscow following the Athens World Congress in a victorious mood. The film made by the television studios of Sverdlovsk showed a jubilant Marat Vartanyan, who, at Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow, tells with a lot of bravado that everything had gone smoothly and that the AllUnion Society had been re-admitted to the WPA with a lot of enthusiasm. However, less than two years later the Soviet Union ceased to exist, taking away the country that the Al-Union Society was said to represent. In addition to psychiatric associations, however, there was an enormous need to establish associations of other mental health professionals and of family members. We didn’t dare think about consumer organizations at that time; that was at least three bridges too far. It was simply too early to hope that consumer organizations were possible in a country where people were afraid to voice their opinions and didn’t dare to be different. Stigma was such a factor that families kept the patients isolated at home or far away in social care homes. In the fall of 1992, an American delegation visited Kiev that had a major impact on the consumer movement. It consisted of representatives of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), a powerful American family organization; Loren Roth, the professor from Pittsburgh who in 1989 led the American investigative mission to the Soviet Union, had invited them to take this trip. He felt it was time to expand the NGO field there. The visit to Kiev luckily coincided with one of my trips to Ukraine. For mental health care in the former Soviet Union, the visit was a historical event. This

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was the first time that family members of patients treated at the “Pavlovka” had been invited to a meeting. Most of them were parents, and had children who were hospitalized in the departments of the clinic. Even though it was 1992 and Ukraine had been independent for more than a year, the Soviet Union was gone and the “glasnost” and “perestroika” of Gorbachev a matter of the past, people were absolutely not used to voicing their own opinions. The Americans told their story. For instance, Dale Johnson, President of NAMI, told how his son had fallen ill, how he and his wife had reacted, and what agony had followed. When telling his story tears were rolling down his cheeks, and with the other two speakers the same happened. Their tears, their openly showing their emotions, evoked tears among the participants. Everywhere around me people were silently crying. Suddenly a woman stood up and started telling about her son, how bad he had been treated in the clinic, how much she suffered when seeing her maltreated and undernourished son. It was time, she said, that they also got into action. Only when family members could unite and demand better treatment, would something happen. Another mother got up immediately and started attacking her: “Why are you hanging out our dirty linen?!” she shouted, “Why should these foreigners know what is happening here? Let’s solve our problems ourselves, without foreigners around. Our children will suffer from this!” The mother who spoke first, Tatyana Kozhurina, responded: “If we keep silent nothing will ever happen. Who cares that these foreigners know what is going on, it is time something is done!” After this emotional meeting, a number of parents stayed on. They also had enough of the inertia. More or less on the spot the relative association “Nadezhda” (Hope) was founded, with Kozhurina as Chairperson. It was one of the first family organizations in the former Soviet Union, and, for several years, it would be an important ally of the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association. That changed when Kozhurina left, a few years later, after her son died of mushroom poisoning. The association was taken over by a group of parents with a pure variety of Soviet mentality, and who soon were spending most of their time and energy fighting each other. When the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association subsequently campaigned to end the monopoly of psychiatrists deciding on compulsory treatment, they became fervent opponents. That had been good in the “old times,” and why should it be different now? What they meant with “good times” became soon clear when they started campaigning for the restoration of the Soviet Union. After the transports of humanitarian aid, we continued to work on improvements in the material living conditions. The kitchen of the

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“Pavlovka” was improved after we discovered the cold storage during one of our visits where we found the meat waiting for consumption by the patients. It was a huge chunk of cow (at least, that is what it looked like considering its size) that was silently rotting away. A green haze covered the meat and a sweet stench was hanging in the air; clearly the cool storage was not functioning. Also some projects in Romania and Lithuania received material support, even though slowly, but surely, this phase of our work was coming to an end. The aid was well intentioned, and usually reached its destination, but it didn’t change anything structurally. The system remained unchanged, the treatment remained archaic and the stigma and exclusion from society remained unaffected. On top of that material aid triggered corruption and caused problems between patients and staff. When you deliver blankets, warm clothes, slippers and coats for patients but forget to add something for the personnel, you are asking for trouble. Nurses earned almost nothing, but usually had a family at home with kids. How could we blame them for taking things home every now and then? The material aid unintentionally led to jealously, and jealousy is a bad basis for more humane treatment. In a way, material aid was working against us and against what we stood for. Still, looking back it was probably good that we delivered humanitarian aid for a while. It was of great psychological importance, it showed that the Iron Curtain was gone and that there were people in the countries around them who cared about them. In addition, the Cold War had made caricatures of us, and that wrong image had to be gradually destructed. A visit by Westerners to a psychiatric hospital was often a first class happening; it was almost like the first white man entering an African village. You were looked at, touched; people were standing with open mouths staring at you. You felt like a baboon with red buttocks in the monkey cage of a zoo. But, because of what we were bringing, everything we said was considered to be the ultimate wisdom – so much so that it became frightening. On the road with a photo of Gluzman When we started providing the first trainings, we were dealing with a somewhat similar effect. For instance, in Ukraine we started the first course for psychiatric nurses in 1993. Two lecturers of the Professional University Arnhem/Nijmegen had unexpectedly come to our door with an offer to help. They had done some work in Romania and on the Greek island of Leros, and suddenly they were here, in our office. They came to tell us that what we were doing was quite nice but that it would remain like

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carrying water to the sea if we didn’t get involved in improving the position of nurses. Nurses were not heard in Eastern Europe, were the slaves of psychiatrists, and were not even trained to work with psychiatric patients. A course had to be developed, and the position of psychiatric nurses needed to be improved. They were willing to take that job on themselves. It is an offer we couldn’t refuse, they added. It was an interesting duo. Rob Keukens was the more philosophical one, knew about everything and had read a lot, as a result of which he knew an anecdote or story in any situation in which he found himself. His colleague, Hans van Pernis, was the charmer; unshaven, with the image of being easygoing he dropped a word here and there or added something to the conversation, in the meantime looking around to check whether he could detect some female beauty. However, they functioned very well as a team, had the necessary sense of humor to survive and were the absolute dream team to send into the bush. We agreed to their plan, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs agreed to finance a project proposal to develop a training program for psychiatric nursing.

Rob Keukens (l.) and Hans van Pernis, 1995 However, during their first visit, things went completely wrong. They had been given a photograph of Gluzman and the plan was that they would be picked up at Borispil airport in Kiev. Convinced that everything had been arranged in advance, they hadn’t taken anything else with them: no address, no telephone number, not even the name of a contact person. Upon arrival in Kiev on Friday evening, there was nobody waiting for them, and the photo of Gluzman that they held high in the air and showed to

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everybody who crossed their path didn’t perform any miracles either. After spending hours at a half empty airport, they decided to take the bus into the city, where they found a room in a derelict Soviet hotel in order to wait for Monday morning, when they could go to the only address they knew: the Pavlovka. There they were received with open arms, of course. The seminars took place in the hospital, in a classroom with twenty enthusiastic and a bit agitated Ukrainian nurses, who were wrapped in fat coats and fur hats because of the penetrating cold and a non-functioning heating system. An interpreter was translating for the two trainers, during which the use of hand and feet formed an important part of the communication methods. The fact that the interpreter repeatedly and vehemently disagreed with the trainers and made that clear in every possible way didn’t make things better. Half of what was being told went in one ear out the other. “Multi-disciplinary teamwork” sounded great, but the participants had no idea what it meant. This became even clearer when we organized a special network meeting on psychiatric nursing. About forty nurses from more than ten countries met at a conference center in the forest somewhere in The Netherlands, where in addition to lectures, role-plays were used as an educational tool. A group of British participants had worked out the role-play and with the help of simultaneous translation English-Russian, they tried to copy reality as much as possible. They had prepared several versions: how it should not be done, with a dominant psychiatrists who immediately took the lead and decided everything by himself; how it usually went, with contributions by all but with a psychiatrist who still dominated the meeting; and last, but not least, what should be the optimal situation. The first roleplay was enacted and ended in enthusiastic applause by the audience. A chief nurse from a provincial psychiatric hospital got up and full of passion she grabbed the microphone and started speaking. Fantastic! She had never seen something so powerful, so good. If she could ever convince her director to put this to practice in his hospital, she would be delighted. It was almost too painful to tell her the truth that this was exactly how it should not be done! For her this was already almost a fata morgana, an unreachable goal. The network meetings were combined with projects in the countries themselves, in order to assure that newly acquired skills could be put to practice immediately. These projects concerned the whole range of mental health care delivery, and were all directed at breaking the purely institutional care structure. Because if there was one thing that we had learned during the first years since the fall of communism, it was the fact that political abuse of psychiatry was only the tip of the iceberg. In 1988, ten million citizens in the USSR were listed on the psychiatric

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register, about 2.5 percent of the population. Registration meant, in fact, that you did not participate fully in society. You had to report at regular intervals to the dispensary, you were not allowed to drive a car (not that there were many cars, but still…), were not allowed to vote, and had great difficulty finding a job. In short, you became a second-rate citizen. It was not so difficult to wind up on the psychiatric register, but to get off was almost impossible. The treatment of political prisoners was, in most cases, not different than the treatment that regular persons with mental illness had to endure. They too were injected with massive loads of psychotropic drugs, whereby polypharmy (prescription of several drugs simultaneously) was not an exception. They too were subjected to the so-called sulphozinetherapy, during which a mixture of sulphur and peach extract was injected intravenously in order to induce high fever and coma in order to “burn out the poison of mental illness.” Insulin was also used for this purpose. During the crisis years at the beginning of the 1990s in Ukraine, dozens of people died as a result of diabetes because of the lack of insulin, while, at the same time, it was still being used in psychiatry. Only in 1995, sulphozine was banned as a psychiatric medication. For quite a few years, psychiatrists still tried to convince me that it was a very effective treatment. This opinion was by itself not so strange, even though it was shocking. Psychiatrists who had been trained in complete separation from world psychiatry just didn’t know better. The library given to the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association following our campaign in the United States was not a solution: the books were mostly in English, and the number of Ukrainian psychiatrists who knew a foreign language could be counted by the fingers on one hand. In the other former Soviet republics, the situation was no different. If we really wanted to open the windows, we would have to publish translations of Western literature. We are going to print In 1993 we started publishing the first booklets and brochures, and books were printed by a friendly publisher. The first book was a Ukrainian edition of the American classification of mental disorders DSM IIIR, then one of the two classifications used internationally. At that moment, it was unclear which of the two would be used in Eastern Europe: DSM, or the classification of the World Health Organization, ICD. The problem was solved by itself, because soon the new version of DSM was published, DSM IV, but when we asked for Russian copyright in order to translate it

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and disseminate it in the former Soviet Union, the owner – the publishing house of the American Psychiatric Association – demanded a fee of five thousand dollars. For us that was a huge amount of money, and for the region it was crazy. We refused to pay such a sum and decided to focus on ICD. That is how DSM lost half a continent, and the American Psychiatric Association an enormous future source of money. After DSM IIIR, other books followed, but it all went very slowly, the economic crisis had hit Ukraine hard and just finding paper and ink was a huge problem. Most of the printers had given up and closed their doors. We decided to find the solution somewhere else. With financial support from a Swiss donor, we bought a second hand printing press in The Netherlands. It was a major investment, but the equipment would still be able to function for quite a few years and would thus recover part of its costs. In Kiev, everything was prepared for the arrival of the printing press. The Pavlovka agreed to provide two additional spaces and everything was done to finish the preparations in time. A new concrete floor had to be built, because otherwise the building would shake on its foundations when the press would be printing. In addition, insulation material had to be put in and a new electric wiring system with extra power had to be installed. While the truck soon departed from The Netherlands, the workers appeared to have taken their task less seriously. When the director of the future publishing house visited the future premises, the builders were lying around on the floor half drunk, and work had hardly started. This put us to an enormous dilemma, because the only way to get them to work was to furnish them with vodka, which would make them even more drunk. By the time the concrete floor was in, they could hardly stand on their feet, but we made it in time. When the printing press arrived, we had the next problem. The crane that had been ordered was nowhere to be seen. More or less in the street another one was chartered, with as payment… vodka. It was a far too small a crane, it swung from one side to the other when it pulled the press out of the truck, but at the end of the day everything found its place and the finalization work could start. A month later, the printing press was operational. Arrival of the printing press in Kiev, 1995

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Setting up our own publishing house, Sphere, with its own printing press turned out to be a great move. One book after the other was published, and every book turned out to be another crack in the wall of ignorance. The print run was usually one thousand copies, due to lack of sufficient funds, which was of course a drop in the ocean. By disseminating the books and brochures in an organized and controlled fashion, we tried to make maximum use of the available copies. For each region, each country, a shelf was vacated in the office of the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association, on which the books we put ready for transportation. Transportation did not go by mail, but via visitors and sometimes by train drivers, a widely used means of transportation that is still being used. The system is quite simple: you find a train driver, give him the parcel and the amount he wants as a fee, you then call the addressee, tell him which train will deliver the parcel and at what time and date it will arrive, and the addressee picks up the parcel from the train station. In the middle of the 1990s, we even succeeded in using pilots of the Ukrainian airline company. It was a beautiful system that made everybody happier: the pilots and train drivers earned something on the side, and we had cheap transportation. In the course of the years, we published more than one hundred books and brochures. We didn’t limit ourselves only to psychiatry, or mental health in general. We also published a number of manuals in the field of law, in order to stimulate the development of a modern judiciary. In addition, we published books on relevant issues in society, such as anti-Semitism and discrimination. The Ukrainian version of The Diary of Anne Frank was published, to be followed by a book by the Dutch author Etty Hillesum about the persecution of the Jews in Holland during Nazi occupation. We also published books by Pristaiko on Stalinist terror in Ukraine. The bulk, however, remained psychiatric literature, and until today we are the main publisher of psychiatric literature in the Russian language. Murder by blinys During most of the 1990s, Kiev remained the center of mental health care reform in Eastern Europe and the former USSR. We traveled to the city regularly and sometimes there was a better chance of meeting Western supporters in Kiev than elsewhere in Europe. A flat in a Sovietstyle apartment block in the Kiev suburb Obolon, close to Gluzman’s home, had been turned into a guesthouse. In addition, it also housed the offices of the Ukrainian Bureau for the Protection of Human Rights, and was also the location where a lot of meetings, receptions and parties were held. For example, this multi-purpose flat was where we held events surrounding

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our trips to Kiev with Fokker airplanes of the Dutch Royal Air Force. The place was a nice combination of Soviet-style furniture with typical Dutch decorations, such as a photo of the Dutch royal family in the toilet. To sleep there was sometimes like living at Central Station in Amsterdam. From early in the morning until late at night people would drop by, either to work in the office, to make some photocopies, or just to check how things were going. There were days when meetings were going on in each room with people standing in the corridor debating some political issue. The most memorable occasion was some time in the mid 1990s, when Jan Veldmeijer and I were staying in the flat. It was winter, and as usual everybody was completely overstressed and behaving as if a revolution would be declared the next day. One of the partners of the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association had dropped by to hand over some documents, but somehow couldn’t get them printed from her floppy disk. She was sitting behind the computer in one of the rooms, dressed in her winter coat with a fur hat still on her head, sweating profusely while she tried to get the documents printed. Her husband was standing behind her giving her instructions, without success, and the sweat kept running down her face. Still it hadn’t occurred to her that she could take off her winter coat and hat. Gluzman was in the room next door, feeling bad and having problems with his heart. He had just taken a pill and was lying in a chair, with his tongue sticking out, trying to recover. The room was temporarily off-limits. A third person had just locked himself into the toilet, which indeed had a faulty lock. He was a bit of a blown-up frog, red-headed and always very agitated, but now he drove us all completely nuts by banging on the door and shouting: “Let me out! Please let me out!” Jan and I had withdrawn to the kitchen with the door closed, and after lifting our glass we said: “Ah, we are back home. Good to be here again!” During the first years, we cooked in the flat ourselves, trying to reduce costs and also have the feeling that we were in a way at home. Later the daily program became too hectic, and a cook was introduced. Luckily one of the neighbors was a former cook of the first Ukrainian President, Kravchuk. She was a very kind woman, close to pension age, but was never married and had clearly missed having the pleasure of feeding her own family. This was all to be compensated by us. Galya would cook, and the word “cooking” is not sufficient to describe her ferocious activity in the kitchen. She would prepare food in her own flat, down the corridor, and then at eight a.m. she would slip into the apartment and build her own empire there. By the time we would stick our sleepy heads around the corner, Galya was already prepared to show us the wide variety of the Ukrainian breakfast table. The main component:

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bliny, small pancakes, to be eaten with sour cream; lots of sour cream. It was useless to say that we couldn’t eat more; plates were filled and, on each, a big blob of sour cream. When finished with the first helping, a refill or two was automatically provided, no questions asked. It was murderous, but there was no escape. We developed a new vocabulary, all evolving around the concept of “murder by blinys,” but it didn’t take away the obligation to eat until one’s pants couldn’t fit anymore and there was difficulty walking without constant belly pains. Sometimes we tried to avoid her cooking by coming late, or leaving before breakfast, but Galya was unforgiving: no dinner meant the next morning breakfast plus dinner, and no breakfast meant starting dinner with bliny followed by the dinner food. Gluzman laughed about our comments, especially when people announced in advance: “Can we have the flat without cook, please!” But he was the lucky guy – he ate at home, and Galya somehow never saw him as the main object of her cooking love. Seminar in a swimming pool After the first conference in Bratislava, most of the meetings were organized in The Netherlands. The meetings were sometimes small, on specific fields of work like psychogeriatrics or nursing, or larger annual meetings in which sometimes more than one hundred participants from a wide range of countries would participate. The Network meetings had a double purpose. They were an excellent way of transferring knowledge and stimulating discussions and, thus, triggering people to develop and formulate their own opinions, but, at the same time, they were an important means to encourage sustainability and mutual support. Many of the reformers were individuals or operated in small groups, often in an environment that was reluctant or even hostile to their ideas and plans. The risk of uncertainty, despair and burnout was huge and thus it was of the utmost importance that they could meet fellow reformers to share their problems and learn from each other. The Network became a sort of moral safety net, and after a few years it became clear that the goals were easily met: cross-fertilization became a habit, multi-national projects a regularity and during the meetings people finally felt free to express their views unhindered. In the course of the 1990s, most of the meetings moved to the Czech Republic. There were various reasons for this. First of all it was much cheaper, although after a while the prices started to rise as well. But secondly the environment was much more suited for visits to institutions and projects. In the Czech Republic at the beginning of the 1990s, quite an extensive network of community based mental health care services had been developed, albeit adapted to Czech reality and its financial

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possibilities. For many problems inventive solutions had been found, that could be copied elsewhere. And visiting these types of projects was much more effective than organizing excursions in The Netherlands where it was too expensive and a much higher level of material circumstances. It was easier for participants to make the mental translation to their own context in small towns like Kladno, near Prague, which didn’t look much different than the standard suburb of a Soviet city. If innovative programs worked in the Czech Republic, chances were that it might also be possible in the countries of the participants. Excursions now produced ideas and plans, instead of the frustrations about the excessive wealth in Western Europe. The Czech Republic was an eldorado for conferences at unusual locations. We maintained communication with the congress bureau in Bratislava, which by now had moved to Prague and had become one of the main congress bureaus in the capital. Periodically, my colleague, Jan, and I would go to the Czech Republic for a day or two to search for new conference sites. Our portfolio holder at the congress bureau would have chosen a series of locations in advance, and during our stay in the country we would go from one place to the next in order to make a choice. One thing was clear to the congress bureau: we didn’t like standard locations and the more unusual the better. After a while, they knew exactly what we were looking for. Thus, we held seminars and meetings in a former training school for terrorists outside Prague, in the training center of the Czech Ministry of Defense, and in old trade union hotels that looked as if communism had just ended the day before. One of the nicest locations was the former hunting complex of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. It was located in the middle of a forest, south of Prague, far away from the living world and without any road signs indicating that it existed. Suddenly, in the middle of the forest, a road led to the left and after passing a barrier and following a long winding road through the forest, the main building could be seen. Around this building there were villas hidden between the trees, where the Party leaders had stayed during their hunting parties. The most luxurious accommodations were in the main building, including a Presidential Suite in which undoubtedly Party leader Gustav Husak had stayed. Maybe Leonid Brezhnev, a fervent hunter, had slept in this bed! My nostalgic heart immediately started beating faster, especially because the furnishing was extraordinarily tasteless. The suite had an extensive living area for the important guest, surrounded by a whole range of rooms for security and household personnel.

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These service rooms were connected by corridors, in order to make sure that Husak – or Brezhnev – would not be disturbed. These corridors gave access to the rooms where the guests had to be served: a kitchen, the dining room, and a sauna and its own swimming pool. At a distance, this seemed an extraordinary luxury, but when you came closer you would immediately notice one thing; the lack of quality. The rooms had been finished very haphazardly. In the bathroom, hardly a tile was aligned properly and the woodwork had gaps, holes and cracks. The swimming pool seemed to be a luxury, but if Brezhnev had jumped in, it would probably have been empty instantaneously as it was one of the smallest I had ever seen. The saunaand swimming pool complex had a door to the outside, but no terrace whatsoever, only a small balcony. I had noticed that lack of quality before; for example, in the holiday resort of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Jurmala, south of the Latvian capital Riga, where we organized a meeting. There I slept in the room where Andrei Gromyko, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union, had stayed. Gromyko had been known as a humorless and ascetic man, but that this meant that you would be given such a bad bed I never knew. Here the tiles also had been put in crookedly, and the furniture was of mediocre quality and the choice of colors quite disgusting. And in Bratislava, where I managed to spend a night in the Presidential Suite of Hotel Devin on the banks of the Danube River, just before it was reconstructed, the setting also confirmed this rule. Bad quality, and above all tasteless furniture, in this case bulky chairs covered with black leather and chunky dark wooden tables and desks. Wonderfully awful. How is that possible? I wondered for quite some time, and eventually I came to the conclusion that this was the result of the workers’and farmers’ state, as the Communists preferred to call themselves. Indeed it had been workers and farmers, who had achieved power through political deceit, violence, coups and terror and had suddenly been in control of the country. They belonged to the highest authority, but that does not mean that their taste had adapted itself to this. What they did was pure imitation, it was nothing less than kitsch. They probably didn’t even notice that the tiles were crooked, that the bath didn’t exactly fit, that the dado hadn’t been done properly and that the paintings wouldn’t have fetched a dollar at a flea market. The hunting complex south of Prague was a perfect location for a conference, and they were happy to have us as clients. The center was hardly used, only the Russian mafia rented a couple of villas every now

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and then because it was so nicely remotely located and they could do their business undisturbed. The rest of the time, it was empty, deserted. The only problem was that there was no conference room. The guys had come to hunt, not to work. What to do? Luckily the place had a sizeable swimming pool, and that gave us an idea: we would empty the swimming pool and put a carpet on the floor. That way we would have a conference hall, from which the participants could only escape by climbing up the ladders. The only problem was that it was bloody cold, because the heating didn’t function. This latter problem was solved by hiring a hot air gun. Every morning I would get up early, go quickly to the hall and turn on the machine. Then I could sleep another hour and subsequently have breakfast, and by the time the meeting started it would be nicely warm. Then we would have to turn off the hot air gun, because it made a hell of a noise, and after and hour or two it would get cold again. So we would hold a coffee break, heat the swimming pool in the mean time and then continue, and this rhythm would continue throughout the day.

Meeting in the swimming pool On the second day of the meeting, I put the hot air gun on the bottom of the swimming pool, instead of on the edge. I hoped this would make it warmer downstairs, because some of the participants had still complained about the cold. I went back to bed, but suddenly the manager was banging on the door, with a red face and strangely excited: something terrible had happened. I ran after him, to the swimming pool, and came face

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to face with a huge blue balloon. At the foot of it lay a rolled up carpet and the hot air gun that was still happily blowing its hot air. It turned out that the hot air gun had heated the coating of the swimming pool, as a result of which hot air had been created under the coating and had pushed it up until it resulted in a sort of hot air balloon. It was a marvelous sight, but the manager clearly didn’t agree with me. We turned off the heating and pffff… the balloon emptied itself. The meeting could continue, but afterwards we received a bill for new coating in the swimming pool. The meeting we organized here was a special seminar for the young generation, one of such meetings that we organized in those years. We realized that the older generation was reaching the top of their ability to change; as a result, the reform process started to stagnate. For tactical reasons, the managers and other leaders usually were invited to our conferences, but, as a result, we didn’t reach the young people who eventually should continue the process. This asked for a different approach, one that would enable us to turn things around and give the process new energy. In order to avoid discussions and the feeling of being bypassed among the influential people, we decided to organize special meetings for people not older than 35 years of age. In such an atmosphere, they would be involved in the program in a much more active manner. The basic concept had been developed by Toma Tomov from Bulgaria, and was, in fact, quite simple: the participants would be given a task that they had to perform in small groups. The basis was a description of a fictive post-totalitarian region, named “Slaka,” where mental health care was quite similar to those of the former Soviet Union. The participants would attend a number of introductory lectures about various aspects of modern mental health care delivery and, subsequently, had to start working in small multi-disciplinary and multi-national groups. Each group had a laptop, an interpreter English-Russian and a walkie-talkie with which they could call up consultants. The consultants were sitting separately, with a walkie-talkie, and spent their time giving advice and analyzing the developments in the groups. What usually happened was that the groups would first wind up in a deep crisis. Who had to take the lead, how to start, and what was actually expected from them. The groups would work till deep in the night, and would meet the next morning in a plenary session to discuss problems that had arisen. With most groups, it was all wrong and it would never work. Still we sent them back to work. After the deepest crisis, they would get moving, would form a working method that differed from group to group

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and at the end of the second day they would be actively discussing and writing their plans. The discussions would sometimes really become hot, partially due to differences in culture and backgrounds. For instance, in one group we hardly managed to contain the beginnings of a MacedonianKyrgyz war. But the final result was magnificent. The plans they developed were interesting, often very innovative, and most important was that the participants now knew what we meant with modern mental health care. Also, they had learned, though all the difficulties, to work in teams, an almost unexplored territory in these countries. The “Slaka” meetings were followed by other training seminars for the young generation. The model was the same, only the theme differed. In the course of time a whole generation of new mental health reformers was educated, the majority of whom became active in projects or initiated them themselves, and put their knowledge to practice. The region was buzzing with activity. Unfortunately, the funding decreased at the beginning of the twenty-first century and gradually the number of young generation meetings decreased. We also gradually witnessed the result of open society: young and promising specialists departed for abroad, and good nurses were lured into becoming trade representatives of the pharmaceutical industry and spent their days selling Viagra and other pills: a painful loss of valuable capital.

Chapter 20

Romance with the WPA The demise of the Soviet Union and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe resulted in a totally different geo-political situation. The number of countries grew enormously in a relatively short period of time. Not only did we suddenly have fifteen countries instead of one Soviet Union, but Czechoslovakia had also fallen apart into two states and Russia was threatening to break up as well. All indicators pointed to the possibility that the process of disintegration would lead to the establishment of new countries. Chechnya had basically separated from Russia under the leadership of Dzhokhar Dudayev, but also Yakutia was following its own course and had its own Minister of Foreign Affairs with whom we maintained contact. It sounds maybe strange, now that Putin and his KGB cronies got the country back under control, but Yakutia - Sakha, as it called itself - was as big as Europe in size and potentially very rich because of all the natural resources such as gold, diamonds and other minerals. Even Tatarstan, only a few hundred kilometers east of Moscow, was thinking about independence. It was an interesting time, never a dull moment. For the psychiatric arena, this meant potentially at least fifteen new psychiatric associations, while in Russia three psychiatric associations were active already: the successor to the All-Union Society of Psychiatrists and Neuropathologists, now called the Russian Psychiatric Society; the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia; and the St. Petersburg Psychiatric Association. The latter association had been founded by Yuri Nuller and Vladimir Tochilov, and was supposed to function as a counterweight against the old nomenklatura from Moscow. In principle, each of the former Soviet Republics had its own national psychiatric association, although, in most countries, it only existed on paper. The associations of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan were led by the local representation of the Soviet psychiatric elite. In Kazakhstan, there was even open warfare between two self-declared chairmen, one in Almaty and the other in the new capital, Astana. However, their level was six of one and half a dozen of the other. The Kyrgyz Association was led by the only remaining Russian in the country with a scientific degree, Valery Solozhenkin. He was an old acquaintance of Yuri Nuller and had connected himself emotionally to the country and, thus, he refused to leave, like most other Russians had done. Undoubtedly, the fact that he was unchallenged as a leader played a role in this: in Russia he would have been just one out of many. Solozhenkin was a very interesting mixture of a reform-minded yet old-fashioned psychiatrist,

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a Russian melancholic philosopher and an Asian monarch. At home in Bishkek, he didn’t allow much contradiction and wished to be addressed as “professor.” His opinion was the rule. Outside his country, however, he showed his soft side. Pensive, a bit pessimistic by nature, every now and then close to despair, he would be smoking one cigarette after the other, complaining about the harsh fate that had befallen on him and his country. I think that the disintegration of psychiatry in his country hurt him sincerely and he really wanted change, albeit according to his own plans and to the level that he himself would determine. Things he didn’t like were sabotaged by him, if not openly then secretively. Still, in comparison to the psychiatric bosses in the countries around him, he was a relief, a sort of renaissance monarch. For him, it was important that he was given adequate personal attention and that we would sit separately with him and philosophize about how things could have been different. He would look at a companion with his sad eyes, lighting one cigarette with the other. With keen interest and admiration, I often observed how he managed to open a new pack of cigarettes with one hand, using the same hand to pull out a new cigarette and lighting it with the old one, making sure that the smoke from the chimney continued unabated. “Smoked meat doesn’t decay” was the slogan, and he put this to practice maximally. A few years ago he died, much to our regret, because we had become very fond of him, but the fact that he managed to live so long with his chain smoking really Photo Valery Solozhenkin astonished us. Most of the national psychiatric associations weren’t of much use. Often they had little idea how many members they had, dues were not being paid and members saw no reason why they should pay: they didn’t get anything in return. Only the Baltic psychiatric associations and Gluzman’s Ukrainian Psychiatric Association had their matters more or less organized. They really had membership lists, organized meetings and general assemblies and were actively involved in the development of psychiatric science in their countries. Also the Independent Psychiatric Association in Moscow was active, but on average it didn’t have many more members than about fifty. They also had the same problem as the Association of Free Romanian Psychiatrists: they were just as monopolistic and rigid as the

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associations they opposed, and both openly held the opinion that politicians had to be examined psychiatrically. For us, this was sufficient reason to stay far away from them. In fact, our Network of Reformers in Psychiatry was just about the only structure actively engaged in trying to link these countries to world psychiatry. The whirlwind of change from communism to capitalism, the enormous economic crisis, the threat of civil war in parts of Russia and the Caucasus, were reason enough for people to look only internally and not to seek links with the outside world. In order to change this, we decided to invite a large group of reformers to the World Congress of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) in 1996. It was the second World Congress of the WPA following 1989, when the Soviets had conditionally returned to the association, but the 1993 Congress had taken place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which was too far away for the Eastern Europeans. As a result, this was the first World Congress where people from “our” region could travel to freely. This offered unique possibilities, which we wanted to use maximally. Putting Eastern Europe on the map The confrontation between GIP and the WPA had gradually changed to one of non-confrontation and, on occasion, even collaboration. A number of prominent psychiatrists connected to the WPA, who had been on the other side of the barricades in the 1980s, were now supporting our work in Eastern Europe. This offered possibilities for collaboration. Our proposal to use the World Congress to pave the way for as many Eastern European psychiatrists as possible to enter world psychiatry was received with great enthusiasm. The congress bureau in Madrid played a crucial role in the preparations for the Congress, and particularly one of the directors, Carolina Sicilia. Carolina was a very charming middle-aged lady, with a Spanish flair and a very strong sense of humor, and on top of that with a heart in the right spot. She was married to the executive director of the congress bureau and shared our enthusiasm to make something special out of the Congress. Of course, she had a commercial interest, because the idea was to bring together more than ten thousand psychiatrists, but, at a certain moment, it was clear that her social engagement became even more important than her commercial interest. She knew how little money we had and helped us in all possible ways; for instance, by convincing her husband to offer us much more services free of charge than had been the original intention.

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As usual, Jan Veldmeijer and I took control of the preparatory work for this event, and traveled to Madrid several times to visit locations and to work on our plans. Carolina took us under her wings like a mother, drove us from one meeting to the next, while, in the meantime, telling us one story after the other about her family. Often it seemed that she was more on our side of the negotiating table than that of the WPA, who wanted to have a good profit from the congress and for whom we were becoming gradually a costly affair. After meetings where we had managed to get something more out of them, she would be at least as jubilant as we were; “they can afford it,” she would say with a jovial wink. Usually, around two o’clock in the afternoon, we would go to a restaurant for lunch, often leaving only by the end of the afternoon, a bit intoxicated and not capable of doing much work. It was maximum hospitality, and after a while we felt like part of her family, enhanced, of course, by all the stories that she told. And we had quite some plans. We wanted to establish a “Meeting Point” during the congress for participants from Central & Eastern Europe and the former USSR, where they could meet, relax and pick up free literature at the special stand. We had the feeling that for many, the congress would be too overwhelming, too threatening, and that a place to withdraw and mingle with psychiatrists from their own region would be a good idea. The number of psychiatrists in the city could be pretty threatening, especially when seen all over the city with the same blue congress bags. It seems that they have taken over the city - you see them when you close your eyes, and again when you open them… It is almost a nightmare. Apart from the Meeting Point we organized three separate programs: one as part of the official congress program, one for our participants but accessible to all and one in our Meeting Point itself. The latter program consisted mostly of discussions meetings on medical ethics and human rights, and discussions about the future course of work of our foundation. In order to make the congress accessible to psychiatrists from “our” region, we flew in ten interpreters from Kiev who would take care of simultaneous interpretation of the main sessions of the Congress, and locally another four were recruited. A bi-lingual booklet in English and Russian was included in all of the congress bags, consisting of the program components that we considered to be of special interest to participants from Eastern Europe and the part where Russian simultaneous translation would be provided. The Fourth Meeting of Reformers in Psychiatry, in which the more than 75 participants that we had brought to Madrid would participate, would follow the World Congress itself. ‘

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It was a complex and deadly operation, especially as we had only a staff of five people to organize it all. It was also a very costly affair, in spite of the fact that Carolina had helped us in every possible way and probably saved us tens of thousands of euros. The Open Society Institute of George Soros helped again, as well as the European Commission and a number of private donors. For us and for Eastern European psychiatry, the congress was a major success. The ten thousand participants had witnessed the return of Eastern European psychiatry; many psychiatric associations from the region were admitted to membership; and, for the first time, a special zonal representative for our region was appointed. A moral victory was the collective reaction of the presidents of psychiatric associations from Central & Eastern Europe and the former USSR to the upsurge of political abuse of psychiatry in Turkmenistan, a country had had slid back into a Stalinist dictatorship led by the “father of all Turkmen,” Turkmenbashi. All associations, including the Russian Society, signed a protest letter. It immediately had an effect: the fact that former “brothers” protested so collectively resulted in an immediate end to the abuse.

Chapter 21

New style abuse Even though the political abuse of psychiatry in the former Soviet Union had come to an end, the opening of the doors to the institutions had also shown us that the problem was much bigger and that there was, in fact, something structurally wrong. Hundreds of thousands of people were locked up in institutions where the living conditions were terrible, without any hope for a return to society. These institutions were huge coffins, which the inhabitants only left horizontally. This was not only a problem with psychiatric hospitals. Even worse were the “internaty,” the social care homes where anybody with something chronic was being locked up. This included chronic mental patients, mentally disabled, sometimes also physically disabled and a large group of “socially unadapted persons,” people which society didn’t want around and with whom the authorities had no idea what to do. All these people were mixed together in these social care homes, preferably far outside the city. In Ukraine alone, there were ninety of these institutions, with an average of 300 inhabitants per institution. That meant that in the whole region, hundreds of thousands of people had lost their right to a normal life. In the course of the years I have seen many of these institutions; first in Ukraine, later also in Russia, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Georgia, etc., encountering situations that bring the tears to your eyes. These places were usually understaffed, with only a few elderly nurses who had an impossible task to perform and received only a meager salary, and a doctor who would drop by once a day or even less in order to perform the most rudimentary tasks. Outside Kiev, for instance, in Puchevoditsa, we visited an institution several times where only seven nurses were taking care of 360 patients, of which half were not able to move around. What kind of care can be offered here? And again the stench, the stench that sticks to your nose like a tick, and which you still smell in the evening when you try to eat. And maybe the worst of all is the sense of impotence that grabs you. What can you do about this? The problem was so huge, and concerns so many people, it was hard to know where to start. There was also no one to blame, nobody whom you can point at for being the culprit. The nurses do what they can. Most of them have no idea that it could be done differently and, as a result of the work pressures, it would have been impossible to create any form of day program. Insight would have only lead to more frustration and depression. The doctors were detached, visited the wards

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as little as possible, and if they managed to retain their feelings, they succumbed to alcohol. The Communist attitude was prevailing everywhere, in the framework of which anybody who is not productive is removed from society. Society itself was heavily damaged by many years of dictatorship, moral decline and the sense of survival that has eradicated all compassion for fellow human beings. This means that the system could only change when society changed, and that would take at least two generations. I had always tried not to become detached, not to get used to the misery around me. A certain level of indifference was lurking, not because there is no affect but exactly because it evokes such strong emotions that a protective layer is developed. I didn’t want this protective layer; I wanted to continue to feel what my eyes saw. The most effective method was to plan with certain regularity a visit to a social care home or a psychiatric hospital somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Not too often, to avoid getting used to it, but often enough to be able to remember how it was, how it smelled. At the same time, we knew that it was impossible to purvey the real situation, either through photographs, or through film. The images themselves were terrible enough: a patient rolled up in a thin blanket lying in a rickety bed and dressed in dirty rags, heavily drugged with haloperidol, filling his days with emptiness - day in, day out, year in, year out, without ever leaving the ward. In reality, this image mingles with the stench I described before, and with the image of heart rendering heaps of human misery, shivering and with dazed eyes because of medication, filth and forgotten by God and mankind. How can you purvey this in words and images? The woman with the golden hands The visit to Pushevoditsa did not only have a strong effect on me, but also on the people who accompanied me. One of them was a mother of an autistic child, Raisa Kravchenko. She lived in Kiev and was an English teacher by profession. Her son was only six or seven years old and lived at home with her, but normally in a few years he would be put in such an institution. Seeing the inhumane living conditions in this institution convinced her of one thing: never would she send her son to such a place. Together with a couple of mothers, she set to work. It was 1994, and specialist care for children with a mental handicap didn’t exist in Ukraine. There were so-called “defectologists,” doctors who determined whether a child was handicapped or not. And if the child was handicapped, he/she was headed for the social care home. For children, this would mean the start of an agony that would last all of their – short or long – lives. If a child survived a youth institution, when he/she turned 18, he/she would

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automatically be transferred to an institution for adults. The inhabitants of such institutions would leave on “horizontally,” after their death. A whole life behind closed doors, an inhuman fate. Raisa and her enthusiastic team of mothers managed to convince a number of specialists to drop by on Sunday morning at the “Sunday Club,” which they organized in a kindergarten in one of the Kiev suburbs. Professor Valery Kuznetsov, the President of the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association, was one of the first who agreed to participate. The mothers also managed to convince a child psychologist to help, and subsequently also a music therapist and a physiotherapist. On Sunday morning, the mothers would bring their children to the club, where they were examined and given advice. The children did exercises together, they played, sang… The effect was great. For the first time in their lives, the children received attention individually, people looked at what they could do and not only at what they couldn’t. The children progressed visibly. Raisa became more and more enthusiastic and wanted more. An agreement was reached with a kindergarten that one of the floors could be rented for a day program, and with funding from a whole series of Dutch foundations and the Dutch Embassy, the day program was developed. The leaking roof was repaired, the space was refurbished, furniture was purchased as cheaply as possible and suitcases full of toys and dolls were brought to Kiev by our travelers. However, every time the space was ready to be used and the program could really start, they were kicked out of the kindergarten. One center said that the neighbors had complained, the other time it was the other users of the premises that didn’t want them around. Without blinking an eye, landlords would admit that people didn’t want to be housed in the same building as these ugly creatures. Each time, everything had to be packed and the renovated space vacated. This happened over and over again. In a strange way, this didn’t discourage Raisa, but, rather, it seemed to motivate her to continue, every time with renewed energy. Thus her day center grew steadily, eventually found its own permanent premises and developed a unique program that was even partially funded by the government. The association “Dzherela,” which she had founded together with the other mothers, became one of the

Raisa Kravchenko (right) and Irina Griga of the Kiev Mohyla Academy

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most important Ukrainian relative organizations for people with a mental handicap. After ten years of struggle, “Dzherela” was one of the founding organizations of a national coalition, of which Raisa became President. “The woman with the golden hands” we called her, somebody who, in spite of all the setbacks, managed to turn her project into a success story. It proved how strong a family organization can be. Counterfeit dollars In the meantime, the romance between the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association and the director of the “Pavlovka,” Vitali Lisovenko, was completely over. The humanitarian aid transports had come to an end and, thus, there was no longer a possibility of theft. Because of this, Gluzman and his association had ceased to be of interest; Lisovenko had found other sources of income. On the grounds of the hospital, all kinds of businesses had established themselves, which either belonged to him, or paid rent money that he, of course, pocketed himself. When the deputy director decided to have a look one night when a big truck was being unloaded, the barrel of a submachine gun was pushed against his belly. It was clear something fishy was gong on. Also the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association was told that it had to pay rent, and in cash, please. When this proposal was turned down, Lisovenko completely turned against them and showed his real colors. He started putting demands, wanted the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association leave “his” hospital immediately and called us whenever possible “agents of Western security agencies.” On top of that, he constantly caused trouble by sending representatives of the municipal sanitation department and the fire department to the printing house, hoping that they would revoke the license and thus bring the presses to a halt. When that failed, he called the tax police and claimed that the printing press was used to print counterfeit dollars. Within hours, the police were at the door and the place was raided. Lisovenko had made a miscalculation, however, because Guzman immediately called the deputy chairman of the Ukrainian secret service SBU, Volodymir Pristaiko, who sent a bunch of agents to the offices without delay. Also the television stations had been alerted and the whole event was taped and broadcasted on television that evening. The tax police withdrew, after which the SBU sealed the premises in order to make sure that the equipment would not be removed. Lisovenko had lost, but it was clear the publishing house had to move to another place.

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After a while, we were able to buy an old supermarket with financial support from a private donor in Switzerland. This eased the tension a bit, but it was clear that as long as Lisovenko remained in his position, provocations would be concocted. He had established a totalitarian rule at the hospital; the staff was not allowed to have any contact with the outside world, let alone with us; living conditions in the departments deteriorated seriously and the fishy activities on the hospital grounds increased by the day. There was only one way out of the situation: Lisovenko had to go. That turned out to be a complex issue. In the former Soviet Union the trade union is in fact a continuation of the old Soviet trade union and still extremely powerful. To dismiss somebody is almost impossible, even when that person has broken all the rules; this case was no different. Commissions were established to investigate the situation at the “Pavlovka” and they came to shocking conclusions. However, every time a recommendation was made, one of Lisovenko’s “business partners” in the municipal and the ministerial bureaucracy would manage to block a decision. Finally after a battle of two years, Lisovenko was fired in 1997. Electroshocks as a farewell present The investigations by the various commissions revealed an endless list of shocking facts, things that we didn’t even dare to suspect. These were not only shady businesses, deals with firms who earned a lot of money with the sale of medicines and shared the profit with the director, but also pure maltreatment of patients. For instance, the head of one of the departments of the “Pavlovka” had the habit of giving patients who were to be discharged from the hospital a series of electroshocks as “farewell presents.” This had no therapeutic value whatsoever; it was just criminal behavior of the chief of the department. Another department had the habit to declare patients temporarily mentally healthy, who owned property and had earlier been found to be incompetent. The reason for this strange behavior was quite simple. A commission changed the diagnosis to mentally healthy, the patient was then pushed in a car and taken to a notary to sign the property away and “donate” it to one of the doctors. The patient was then taken back to the hospital and reexamined by the commission who, of course, found the patient to again be unaccountable. This way the staff managed to expropriate several apartments in a sneaky manner, a very serious form of theft. What happened in Kiev was not unusual. Also in other cities, and in other countries in the region, the same things happened. It was by coincidence that we had a detailed report of the investigation of this one

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case; in other cases nobody knew about it or cared. Family members also managed to expropriate property in this manner. Grandchildren sometimes had their grandparent declared unaccountable in order to be able to sell the flat in the city center, after which the psychiatrist got a few hundred dollars under the table. The quickly rising value of real estate stimulated this type of dealings. Flats that cost less than ten thousand dollars shortly after independence had increased in value tenfold if not more. And that was not all. There were many reasons for this corruption. Psychiatrists received very low salaries and couldn’t possibly survive on their income; also, there was a complete lack of control and a progressing moral decline. In one case, a man had his Armenian wife incarcerated in a psychiatric institution and told their children that their mother had died in a car accident in the Armenian capital of Yerevan. The woman spent two years in a psychiatric hospital before she was able to escape one night. Suddenly she was there, standing on the doorstep of her sister, who all the time had thought she was dead. And although the psychiatrist had committed a crime according to the new Ukrainian Criminal Code, he was never convicted. A few hundred dollars for the judge and the case was closed. Also in the case of television anchorwoman Oksana Reikhelhaus, the judge changed his mind every time her ex-husband paid him some bribes. Oksana had been married to a Ukrainian of Jewish decent, who had a very dominant mother who didn’t like the marriage at all. The issue was that Oksana was not Jewish and therefore, according to Jewish tradition, their children would never be Jewish. After they had a daughter the mother managed to convince her son to get rid of his wife. The fact that Oksana was suffering from a light and easily treatable mental disorder provided the husband with the possibility to use psychiatry as a means. Oksana would be declared unaccountable and thus the custody of the daughter would automatically be given to the father. Oksana was called in for a meeting with the head of the thirteenth department of the “Pavlovka” without having been informed that this was for a psychiatric evaluation. Also she was never informed that the court subsequently, on basis of this unknown psychiatric report, declared her unaccountable. Only when they came to take her daughter away did she know the truth. She started a campaign to get her daughter back, but when all doors remained closed, she turned to the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association for help. The association carried out a second psychiatric examination, and subsequently she was also examined by psychiatrists from St. Petersburg and from the American Psychiatric Association, and all three commissions

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came to the conclusion that there was no reason for this decision. Oksana was fully able to take care of her daughter and knew exactly what she was doing. This was actually quite evident as she continued her work for Ukrainian television and presented a program on medical issues, not typical behavior for an “unaccountable” person. The situation was even more delicate because her husband, Oleg, was the representative in Ukraine of a major pharmaceutical company. Before that he had had a high position at the Ministry of Health and now he used his extensive network to get rid of his wife and keep the daughter for himself. When Oksana started looking for publicity, he responded with issuing threats to her life. The threat because so imminent that Gluzman asked the SBU to keep an eye on her. At the same time Ellen Mercer, the Director of International Affairs of the American Psychiatric Association, contacted the firm of which Oksana Reikhelhaus’ husband was representative in Ukraine. She informed them of the alleged threats and asked the firm to look into the situation. However, someone in the firm informed Oleg who tried to sue Ellen Mercer. The judicial procedures continued in Kiev and it took two years of fighting before Oksana managed to see her daughter again. It was only at the beginning of 1998, three years after the case started, that the situation was resolved and Oksana saw her rights reestablished. And these were not the only cases that drew our attention. A Dr. Andreiko in Dnepropetrovsk had developed the idea that he could cure schizophrenics through brain operations. However, in order to be able to carry them out, he falsified the medical files by exchanging the diagnosis “schizophrenia” with “epilepsy.” Undoubtedly, he thought that with his discovery he would win the Nobel Prize for Medicine. In Kiev, Professor Tsimbalyuk implanted embryonic brain tissue in the brains of children with mental handicaps and patients with Alzheimer. The families had to pay large sums of money for this, but the promise that it would cure the patient was enough for the families to take on huge debts. Of course, nothing happened, other than that Professor Tsimbalyuk became richer by the day. The tragic side of the story is that we could only hear about the tip of the iceberg. We knew these cases because the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association had a wide network of contacts and victims reporting to the association daily. Other former Soviet republics did not have a watchdog organization, however, and therefore we hardly ever received such information from these countries. That does not mean that the practices did not happen there.

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Diagnosis for sale In the post Soviet period, another form of “economic abuse” of psychiatry became widespread. Undoubtedly the practice had also been used in Soviet times, but the unleashed societies caused an epidemic increase: buying diagnoses by criminals in order to escape long terms of imprisonment. The system was quite easy. A criminal under pre-trial investigation made sure he was examined psychiatrically, after which, he would be diagnosed as unaccountable, for a fee. As a result the “customer” wound up in a forensic psychiatric institution, where he quickly recovered after a commission comes to the conclusion after half a year or a year that the person concerned had been cured. That way he was out on the street in a relatively short period of time, instead of serving a long sentence because of murder, rape, robbery or another serious crime. The price was determined by the seriousness of the crime and the “desired” length of stay in a forensic institution. The fee could be quite large, according to confidential sources, up to a hundred thousand dollars. This economic abuse was surrounded by a lot of secrecy. Everybody knew, but nobody wanted to know officially. A lot of money circulated in this area, and both prominent psychiatrists and governmental officials were involved in it. Since it was all swept under the carpet and nobody dared to stick out their necks, it remained a practice that went unpunished for a long time. Only in 2004, the bomb exploded when a case in Georgia became major news. A scandal was the result, after which the Minister of Health fired all forensic psychiatrists in the country and asked Global Initiative on Psychiatry to develop a clean forensic psychiatry. This was the beginning of a long term involvement in Georgian forensic psychiatric service development.

Chapter 22

A successful failure When developing and implementing projects in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, we tried to invest as much as possible in the capacity of people, convinced that they had to take responsibility for their own mental health care and that, in the end, they had to decide how it should develop in future. It was not always easy, because Communist rule had made people completely dependent; they were not accustomed to thinking for themselves. The State decided what was necessary, the people only implemented their decisions. Then, suddenly, we expected our reformers to think by themselves and indicate what they wanted. One of the participants in the first Network meetings was a Latvian professor of psychiatry. Apart from the fact that he believed in the diagnosis “sluggish schizophrenia” and at every meeting took at least one attempt to convince me that he was right, he was also part of the group that was waiting hopefully for our propositions. You could bet on it, every time as a meeting concluded, he would get up and ask the same question: “Robert, when will we get from you the blueprint how our psychiatry should look like?” And every time he got the same answer, namely that there was no blueprint and that the participants should use the information we provided during our meetings in order to decide for themselves and develop their own plans for the future. It didn’t make any difference, for him it was higher mathematics: he just didn’t get it. Stimulating one’s own initiative, developing a plan or a model, also meant that you radically risked the principle of reinventing the wheel all over again. In fact, it was the other way around: it was important that people themselves invented the wheel, that they themselves discovered the best approach. We provided the information, contacts, and showed how it worked in other countries; but for the rest, we were supposed to stay in the background. That also meant that mistakes were made, but however unpleasant that might be, these mistakes were an important part of the learning process. A mistake is only a mistake when you don’t learn from it. While this development slowly but surely got off the ground and, in particular, the younger participants became increasingly active and came up with their own ideas and plans, the Network itself remained a business that was totally run by us. We organized the meetings, developed the themes, worked out the programs and made sure that the Network remained a real network, where information was disseminated and the participants could learn from each other’s successes and failures.

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On one hand this was the easiest way out. When you organize five or six conferences per year, the machinery becomes well oiled and you prefer not to involve others and risk destroying the balance. However, in order to avoid a boring repetition of conferences for us, we were constantly looking for new places to gather. We also held farewell dinners in special locations so that the participants, after three days of hard work, would also experience something relaxing that they could take home as a memory. We were quite strict as far as working hours were concerned: every day we would convene from nine in the morning till seven or eight at night, and sometimes we would even organize sessions after dinner. During coffee and lunch breaks we would keep an eye on the front door, to make sure that nobody escaped to do some shopping in the city. Escaping was difficult anyway, because the conference sites were in the middle of nowhere. After much pressure, we would organize as a “compromise” a bus that would take participants for an hour or two to shopping malls in a nearby town, but that would really be the limit. It is not for nothing that our conferences were called “punishment camps.” The Big Three On the other side it was about time that the participants in our Network started taking responsibility for it themselves. It was part of their “empowerment,” learning to stand on their own feet. Even though it would be more difficult for us to organize the meetings at the same level and with the same ease, we still realized that it was important that people from the region become involved in directing the Network and organizing the meetings. In order to reach this goal we decided to establish an association, of which all the participants and participating organizations could become members. This association would at first stimulate the interaction between the members, and eventually should become responsible for all the coordination and logistics of the Network and its meetings. As name of the association we chose “Association of Reformers in Psychiatry” (ARP). At the end of 1997, the Network consisted of seven hundred members in twenty-five countries. All the persons on our list had the right to nominate candidates for the Executive Committee, and subsequently vote for them. The nomination process went by mail; elections were organized in two phases. A hundred reformers were invited to come to the Constituent Assembly of the ARP, the other six hundred members of the Network could vote by mail. The Constituent Assembly was organized at a conference center in The Netherlands in April 1998.

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At that time, the leading role within the Network had shifted from Semyon Gluzman to the Bulgarian psychiatrist, Toma Tomov. This was mostly related to the phase in which we found ourselves. Gluzman was a pioneer, somebody who had been with his feet in the mud and had started building things from scratch. He was a practically thinking person, not a passionate scientist. His strongest side was slowly becoming his weakest side, namely that for him rules and limitations didn’t exist. In that sense, he was a dissident to the core. But the world moved on and the anarchistic period during the first half of the 1990s had come to an end. Foundations demanded concrete proposals, with concrete objectives and a fixed budget. That was something Gluzman still could handle, but the next phase became more difficult: foundations also expected you to stick to the plans and the budgets. This was very difficult and in some cases even impossible in Eastern Europe, and especially in the former Soviet Union. For Gluzman, this was reason enough not even to try, even though we had to send a detailed report with concrete activities to the donor. This caused tension and despair on our side and incomprehension on the part of Gluzman. Tomov, however, was a scientist who was used to prolonged discussions, analyses, detailed planning, evaluations, indicators; you name it you got it. In addition, he knew the exact language that the Western organizations world liked to hear. He held a unique position in that he was one of the few in Eastern Europe who mastered this concept. He had a wide network among Western scholars and was respected by them. Eastern Europe was for them unexplored territory and Tomov and his views enabled them to discover this huge blank spot on the map. In a way it was, especially in epidemiological respect, something like Africa in the time of David Livingstone and Henry Stanley.

Toma Tomov and Robert van Voren, 1999

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It was in the same time that we prepared a huge project with Toma Tomov, in the framework of which we wanted to train small teams in six countries in the region who would on one hand try to develop an overview of the needs in the field of mental health care delivery in their countries, and on the other hand examine the attitudes of the various professional groups in mental health and of society as a whole. These attitudes were important factors in trying to understand why mental patients were treated in this part of the world as outcasts, and how the Communist system had influence their views and positions. This “Attitudes and Needs Assessment Project” was co-financed by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a number of other donors and was the first attempt to map mental health care in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. We worked for many months on the project proposal, the last time in a hotel in Budapest, exactly on the day that Princess Diana was buried in London. The television was on, because I didn’t want to miss anything of the event; this dismayed Toma whose head was deep in the proposal and could by now only talk in terms of “Needs” and “Attitudes.” Diana’s funeral clearly did not belong to his “Needs.” but it did to mine. Trying to match the sound of the television, Toma argued his approach in the proposal, the hypothesis that formed the base of it and what outcomes he expected to see. To follow his reasoning was difficult anyway, but with these historic events evolving in the corner of my eye it became even more difficult. Tomov’s use of language was by now notorious and didn’t make him more understandable; Toma was able to “tomovize” quite simple issues to such an extent that others lost track and stopped understanding his meaning. However, I had developed quite an experience in this field during the preparation of the project and could thus quite easily “detomovize” his texts, thereby retaining some understanding of his line of thought. Tomov was, as it were, floating twenty centimeters above ground, his thoughts were sometimes brilliant but had also sometimes very little to do with reality as they were far too academic for the region in which we worked. Gluzman had an aversion to academic language and was looking for a far more practical approach, but sometimes forgot that eventually the new mental health care services should be based on evidence, on a correct and scientifically based evaluation of the needs in society. It goes beyond saying that both gentlemen didn’t really get along very well. The painful issue was, however, that together with the Lithuanian, Dainius Puras, they formed the “Big Three.” Puras was in that respect a

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“midfielder,” because in Lithuania he had shown that he could implement practical reforms that led to tangible results, but at the same time he also understand that a scientific basis was pivotal, and it was usually absent in Eastern Europe. Being a Lithuanian, he had the most silent character of the three, and thereby maybe less conspicuous than the others. Together they had worked on the draft constitution of the association, which had been quite a job and had clearly shown the differences between the three and, because of the endless discussions, had even strengthened their relationship. The election of the Executive Committee of the ARP during the Network meeting in The Netherlands resulted in a board composition which we more or less expected. The “Big Three” were all chosen to the leading positions, Tomov as Chairman of the Executive Committee, Gluzman as General Secretary and Puras as Deputy Chairman. Treasurer became the Moscow lawyer Svetlana Polubinskaya, and as elected members, Nazim Agazade from Azerbaijan, Jacek Bomba from Poland, Jan Pfeiffer from the Czech Republic, Valery Solozhenkin from Kyrgyzstan and Vladimir Tochilov from Russia. It was a good company that quite evenly represented the region. The election of Tomov to the position of Chairman instead of Gluzman confirmed that we had entered a new phase in our existence. As such the election of the ARP Executive Committee was a historical event. For the first time since the fall of Communism, a multinational and multi-disciplinary association was founded with representatives and members from virtually all the countries in the region. It was, in fact, the opposite of the centrifugal processes that we saw everywhere in the region, where more and more fragmentation took place. For that reason we could be proud of the results we achieved. From theory to practice But now we had to get started. The preparations had been done, on paper it all looked great, but now we had to start implementing our plans. During a beautiful ceremony, an agreement was signed between Geneva Initiative and the ARP, in which the conditions for the transition period towards the handover of the Network were stipulated. After four years, the ARP should be in full control of the Network and Geneva Initiative should pull out altogether. The secretariat would be established in Sofia, because Ukraine was too far to the East and because the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association had played a dominant role already for more than seven years. It was time somebody else took over.

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The first year was spent on establishing an office in Sofia and on outlining the rules and duties of the membership. The ARP had an “Ethical Code” that had to be signed by all members before they could even join the association, but apart from that an endless discussion evolved on what other duties members should have. Also the rights turned out to be a problem, because what could the ARP offer? This was an important point of contention. The discussions often looked like the meetings of the IAPUP during the first years of its existence, especially because half of the members didn’t speak a word of English and we were as a result forced to work with interpreters. And when there were no interpreters around the board members assumed this role themselves: the members who spoke both languages translated for themselves, voicing their thoughts first in English and then in Russian, and when somebody only spoke Russian it was translated into English by somebody else on the board. Especially when somebody was rather wordy it resulted in a comic theatre play that didn’t seem to come to an end. With all his skills, Toma tried to keep the meeting going, but when fatigue set in, his own Russian slowly changed into Bulgarian with a Russian touch and, as a result, nobody understood a word of what he Toma Tomov in his role as President of wanted to say. the ARP The discussions concentrated on issues that were not so important, but which illustrated the growing difference between Central & Eastern Europe on one hand and the former Soviet Union on the other. It had always been our intention to keep the region together in order to make sure that everybody could learn from each other and help each other. However the collective Communist past turned out not to be strong enough to keep this unity. The needs in the former Soviet Union were quite different than those in Central Europe. There a structure already existed, the first steps had been taken towards community based mental health care services and, on top of that, these societies were much less affected by Communism than those further to the East. In Central Asia, for instance, the main issues were quite different and here it was still very much an issue of survival. Civil society was still very far off. If you would translate it into terms of “have and have nots“ it would be quite simple: Gluzman became the spokesperson of the “have nots,” while Tomov represented more the “haves.”

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Sometimes this schism led to funny situations. One of the most illustrative meetings of the Executive Committee was in August 1999 in Hamburg, during the World Congress of the WPA. Tomov, Pfeiffer, Bomba and Polubinskaya were still sitting at the board table discussing statutory issues. These were the moments when the lawyer in Polubinskaya came to the fore: she determinedly quoted from articles in the constitution, and added a lengthy legal deliberation. The rest of the board members hadn’t waited for this discussion. They had moved out of the room, for them these board meetings had become futile events. They had found a place on the balcony, where they were nicely smoking their cigarettes, busy with completely different issues than the ARP. A clearer rift in the ARP was not possible. We tried for four years. A journal was started, which was disseminated electronically. It was supposed to become the communication channel of the association. Only nobody provided contributions, except the Bulgarians themselves as a result it became a totally Bulgarian affair. People would complain about this: why are they only publishing Bulgarian pieces? But it never entered their minds that this was also their own fault and that it could only change if they would start sending in their own contributions. After four years, we pulled the plug. The ARP was a failure, a huge failure in fact. But at the same time it had been a fantastic learning process. We had seen in a unique fashion how difficult it is to bring about change from exclusive consumption to active participation and taking responsibility. We also learned in a painful way that it was impossible to keep the region together. The differences were too great, and were only increasing. Central and Eastern Europe had separated from the former Soviet Union. The demise of the ARP had given us insight into the process that some years later would take place in the political field when ten countries joined the European Union.

Chapter 23

Renewed struggle with the WPA The 1990s were relatively quiet as far as the political abuse of psychiatry was concerned. In the Soviet Union, the political abuse came to an end, except for a short eructation in Turkmenistan and, later, in Uzbekistan. At the beginning of the decade, there were reports on political abuse of psychiatry in Cuba, that also came to an end fairly quickly. The only major case we had on our plate was in The Netherlands, of all places. It must have been at the beginning of 1988 that a stocky and somewhat nervous man appeared on our doorstep. Our offices were then still located on the Raadhuissstraat in Amsterdam, behind the Royal Palace on Dam Square, where you first had to go through our shop with dissident literature and Soviet paraphernalia before you could reach the office part of the premises. The man wanted to see me, and after I had seated him at a table, he started a long story of which, I have to admit, I couldn’t understand a word. We were more often visited by people who were convinced they were directed radiographically by either the CIA or KGB or both, or that they were victims of some sort of conspiracy, and, at first, I thought I was dealing with a similar case. His rapid speech and the pile of documents he brought with him made me suspicious. On the other hand, his story seemed to be pretty consistent. He told me he had been a social worker at the Ministry of Defense and that a landmine used in a training exercise had exploded spontaneously. A number of draftees and the instructor had died during the event. He had been ordered to go to the widow of the instructor and tell her that the explosion had been her late husband’s fault. On his way to her, however, he was in a serious conflict with his own conscience, because he knew it was not true. When he reached her place, he told her the whole story, including the fact that her husband was not guilty and that he would make sure that the truth would prevail. Why the Ministry of Defense had decided to tell this lie was not completely clear. Was it to prevent the Soviets from knowing that the Dutch had faulty landmines? Was it purely for financial reasons, because the Ministry didn’t want to pay compensation to the widow? One could only guess, but one thing was clear and that is that the Ministry of Defense made a big deal out of it, as they tried to get rid of their social worker by having him declared psychiatrically ill. By that time, the Ministry had attempted this several times, during which the medical service of the Ministry had falsified reports, or at least purposely quoted them incorrectly. Subsequently, lawyers had been put under pressure and the Dutch secret service had become involved. The story became too complex to understand

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at once, but it also sounded too serious to disregard. I promised that would investigate his case. One of my associates, André Koppers, was interested in the case and met the person in question, Fred Spijkers. In some way, the chemistry between the two worked, because Spijkers had the feeling he could tell his story to Koppers, while André became increasingly intrigued by the story and was given the time and space to go deeper into the files. We agreed that he could spend one day a week on the case of Spijkers. Step by step we became convinced that the Ministry of Defense was indeed playing a dirty game here and used a non-existing psychiatric diagnosis in order to silence Spijkers. We also noticed that the security services became increasingly involved in the case, and that the nervousness of Spijkers was therefore completely justified. We were facing a dilemma. We didn’t want to jeopardize our relations with Dutch politics, but at the same time we couldn’t pretend that this was not supposed to be on our plate. Eventually, we decided that, on the basis of the documents that Spijkers had provided, we would write a confidential report in which we outlined the psychiatric aspect of the case in detail, without giving an opinion on the mishap with the landmine itself. The report could be used by Spijkers to gain political support and to prove that he was a victim of political abuse of psychiatry. The reaction by Dutch politics was shocking. One politician after the other refused to deal with the issue, or suddenly withdrew after an initial promise to do so. For me, the biggest shock was the attitude of Joris Voorhoeve, who had supported our campaigns for Soviet political prisoners for many years and had always maintained that morality and solidarity were key issues for him. As Minister of Defense he refused, however, to solve the case and responded with total silence to my personal letters to him with the request to solve the case of Spijkers. I never understood this double attitude, and actually never accepted it. It was one of my biggest disappointments. Luckily for Fred Spijkers, there was eventually one politician, Senator Glastra van Loon, who was prepared to stick out his neck. His courageous step resulted in a snowball effect. After thirteen years of fighting the Ministry, the case was finally resolved and Fred Spijkers was compensated financially. All seemed OK, and Fred was even royally decorated. But when the financial compensation was transferred to his bank account, he immediately received a financial claim from the tax department

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that demanded more than half of the sum. Holland at its best, one could say. The Ministry had to intervene and promise to pay the tax claim and to make sure that Spijkers could keep the entire amount of the compensation. Money, however, does not compensate for lost pleasure in life and the many years of tension and distress to which he, his wife and kids had been subjected. Falun Gong As indicated, we regularly received materials on alleged cases of political abuse of psychiatry; sometimes it concerned individual cases, like that of Fred Spijkers, sometimes it concerned entire countries. Often after investigation it turned out that the documentation provided was insufficient or that examination did not lead to a confirmation of the claims. Sometimes it also became clear that it didn’t concern political abuse of psychiatry, but more about general abuses in psychiatry, of which, unfortunately, there are too many to mention. One day in the summer of 2000, I received a package of materials on political abuse of psychiatry in the People’s Republic of China. It was a compilation of individual cases, but also with some historical overviews. The latter documents were actually the most worrisome, because they indicated the existence of a systematic political abuse of psychiatry like we had seen in the Soviet Union. During the years that we had been busy with political abuse of psychiatry we had never received information on such a systematic system of repression in China. On one hand that was surprising, because almost all the socialist countries had been using psychiatry as a means of repression in one way or another. On the other hand, we could also easily explain this. China was a totalitarian country with large geographical areas where people could disappear in a vast network of camps, and also Stalin did not have to resort to political abuse of psychiatry. We thought that the Chinese were using the “Latin American model,” that means incarceration in camps and prisons, physical and psychological torture and, at most, the use of psychiatrists during torture sessions in order to determine which means of torture was the most effective. The individual cases in the package concerned mostly members of the Falun Gong movement, a spiritual movement in China that had millions of followers at the end of the 1990s. Estimates said that by the end of the twentieth century more than seventy million Chinese had joined the movement, among them many highly placed officials and politicians. The movement favored the development of body and mind through meditation.

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It was absolutely not a political movement, but when it organized a demonstration in the summer of 1999 in front of the Communist Party building in Zhongnanhai to which tens of thousands of followers flocked, the authorities got scared. Here was a national movement founded in 1992 that, in seven years, had acquired more than seventy million followers. It was a movement that was not controlled by the Party. In other words, here was potentially a movement that could endanger the monopoly on power of the Communist Party. The authorities decided to ban the movement altogether, and intervened ferociously. Thousands of followers were arrested, tortured and beaten to death in police precincts. Others disappeared in psychiatric hospitals and were tortured there. It was a reign of terror unleashed to end the movement as quickly as possible. The documents that I received went back further than recent times, however. They reported on massive abuse of psychiatry for political purposes during the reign of Mao Zedong, during which millions of people had been declared mentally ill. And they also reported on many cases of political abuse of psychiatry that had no relation to Falun Gong, but to trade union activists, human rights activists and ordinary citizens that stood up for their rights and were punished harshly only because of their activity. The sender of the package was the British researcher Robin Munro, a Sinologist who was working in London on his dissertation after a lengthy stay in China. He had a wide network of contacts in China, spoke Chinese fluently, and had traveled to China several times over the past years in order to explore libraries in provincial towns. There he had collected a huge amount of literature that carried the stamp “secret” but, at the same time, were openly accessible. This literature concerned reports and articles on the number of people that were committed to psychiatric hospitals because they had complained about a variety of issues. There were even historical analyses among them, which went back to the days of the Cultural Revolution. The materials showed that over the past decades, millions of people had become victims of political abuse of psychiatry. The abuse had started in the 1950s and 1960s, and had increased enormously during the Cultural Revolution. From 1978 onwards, it had taken the form of the classical political abuse of psychiatry as we previously knew from the Soviet Union. According to official documents, in the 1980s, fifteen percent of all forensic psychiatric cases had a political connotation. In the beginning of the 1990s, the numbers had decreased to five percent, but with the beginning of the campaign against Falun Gong, the percentage

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had grown again quite quickly. It also appeared that China hardly knew high security forensic psychiatric institutions until 1987. However, since then the Chinese authorities had built a whole network of special forensic psychiatric hospitals, named “Ankang,” which is Chinese for “Peace and Health.” By that time, there were 20 Ankang institutions in China with a staff that was employed by the Ministry of State Security. The psychiatrists who worked there were wearing white coats over their uniforms. The authorities’ plan was to have at least one such institution in each of the cities with a population of over one million inhabitants. The strange thing was that Robin Munro had been able to take all this material out of China packed in big boxes. For somebody like me, who was used to the Soviet Union, this was an incredible story. The idea that a document was marked “secret” and would still be accessible somewhere in a corner of a provincial library was, for Soviets, impossible. But this was the difference between the Soviet system and the Chinese one: in China, the organizational structure was much less centralized and central control was clearly not as extensive as in the Soviet Union. What was impossible in one city would be possible in another, and the supervision of Beijing was relatively limited. In the Soviet Union, however, it didn’t make any difference if you lived in Podolsk, in the European part of Russia, or in Yakutsk in Siberia: secret was secret, and that was it. The political abuse of psychiatry in China appeared to be taking place only in institutions under the authority of the Ministry of State Security and the police, but not in those belonging to other governmental sectors. Mental health care in China is divided into four sectors, which hardly communicate with each other. These are the earlier mentioned Ankang institutions of the Ministry of State Security; those belonging to the police; those that fall under the authority of the Ministry of Health; and, as a fourth sector, those belonging to the Ministry of Social Affairs. Both the sectors belonging to State Security and the police are closed sectors, and, as a result, information hardly ever gets out. Psychiatrists working in, for instance, the hospitals belonging to the Ministry of Health have no contact with the Ankang institutions, and, indeed, had no idea what happened there and could, thus, honestly claim that they were not informed about political abuse of psychiatry in their country. The structure of forensic psychiatry in China was to a large degree identical to that in the Soviet Union. On its own, this is not so strange, because psychiatrists of the Serbski Institute in Moscow came to Beijing in 1957 in order to help their Chinese “brethren,” the same psychiatrists

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who developed the system of political abuse of psychiatry in their own Soviet Union. As a result, diagnostics were not much different than in the USSR. The only difference was that the Soviets had a preference for “sluggish schizophrenia” as a diagnosis and the Chinese usually stuck to the diagnosis “paranoid schizophrenia” or “paranoia.” The consequences were, however, the same: lengthy hospitalization in a psychiatric hospital, compulsory treatment with neuroleptics, abuse, torture… all directed at breaking the will of the victim. Old roles The scope of the political abuse of psychiatry in China was such that it was clear we had to revamp our old activities. The foundation was by now almost exclusively busy with supporting reforms in Eastern European mental health care and the political abuse of psychiatry had, as a result, moved to the backburner. It was ten years before that we had campaigned against it and most of our staff was hired after that period. Even on the Board there were only few who could remember the “old days.” Old instruction manuals had to be taken out of the cupboard and we really had to think hard to remember how we developed our campaigns at that earlier time. From the very beginning, we had to deal with a number of significant obstacles. In the first place, we had no money and raising funds for campaigns for human rights in China turned out to be quite a hassle. An application to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague was passed on to the Dutch Embassy in Beijing. From there we received the answer that an application could be submitted, but that the application should be made by a Chinese organization. But how could we find a Chinese organization that would dare to do this? The members would have immediately been picked up and transferred to an Ankang institution themselves. The precondition of the Dutch Embassy was an impossible one, and thus we decided to continue our search. A large application was prepared for the European Commission. The Commissioner for External Relations was, at that moment, Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong before the Crown colony was handed over to China in 1997. Patten was, as a result, very interested in the proposal and was actively involved in preparing the application. During meetings, he clearly showed that he knew the contents of our plans and that he fully supported the initiative. Still the application was turned down. It soon became clear that the reaction was the same everywhere: China was too big a trade partner, and nobody wanted to irritate the Chinese and be the object of their anger. And that anger would be considerable: for the Chinese authorities, the political abuse of psychiatry was irrevocably connected to

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the issue of the Falun Gong movement and this had to be rooted out at all cost. People who spoke out against the political abuse of psychiatry were, as a result, State Enemy Number One. The second problem was the absence of a constant stream of welldocumented cases. Much of the information that reached the west came via the Falun Gong movement, and that caused us quite a problem. We wanted to avoid the impression that the political abuse of psychiatry in China was a “Falun Gong problem,” and, instead, stressed that the political abuse went much further than members of this movement alone. This became even more important when the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) tried to limit the problem by presenting it as a purely Falun Gong issue and, at the same time, create the impression that members of the movement were possibly not mentally healthy, that it was a sect that possibly brainwashed members, etc. There was even a diagnosis used of “qigong syndrome,” reflecting on the exercises used by the Falun Gong. It was, to be honest, a dirty game aiming to avoid the political abuse of psychiatry from dominating the agenda of the WPA again. The lack of documented information was also the result of the fact that many of the victims who had left China still had relatives in the country. Experience had shown that the expression of views and activities in the West could immediately have repercussions for family members that had stayed behind. As a result, it became very difficult to find victims who were willing to have themselves re-examined, and thereby enable us to put the Chinese diagnosis next to an independent Western one. In the case of the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, this had been the most convincing proof. The files that Bukovsky had managed to smuggle to the West in 1971, the more than fifty victims who had been examined in the period 1977-1981 by psychiatrists of the Moscow Working Commission, those had been the material that had convinced most of the psychiatric associations that there definitely was something wrong in that country. In the case of China, we had to do without this material. It was only in 2006 that we were able to have a well-known dissident reexamined psychiatrically, providing Wang Wanxing, one of the most famous Chinese dissidents, spent thirteen years in an Ankang, and was found to be mentally healthy by a Dutch team of experts

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proof that he had been hospitalized for purely political reasons. And not just for a month or two: Wang Wanxing had been hospitalized in an Ankang institution for political reasons for a period of thirteen years. Added to this was the Chinese pride or “face,” the nationalistic feelings of Chinese. Even though it was an inhuman dictatorship and millions of Chinese had been killed, it was and remained their motherland. As soon as the country was attacked – and that is how many Chinese saw it – they were supposed to take the side of the motherland, and, as a result, many Chinese were against our campaign and especially against attempts to put pressure on the Chinese authorities. We never really encountered that kind of nationalism during our campaigns against the political use of psychiatry in the Soviet Union. Nationalist feelings in favor of the Soviet Union seemed to be absent among the dissidents, because the country was, for them, an artificial entity totally founded on terror and repression with which they felt no connection. That counted even more so for dissidents in the nonRussian Soviet republics, like the Baltic countries or Ukraine. If they voiced nationalist feelings, they were for a country that had been erased from history by the Soviets and, as a result, no longer existed. Among Russian dissidents, nationalism was limited to a rather small group of Slavophiles, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who had a lot of criticism towards the authorities but not with regard to the size of their country caused by the inclusion of so many other countries in the region. Only in the beginning of the 1990s did these nationalist feelings start to spread, when the Soviet Union had fallen apart and they had lost, for instance, “their Ukraine.” And as if this wasn’t enough, we had one more problem: our organization was no longer equipped for campaigning. In the 1980s, campaigning was our daily business and we had a wide network among, for instance, the Dutch parliament and among journalists. The organization was known, our press releases were almost always published by the media and we were heard and seen on radio and television quite frequently. The same situation also existed in other countries: a press conference at the United Nations in Geneva almost automatically led to a wave of publicity, and people like Peter Reddaway managed to get their articles published in prominent publications such as the New York Review of Books. That was all a matter of the past. The most recent press list we had dated from 1992, when nobody had e-mail and in many cases even a fax was still considered to be something innovative. The addresses were then usually accompanied by telex numbers – while these machines had now found a resting place as scrap metal or in a museum. And on top of that our associates were now specialized in running projects, not in campaigning. They hardly knew the

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historical connection and didn’t always understand why a foundation like ours had to be concerned with political abuse of psychiatry in China. How difficult it was to get the rusty machinery going again became clear during the first press conference in The Hague. We had published the first brochure on the political abuse of psychiatry in China and this would be now presented to the press. Robin Munro had crossed the Channel from the United Kingdom especially for this purpose. Convinced that our subject would attract a lot of attention we had rented a larger auditorium in the press center of the Dutch Parliament, but by the time we started only one journalist had turned up, and that was only because he had studied history with me and had later participated in the campaigns in support of the Independent Peace Movement in Moscow. It was not very promising; China was clearly not a hot topic. With regards to psychiatric associations we didn’t fare much better. The file was sent to member associations of the WPA, but there was hardly any reaction. Only a few associations responded at all, among them the British Royal College of Psychiatrists, but that was probably because a number of our board members had submitted a draft resolution that would be voted upon during the upcoming annual meeting of the College. The resolution asked the British Royal College of Psychiatrists so send together with the WPA an investigative mission to China in order to carry out an investigation of the allegations of political abuse of psychiatry and that in case this mission found evidence of such abuses, to ask the WPA to reconsider membership of the Chinese member society. At the annual meeting of the British College, a fierce debate erupted, during which psychiatrists of Chinese descent, in particular, stated that this was a resolution that was against China as such and therefore against all Chinese, making it a resolution they could not support. In order to find a compromise, a clause was added to the resolution that called upon the College to support ethical Chinese psychiatrists in every way possible. Eventually the resolution was adopted, as a result of which we were sure that the issue would be put on the agenda of the forthcoming General Assembly of the WPA. This General Assembly was to take place during the next World Congress of the WPA in Yokohama in August 2002. Again, we ended in a split position: on one hand, we had developed a working relationship with the WPA, whereby supporting mental health care development in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union formed the core of the activities. At the World Congresses in Madrid in 1996 and Hamburg in 1999, we had been present with large delegations from Eastern Europe, but originally

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had not planned to do the same in Yokohama. It was too far away and too expensive, and our donors were less willing to provide funding for these types of activities. On the other hand, we now had to go to Yokohama in order to raise the issue of political abuse of psychiatry in China, and that offered the possibility of bringing a smaller group of Eastern European participants to the Congress and to organize a number of symposia. Again, the same tension developed with regard to the Congress as the one we felt within our organization: how do you combine collaboration in one field with confrontation in another? Blue lights of Yokohama Yokohama had for me a special feeling. My father had gone to Japan almost annually during my youth. The trips lasted for longer periods, sometimes for more than a month, and when he came back it was a big event. He was part of an official delegation and upon arrival they would be welcomed in the VIP lounge. Usually there was a press conference and, since he was responsible for public relations, he would continue to work, even though they had been traveling for more than twenty-four hours. He would always be very busy and looked very official, not really like my father, but, in my head, it was already one big party. We never knew what presents he would brought along, and when we saw his huge suitcases, our imagination would just go berserk – what kind of unusual things would he have brought this time? Usually it turned out to be Japanese version of Dinky Toys and rice paper fans, but also Japanese flags, kimonos, Japanese candy, dried miniature crabs, and Japanese nuts with seaweed. Now such items are not unusual and one can purchase sushi and wasabi nuts in every supermarket, but then these were exotic products that could not be obtained otherwise. In addition, he would bring a load of golden tiepins, cufflinks, pearl necklaces and small electronic equipment, all gifts from Ministers, local authorities and firms like Mitsubishi and Toshiba. And finally he also found some Japanese pop music, bought for fun in a department store. The record was called Blue Lights of Yokohama and was completely incomprehensible, apart from one sentence: “Blulaito Yokohama,” a “Japanized” version of the English text. After a while I knew the song by heart. During the preparations for the World Congress, the words came back to me completely. Blulaito Yokohama! The instructions from my youth were very handy while preparing for the Congress. Every time we were invited to the home of a Japanese colleague of my father, we would be warned extensively. For instance: never say that you like something, because then they have to give it to

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you. Or never shake hands with a Japanese person; Japanese don’t like physical contact. And don’t look them straight in the eye; that offends them. Remember to take one’s shoes off at the entrance and only enter wearing slippers. And especially: never call a Japanese person by his first name, as it is insulting. All these were simple instructions, which helped to prevent painful situations and were now also very helpful to remember. It was also very helpful to know that the Japanese never say directly “no.” It gives them an unpleasant feeling and, thus, they prefer to answer with a not so clear “yes” or something even more vague. When that happens, one should be warned and a bell giving an alert; during our preparatory visit, the bell ran constantly. It turned out to be terribly difficult to reach any agreements; everything was postponed or put on hold, or answered with a “maybe” or an unsure “yes.” After a while, we understood that this meant that these Japanese people were not authorized to make any decision and that everything should first be discussed with the leadership of the WPA. Also this was a typically Japanese phenomenon; every decision had to be confirmed from above. Japanese personnel working for executives could not make individual decisions; as a result, one of our associates might discuss and agree on everything in detail with our Japanese counterparts, but then, the boss would call me later that evening to go over everything once more – but now at the executive level. It was pretty tiring, because you never knew what the actual situation was and when a decision was really a decision. At the same time, it was also a very intriguing environment. We ate at small restaurants with lovely food, without having any idea what it was made of and without anybody around who could explain, because nobody spoke a word of English. Sometimes an aquarium functioned as a shop window for a restaurant, filled with life octopuses. After choosing one, it would be cut to pieces in a flash on the table right in front of you, and they would still be shivering while you let the raw pieces slide down your throat. We stayed in the Japanese “ryokans,” Japanese hotels where we were the only foreigners. Our heads could be seen above all the other guests while walking down the corridor in our kimonos, and where each morning a geisha would prepare an extensive breakfast in our rooms, completely in Japanese style. It was interesting to walk down the narrow streets in the old neighborhoods, where only a narrow Japanese van could pass and all the gas meters were hanging outside on the street, to make sure that the controller didn’t have to enter the apartments. There were vending machines in the street, from which people pulled out cold drinks in the summer and in the winter mostly the same type of cans, but this time heated. The red light district of Yokohama was also there, at the edge of

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which a whole range of restaurants were filled with Japanese who would first feed their escort ladies before succumbing to the pleasures of the flesh. We only realized this when I was sitting in such a restaurant with my wife. I saw the Japanese men watching us all the time, but I only realized what was happening when one of them showed me a wide grin and stuck up his thumb. Such an escort, in whom his petite concubine could fit at least twice, was probably something he would also like to try! Every moment of the day and at every street corner, we bumped into something extraordinary. There was the special feeling of being big and clumsy, that everything is too small. The bathrooms were made out of one piece of plastic, including floor and ceiling, and a sort of empty eggshell in which one could shower while sitting on a small stool in front of the mirror. The hotel rooms were often so small that a Westerner could hardly turn around without bumping something over. The apartments were often more reminiscent of the house of Tom Thumb than of an ordinary house as we knew it. One broker had an advertisement that really did it: there was an apartment for sale of not more than fifteen square meters, including kitchen, bathroom and bedroom – an optimal use of space. It was only in the metro stations that one’s size could be handy – I could easily see my companion in the distance with his/here head above the crowd.

A compromise seems possible The Congress in Yokohama was attended by far less psychiatrists than had participated in past Congresses. Only five thousand participants had registered, less than half of the 1996 Congress in Madrid. We had been provided a corner in the Congress center, but it was not a real “Meeting Point” for participants from Central & Eastern Europe, as we had at the World Congresses of the WPA in 1996 and 1999 and where we welcomed participants from “our” region. “Our” participants, psychiatrists from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, no longer needed any support from us and were able to find their own way. We also produced no Russian language guide for the Congress bags, as we had done before in Madrid and Hamburg. Only four interpreters had been flown in from Ukraine to translate our sessions. We had organized a number of symposia and one roll play in order to enliven the Congress. The roll play concerned a session of the Council of Ministers of the fictive post-totalitarian state Slaka, where a plan had been developed to deinstitutionalize mental health care services. The Council of Ministers had to take a decision during their session and had invited a number of experts. The Member of the European Parliament,

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John Bowis, played the role of Minister, the Bulgarian, Toma Tomov, the reformer who had developed the reform plan and Dainius Puras, from Lithuania, played an old-style hospital director who had to torpedo the plan. The hall was decorated with large red banners with slogans. The Soviets would have been proud of us. Our main purpose at the Congress was, however, to make sure that the Chinese issue would not be swept under the carpet and that a resolution would be adopted that would increase the pressure on the Chinese authorities, hopefully, leading to an end to the political abuse of psychiatry. We hoped that the fact that China had been selected to organize the Olympic Games in 2008 would be motivation for the Chinese to avoid negative publicity. It was an optimistic point of view; in the following years it became clear that negative publicity had very little influence on Chinese governmental policy and also that human rights abuses could continue more or less undisturbed without any serious consequences and negative publicity. The economic power of the country made it in a way untouchable, much different than the Soviet Union during the last ten-fifteen years of Communism, when the country was already on its last legs. On one hand, the positioning of the WPA Executive Committee was familiar to that of the past, but, at the same time, it proved to be more adult and open. At first, the issue of Chinese political abuse of psychiatry had been put as one of the last items on the agenda of the General Assembly - a repetition of what had happened in Vienna and Athens with regard to the Soviet issue. Apparently, they still hoped that the delegates would be tired by the time the item would be up for discussion and would rather go home than turn it into an issue of principle. However, when delegates protested against the agenda order, the item was moved up the agenda. However, the General Secretary of the WPA had called a limited number of delegates to a confidential meeting prior to the Assembly. The rumor was that a compromise had been presented at this meeting in order to avoid a confrontation. And there was another novelty. At the beginning of the meeting, representatives of Global Initiative were allowed to disseminate information on the political abuse of psychiatry in China freely among the delegates, among them an extensive report published in conjunction with Human Rights Watch on the eve of the Congress. The fact that we were allowed to do this and were not, as happened at in Vienna and Athens, accused of being CIA agents or representatives of the Scientology Church, showed that the WPA had become a lot more respectful to us. And even though we disagreed, that didn’t mean that we had to lambaste each other.

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When the issue was raised during the General Assembly, the exact nature of the compromise became clear. The WPA would send an investigative mission to China in order to investigate the political abuse of psychiatry. The visit should take place in the spring of 2003, in order to assure that a report could be presented during the Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, which would take place in May of that year, and the annual meeting of the British Royal College in June/July of that same year. If the Chinese obstructed or prevented such a mission, an Extraordinary General Assembly would take place to consider suspending or ending WPA membership of the Chinese member society. It looked like a perfect compromise, and was supported by a large majority. Only the British abstained from voting. We were reasonably happy with the result. The Chinese issue had not been swept under the carpet and the WPA seemed to have taken its responsibility, albeit after external pressure. The pressure on the Chinese authorities would continue. What gave a bad aftertaste, though, was the fact that the WPA Executive Committee continued to refer to the “Falun Gong issue.” It didn’t make a difference how often they heard that the political abuse of psychiatry was a far wider issue and that Falun Gong victims only formed a small part of the total number of victims, they continued to stick to this wording. In one way or another, it seemed to be in their interest to minimize the issue to one that only concerned a semi-religious movement that was often described as being strange and sectarian. Equally untrue was the statement of the WPA leadership that the organization had fought hard against the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, and that it was proud to have managed to bring the political abuse of psychiatry there to an end, but that the Chinese issue was quite different. I couldn’t remember with the best intentions in the world when the WPA had fought hard against the political abuse, but only that it had fought very hard against our campaign. Interesting how memories can be affected by the course of history. During the period following the World Congress of 2002, the WPA Executive Committee’s half-hearted attitude in Yokohama became clear: it was an omen of a long lasting policy of postponement or diversion. Of course, the investigative mission of 2003 never took place, and when eventually a visit to China did take place it was more of scientific exchange. In the meantime, the political abuse of psychiatry continued unabatedly, but the WPA didn’t seem to care. The WPA leadership continued to argue that the Chinese Psychiatric Society was a non-governmental organization and, therefore, not responsible for the policies of the government. But how nongovernmental could an organization be in a country where everything was

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controlled and directed by the Party and the State and the non-governmental sector didn’t exist out of principle? Due to a lack of funding, we could no longer continue our campaigns. National psychiatric associations showed increasingly less interest in the subject. As a result of lack of funds and frustration over the situation, we decided to stay away from the next Congress in 2005. The policy of wheeling and dealing by the WPA Executive Committee had succeeded in moving the China issue to the sideline, without much effort.

Chapter 24

Into prison Two sphinxes are standing next to each other on the banks of the River Neva, their faces turned towards each other. They look straight ahead. The riverside of the faces have decayed, not much is left but a bare skull. That side is turned towards a red brick complex of buildings on the other side of the river, a labyrinth of buildings with a Russian Orthodox Church in the middle. It is the Kresti prison in St. Petersburg, the largest pre-trial prison in Europe. It is also the prison where, in the course of time, many political prisoners waited for transportation, either to the cellars of the secret police headquarters on the other side of the two sphinxes, two streets away, or to the immense stretches of Siberia. In both cases, the final station was a probable death – in the cellars of the secret police by execution or in Siberia by hunger, exhaustion, illness or the inhuman cold. It is also the prison where the well-known Russian poetess, Anna Akhmatova, stood in line daily during the Great Terror at the end of the 1930s, bringing food for her son who had been incarcerated here, waiting for transportation to Siberia. A plaque on the wall reminds the passers-by of Akhmatova’s ordeal – her son survived camp, but she lost two husbands during Bolshevik terror.

The sphinxes of Shemiakhin on the banks of the river Neva The monument of the two sphinxes, made by the dissident artist Mikhail Shemiakhin, is one of the few monuments in Russia that commemorate the millions of victims of the terror. Located between the headquarters of the secret service in St. Petersburg, the Big House, and Kresti prison on the other side of the river, it reminds the visitor constantly

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of the other Russia that the authorities would rather forget. More and more luxurious limousines and expensive four wheel drives race past the monument, and on the banks of the river, one luxurious apartment block after the other is constructed. There were apartments in a block on the opposite side of the river from Kresti prison that were for sale for a long time. The story goes that the reason for this was that the “new Russians” who had become extremely wealthy through shady business deals didn’t want to look out at Kresti prison, of which one day they could become inhabitants. The doors are opened It was an alcoholic representative for human rights of President Putin in North-West Russia who opened the doors to Kresti prison for us in March 2002, fourteen months after Vladimir Putin had become president of Russia. The man looked like a caricature from which a tragic past was dripping. He looked at us with sad dog-eyes, his hands a bit shaky, the smell of the first vodka of the day around him like a small cloud, even though it was still early in the morning. His nose was pockmarked, reddish, and gave his face a clownish appearance. Still, his indignation was sincere, the situation in the psychiatric department of Kresti prison had really touched him. And there was reason enough for that. About three hundred fifty psychiatric patients were cramped together in small moist cells, where water was running down the walls, ventilation was absent and where, in winter, it was too cold and, in summer, too hot. Sometimes more than nine persons were locked up in one cell of two by three meters, sometimes with only six bunks. That meant sleeping in turns and twenty-three hours behind locked doors, with only one hour airing in a small courtyard that only offered a view to the sky. The stench was unbearable, food outright disgusting, prisoners were seriously neglected and when a psychosis would result in too strong reactions the prisoner concerned would be isolated and tied to a rusty metal bed frame, because medicines were unavailable. These are images that will be fixed in my mind for the rest of my life. The conversations with the prison director went unexpectedly smoothly; he had the impossible task of running an overcrowded prison without sufficient support from Moscow, and at the same time try to humanize conditions. All support was welcome, he said, and he accepted it with open arms. In the course of time, we visited his office regularly, and often the conversations were illustrated with a miniature version of the prison fixed to a sort of hatch that was inserted in the wall of his office.

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If we asked, for instance, for the location of the tuberculosis department, he would push a button, the hatch would open and there was a miniature version of Kresti prison standing in front of us. The task ahead seemed, at that time, to be an impossible one. It was clear that the psychiatric department needed a total and thorough reconstruction. There had been no renovations at the prison in more than a hundred years; the pipes were made of cast iron and rusted, sometimes with big holes that allowed excrements to go from one floor to another. The heating system barely functioned; there was no ventilation system and the showers were a green-brownish slippery cave with – thank God! – almost no lighting. In addition, the staff was totally insufficient; medicine was almost never available; and the space made it completely impossible to create any therapeutic environment.

The psychiatric department of Kresti prison, 2002 What follows were years of negotiating, sometimes without any result. This was especially true when the funds were released for the reconstruction making us wind up in a Russian split. We had the money, but we couldn’t do anything because every step forward is blocked until we “deliver.” Delivering means to pay, bribes that is. They wanted ten percent and when we refused, the project came to a standstill. The problem was

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caused by the central authorities in Moscow, rather than the authorities in St. Petersburg or our willing and slightly melancholic prison director. Moscow wanted its share and refusal meant sabotage. The secret service appeared on the horizon, offering its services, but that also had to be paid. We again turn down the offer. In the end, the real power in Russia was on our doorstep, the link between the mafia and the highest authority in Moscow. It was an unpleasant meeting, in a seedy bar in St. Petersburg with a thug-like young man, a body builder type with short hair and a golden chain around his neck, who drove up to the place in a dark-windowed BMW. He could help us, he assures us; he represents our “Russian friends,” linked to the “Institute for Law, Justice and Freedom” who want to establish “real democracy” in Russia. No worries, all will be OK, as long as we hire him to do the job. After more than twenty-five years of work in the Soviet Union and the successor states, I was used to quite a lot, but this meeting resulted in a sleepless night. It was a direct confrontation with the real power in Russia, the group that is in charge since Putin became President. It is a fusion of criminal circles with the KGB, unscrupulous, hungry for power, not hindered by moral limitations or higher ideals. Years later, on the eve of the elections in December 2007, I saw the same type of faces in the streets of Moscow. They are the “people’s volunteers” that assist the riot police in their task of keeping the keep the streets clean from democratic scum. The same faces, the same empty stare in their eyes. They were gangs of ruffians, like the ones who made the streets unsafe in Germany at the beginning of the 1930s. In one way or another we managed to wiggle out of this dilemma, thanks to a very clever and shrewd representative in Russia who knows the tricks of the authorities more than anyone else. Others support him in his struggle, silently behind the scenes, people who would like to see things develop differently and support our ideals. As in dissident times, it is sometimes better not to know the full story. Old rules return, rules from the time that the dissident movement functioned as an underground movement and information was only shared when it was really necessary. Fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union the dictatorship is back, fitted into a new modern jacket but with the same totalitarian traits. The new Russia I think back to one of my last meetings with Yuri Nuller, in late 2003 or early 2004. He was already seriously ill, dying from terminal prostrate

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cancer. We walked down the Gribodoyev Canal in St. Petersburg where he lived, a few houses down the road from the spot where the democratic parliamentarian Galina Starovoitova was assassinated in the stairway of her house, in the time when political murders were still exceptions and led to international protests. The surrounding area had been blocked off; traffic came to a standstill and agents in civilian clothes were everywhere. Suddenly a column of cars slid across the bridge like a snake, in a flash, a limousine in front and jeeps with flashing lights in the rear. “Ah,” said Nuller, “old times are back. Putin is in town, the people have had it.” Yuri Nuller (right), with GIP Board member Helmut Bieber, WPA Congress in Madrid 1996 A year before his death, Nuller bought shares in a holiday park in Spain; at least that is what he thought he did. He had earned several thousand dollars from a publication in the West, and he hoped that the money would guarantee an annual holiday for him and his wife. It turned out to be a complete scam; he could only use the facilities if he bought a plane ticket from a certain travel agency and that ticket was more expensive than a regular package tour. In desperation, Nuller called a common friend, asking for helping in solving the matter and straightening things out. With help from others, our common friend contacted a highly placed politician in St. Petersburg, hoping that he could help get the money back. “No problem,” was the answer, and after a few phone calls, an appointment was made to meet in a bar. Our friend came to the bar at the agreed moment, where a Mafioso waited for him: leather jacket, short hair, a big golden chain necklace around the bull’s neck. Our friend explained the dilemma, Nuller was in a way an ”ex-colleague,” he had also served eight years in camp, even though it was in Kolyma as a political prisoner, but still. Our friend asked the man if he could help set things straight. The answer was positive and they agreed to meet again the next day – same time, same place. And thus it happened. The next day, our bull’s neck met our friend and, without blinking, put an envelope on the table – all the money was back. Happily our friend called the highly placed politician to thank him. “Mmm, good,” the man said,

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“and how much did you get back?” “All!,” our friend said. “Interesting,” said the politician, “I would have kept half myself.” And so, along he way, we learned that the difference between the upper world and the under world was only relative and sometimes absent, that criminal interests between both worlds were sometimes a bit too connected. It didn’t make us happier or more optimistic, but it helped to create a sense of relativity that was pivotal to our project in Kresti prison. Temporary success After almost four years, we could see our temporary success: the reconstruction of the psychiatric department had been finished and the new unit could be opened. True miracles had happened. What before had been a dark, moist cave was transformed into a prison department that could have fit in a prison in Western Europe. The architects had succeeded in bringing in much more daylight, as a result of which the central part looked much nicer. The cells were dry, well heated, and the number of beds had been reduced to a maximum of four per cell. In addition, fitness equipment had been placed in the department, as well as table tennis and other games: a revolutionary development in a prison system that hadn’t changed since the beginning of the twentieth century.

The psychiatric department of Kresti after reconstruction

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This all turned out to be mostly the work of the director, a very nice man who had personally done everything to make the project a success and who had been able, in a miraculous manner, to distance himself from the repressiveness of the prison system. He increasingly offered us a view behind the scenes, so we had a better understanding of what was happening instead of what Moscow wanted us to believe. He often told us stories that other governmental officials kept to themselves, or would be ashamed of, such as the story of the new heating in the cells. The reconstruction had indeed resulted in well-heated cells, without a lot of moisture in the atmosphere. Or, rather, the heating worked perfectly, better than expected. But to the surprise of the guards, the prisoners were regularly behaving as if they were tipsy, even though there was no sign of anything being smuggled in. How was that possible? The answer came from the prisoners themselves. The director was visited by a delegation representing the prisoners, who came to thank him for the heating system. It worked mainly as a kind of distilling equipment. The prisoners would put trays on the hot radiators filled with water and the well-known Russian black bread. As a result of the heat, the mixture started to ferment and the result was a new and truly exciting drink. The prisoners were partying every day, thanks to our reconstruction! For several months, the staff of the department carried out a daytime program for the psychiatric patients seen nowhere else in Russia. Prisoners were taken out of the cell in small groups, played table tennis, exercised on the fitness equipment or played chess at the tables in the center court between the cells. A truly humane department had been created within a terrible repressive prison system. It seemed our project had finally succeeded. Soviet times return Unfortunately, Russia wound up increasingly in dictatorial waters. It is different than before, adapted to time and current realities. It is like a Russian version of the Chinese model, whereby an individual can do whatever he/she wants in an economic respect as long as the individual stays out of politics. In Russia, it is a bit more “sophisticated.” A person can say whatever he/she wants, as long as nobody listens. A person can earn as much money as he/she wants, as long as certain areas of interest or lines of work are avoided. If a political following increases above a certain line, the authorities will intervene, and the movement is ruthlessly crushed by the almighty State apparatus. The same happens if one becomes rich in business

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areas that belong to the monopoly of those in power, such as oil and gas. If one tries to combine these two, like tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovski, there will be dire results. He was sentenced to eight years and has all the time of the world in his camp in Chita to think about his mistake. In the past, the KGB was the “armed branch” of the Communist Party. Now it is the Party itself. The colorless second-rate KGB officer Vladimir Putin managed to turn the country during eight years of rule into a KGB state, whereby all the power is in the hands of his trustees and he feels so strong that he doesn’t even have to promote a KGB-officer to be the next President. A puppet is enough, because all other important positions have already been taken by people whom he fully trusts. All of these individuals are, of course, coming from the KGB, and all have major interests in oil, gas, the weapons industry, banking and a number of other key industries. They govern the country, they own it, and, just like in Soviet times, Western observers are busy trying to understand the inner politics of the Kremlin. In the past, the issue was who would be standing next to Brezhnev on the Lenin mausoleum during the November 7 parade, and in which sequence; now the economic positions and interests are compared and weighted. This political demise to a KGB State had immediate consequences for the Kresti project. The project was directed towards attitudinal change, and exactly in the opposite direction as current Russian politics. We work for humanization, i.e., dealing with prisoners with mental health problems as human beings, with the first consideration being given to the person as a patient and only after that as prisoner. The system wants to see him, however, as a criminal, as somebody who needs to be taught a lesson. The prisoner who is ill is usually seen as being a simulator. And the worst simulator is the prisoner who pretends he had a mental illness. He is dealt with doubly harshly, and is often locked up under more inhumane circumstances than the main prison population. Change in leadership of the penitentiary system in St. Petersburg endangered the project even more. Although the new director was generally considered to be a reformer, and our experiences with him before his transfer to St. Petersburg had been positive, the wind now turned to be blowing from the opposite direction. The change was probably the result of two factors: orders from Moscow to straighten things out and the natural reaction of someone in a repressive state to create fear and show that he is the boss. Thus, one innovation after the other was reversed. Parcels for prisoners now had to be searched one hundred percent, whereby fruit was cut open, cigarettes were broken in two, and everything subsequently dumped in a

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plastic bag. Both fruit and cigarettes were thus rendered useless, resulting, of course, in anger and frustration among the prisoners. They organized a mutiny, which met with massive force. That is how they got to know the new boss and the message that they shouldn’t mess around with him. It is a primitive and often used ritual, but the effects were immediately felt: fear reigns and without permission from above, nothing is possible anymore. The new attitude also affected our project. This came in the form of one of the patients, a champion fighter, a bruiser, but with the mental level of a child. This patient had a brute force inside him. While a child has a tantrum and lies on the floor kicking when he is angry, this champion fighter beat everything up. It is the only way he knew to respond. Why he was put in the department one can only wonder, but the authorities clearly didn’t understand how to deal with him. He kicked holes in the walls of the airing spaces and guards were afraid to come near him. In fact, the guards triggered his anger with their repressive behavior, and so he reacted as expected and hit at anything around him, destroying anything that is near. As a result, the fitness equipment was taken away and the day program was stopped, allegedly the fault of this patient. It looked like a well-prepared plan, the man was used as a pretext to “sell” us the restoration of the old order. We negotiated to have the equipment returned and the day program restarted. With the bruiser, things are ok in the presence of the psychiatrist since she knew how to deal with him. But when she fell ill, the system intervened. The riot police were called in, the boy was beaten up and locked up in a cell without windows or light, more dead than alive. It looked as though our reform program had ended. But after a while the day program resumed. This cycle was repeated several times: when a crisis happened, the day program would end, and when resumed, it would be in a more limited form. Thus, the results were gradually minimized. The reason for this position is the fact that we worked for attitudinal change and this was the last thing the Russian penitentiary system was interested in. They wanted new buildings with the same repressive system; we wanted a change towards a humane approach, directed towards combining punishment with a program to help prisoners reintegrate into society. They were almost opposite positions that were illustrative of the tension between the new Russian government policies and the attempts to convince Russia to take human rights more seriously and become a civil society.

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This was our dilemma. Should we try at all cost to do something for the prisoners, or do we have to give up and accept the notion that Russia has slid back into old habits to such an extent that it is impossible to hope that the prison system will eventually become more humane? Did we have to accept that a democratic Russia had for the time being become a fata morgana again? Maybe the Russian authorities will provide the answer to this dilemma themselves. During the last years of Putin’s reign, the screws were tightened further and the old Cold War rhetoric returned. In 2006-2007, nongovernmental organizations were restricted and a large number of Western human rights organizations in Russia were prevented from continuing their work. It all happened under the pretext of stricter control of illegal practices or for not paying taxes, but the goal of the campaign was clear: Western organizations were suspicious, they hindered the Russian government in carrying out their policies and were used knowingly or unknowingly by Western intelligence agencies. After the British Council was branded an undesirable agency in 2007 and forced to close its offices in various Russian cities, the MATRA program of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs was the next focus of attention. Already in 2007, associates of the MATRA program were followed by the FSB in Russia and meetings with MATRA recipients were made impossible. In the spring of 2008, they went one step further when MATRA was descried in the Russian media as a front for Western intelligence agencies, which as a wolf in sheepskin tried to undermine government policy. When reading the article, I had some misplaced nostalgic feelings, as if I were suddenly back in Soviet times. From my bookshelves, I pulled a propaganda publication from the 1980s, in which the author raved against the dissident movement and its Western supporters. The essence, the use of language and especially the combination of subtle and harsh accusations was as if the intermediate twenty years had disappeared into thin air with just one breeze.

Chapter 25

Becoming Lithuanian Looking back, it is much easier to understand historical developments or their origins than when one is in the eye of the storm. Wars can be much easier explained from a historical perspective, and sometimes, one feels the frustration in asking why nobody saw it coming and didn’t have the guts or brains to stop it when it was still possible. The RussianGeorgian war in the summer of 2008 is a good example of this predicament. Although one can easily understand the anger on the Georgian side over the arrogance and power games of the Russian state during Putin’s times, the strike on Southern Ossetia by Mikhail Saakashvili was probably the least clever move he could have made. This move resulted in a major defeat and enormous suffering for the population on both sides of the front line. And unfortunately, the Russian authorities walked away smiling, and the strength of the least democratic factions in the Russian government was greatly enhanced. My link with Lithuania dates back many years, to my secondary school period, although, of course, I had no idea then how closely my life would eventually become interlinked with that of this small country on the coast of the Baltic Sea. Possibly, I was attracted to Lithuania because of its continued struggle against Soviet occupation and its refusal to give up even though all odds were against it. Only a few countries refused to recognize the occupation of the Baltic countries by the Soviet Union, and The Netherlands happened to be one of them. Whether this continued resistance against Soviet oppression was the real reason is now hard to retrace, but it is a fact that I chose modern Lithuanian history as the theme for a short paper I had to write for history class. I found a book in the public library titled “…And Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania?”, written by a Swiss teacher, Hans Rychener, who traveled through the Baltics in the 1930s and described his experiences. The book was interesting enough for me to keep, and I decided to report it missing at the library and to pay the ensuing fine. It still looks at me from my bookshelves. After moving to Amsterdam and starting my studies of modern history, my interest in Lithuania continued. Why Lithuania, and not Estonia or Latvia? I don’t really know. Possible, it was because the Lithuanians resisted Soviet occupation most, with “forest brothers” fighting the Red Army well into the 1950s. I admired them, the Lithuanians seemed to have had the guts to say “no” and refuse to collaborate. I bought the book “Lithuania 700 years” by Albertas Gerutis, a Lithuanian serving as representative of independent Lithuania in Switzerland. The book described

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the Lithuanian nation as one that heroically defended its homeland against foreign intruders and occupying forces yet also had an intriguing history as one of the strongest powers in Europe in the Middle Ages. It was an upbeat version of its history, written with the clear purpose of gathering support for its cause. This was not so strange, since the author was one of the few remaining Lithuanian diplomats abroad, and the person who kept the legation in Switzerland going with virtually no funds available. First encounters with Lithuania During my first trip to New York, some time in 1980, I visited the Lithuanian general consulate there, one of the few remaining diplomatic missions of independent Lithuania. It was an extraordinary experience. The representative of Lithuania was an elderly man, probably already in his eighties, with a secretary who was at least as old as he was and who shuffled around the office while finding balance by keeping one hand on the surrounding furniture, serving coffee with shaking hands and trying to find papers that were gathering dust in the cupboards. Together they tried to maintain a ‘business as usual’ attitude to the changing world around them. Every morning, he would open his office, unroll the Lithuanian flag above the street in Upper Manhattan where they were located, and wait for what the day would bring. Lithuania was still recognized as an independent state by the US government, although, of course, the role of this consulate had become nothing more than symbolic. I was shown piles of photographs of Lithuania the way it was before Soviet occupation. They took all the time for me, nothing else to do anyway. The atmosphere of days gone by and watching their outdated photos evoked a feeling of sadness, not only with the representative and his secretary themselves but also with me, because there was no indication whatsoever that Lithuania would ever become independent again. I also felt this sense of standing with one foot in the past and the other in emptiness when visiting other Lithuanian émigré organizations, such as the ‘Lithuanian Catholic Religious Aid’ in Brooklyn. When there, I received copies of the Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania; I only later found out that this was one of the longest existing and best samizdat publications in the Soviet Union. During the mid-1980s, when most samizdat publications in Moscow had ceased to exist, the only remaining one was a thin listing of repressive measures by the Soviet authorities collected in what was called Bulletin V. I often thought about the Lithuanian Chronicle with a mixed feeling of jealousy and admiration. Somehow, these Lithuanians did not only continue to have good sausages (as all my dissidents friends hastened to tell me), but also real samizdat.

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Lithuania remained within my focus of interest while working at the Bukovsky Foundation in Amsterdam. One of the people that frequented the office of the Foundation was an old Lithuanian Jewish journalist, Isaak Kaplanas from Vilnius. He missed his country dearly yet, at the same time, showed some of the complexities that surround Lithuanian history in the twentieth century. He had been a socialist before the war and indicated with a sense of shame that he had worked with Lithuanian radio in Moscow during the war, after he had managed to flee Lithuania in 1941 in advance of the Nazi-German troops. He returned in 1944, but was arrested in 1948 and accused of having been a spy for a number of foreign intelligence agencies, including the Argentinean one (as if that country had a reason to spy on the Soviet Union!). He was sentenced to fifteen years and spent seven years in the Gulag. In 1955, he returned to his family, after which he continued to work as a journalist until his emigration in 1976. Eventually he settled in Amsterdam where he visited our offices regularly. He loved to talk, sometimes for hours, but he never dwelled on what really had happened to Lithuanian Jewry, maybe because he felt that he had collaborated with the Soviet regime and, thus, somehow lost his right to complain. He wrote poetry, long poems in which he expressed his love for Lithuania. Looking back, I am sorry I never took the time to really sit down with him and talk about his past. Kaplanas was delighted when we organized an exhibition on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which has laid the grounds for the division of Eastern Europe between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and the subsequent occupation of the Baltic countries. He shared our anger when one of the leading Dutch newspapers refused to publish an article on the Baltic countries “because they are a matter of the past.” Less than a decade later, they were independent countries again, but Kaplanas did not live to Isaak Kaplanas, 1983 see that day. Over the years, Lithuania or Lithuanians crossed my path; yet, I never felt the urge to fly to Vilnius instead of Moscow. The reason was not disinterest in Vilnius, but, in reality, no other city existed because most of my friends were in Moscow. I didn’t even travel to Vilnius at the beginning of the 1990s when the Second World Center organized shipments of humanitarian aid to Lithuania and set up training programs for young journalists in order

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to help establish a free press in the country. It took until the end of the 1990s before I went myself, when the country had already recovered from the severe economic crisis that followed its independence and the first steps towards European integration had already been made. Still, the atmosphere was clearly post-Soviet, with only a few bars open, Western-style shops and supermarkets being an exception and not the rule. Many buildings in the old town were still dilapidated or not more than ruins. The city reminded me of Prague just after the Velvet Revolution, when I participated in the earlier mentioned victorious congress of the anti-Communist movement ‘Resistance International’ in January 1990. That congress brought together dissidents from all over Eastern Europe, discussing how to end Soviet rule in the countries that were still under Communist dictatorship, including the USSR itself. During the evenings we would carry computers from one hotel to the next, equipment for the dissident movement to be taken back to be used for the free press and independent publications. The town was still empty of flashing advertisements, with yellowish streetlights and cobblestones, buildings with fading colors and broken stucco, free from Communism but not yet occupied by Western commercial trash and tourists. Vilnius had this wonderful combination, a beauty that one would like to retain forever but which was bound to be obliterated by the influx of Western businesses welcomed by a population eagerly trying to regain its connection to the European heartland. Vilnius becomes home Soon my life changed dramatically. I fell in love with a Lithuanian and was soon shuttling back and forth to Vilnius. At first, I had to find pretexts, conferences or meetings that I could not miss, but, after a first turbulent year, the relationship became more or less official and, thus, the need to find pretexts disappeared. Life settled down, as much as was possible because my work and young children from my first marriage forced me shuttle between Amsterdam and Vilnius by plane. It was a hectic life, but the excitement of becoming part of a new environment and community made up for the hassle and complications. Initially we rented a place to live in Vilnius, but, after several years, we found an apartment at the edge of the old town, which we bought and renovated as our home. Lithuania was an exciting country; it was moving rapidly away from Soviet times and tried to link up to Europe and the European Union as much as possible. On a national level, progress was not as fast, due to the fact that the former communists somehow managed to be part of every coalition. However, in Vilnius itself, the young mayor, Arturas Zuokas,

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seemed to stimulate innovation, progress and unusual initiatives. Of course, he fared well by cutting deals with all kinds of businessmen or investment groups, but his enthusiasm, unorthodox approaches and his keen desire to put Vilnius on the international map made up for many of his vices. Only later did it become clear that he, too, was mostly a cynical politician who knew how to play the game; but, even in that sense, he was closer to being a standard type of politician than a post-communist dinosaur. Being there more often and for extended periods also resulted in glimpses of less pleasant aspects of the country and its past. Being a Sovietologist by education who spent the larger art of his life in fighting the Soviet system, actually living in Lithuania and becoming part of its society evoked a double feeling. On one hand, it was the country that, in a way, triggered the collapse of the Soviet Union by declaring independence in 1990. The way they recognized and commemorated the effects of Soviet terror pleased me and evoked a lot of positive feelings. I felt a deep connection and was finally at ease, living in a country that had been part of the system that I battled most of my life and that stood out as one that had taken the first steps to topple the Soviet regime. I visited the KGB museum in Vilnius, where many political prisoners spent time in custody after their arrest or during their investigation. Victims of Soviet repression are commemorated there by having the names of persons tortured and killed in the cellars carved in blocks of granite that form the walls of the ground floor of the building. I read books by former prisoners and deportees to Siberia, and listened to the stories of the family into which I had married who had suffered heavily as a result of Soviet repression. It was the closest I could get to feeling how destructive Soviet rule had been. At the same time, the continuation of Soviet mentality in Lithuania irritated me, as if the upper layer was scratched away but the main part remained unaltered. Behavior and attitudes, in particular among authorities and civil servants, drove me wild and reminded me almost daily of the system I tried to help bring to an end. I realized it would take two generations to get rid of this consequence; but realizing it is one thing and living with it quite something else. However, soon I noticed another unpleasant aspect of Lithuanian life, that of latent anti-Semitism. It was at a Sunday party during my first Lithuanian summer, with friends of friends, where a man started explaining to me that all the problems in Lithuania of the day were the result of Jews. He equated Jews with Communists and, in his view, they had been the ones who had caused the 50-year occupation of the country. I was flabbergasted.

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I knew that, in Eastern Europe, a negative attitude towards Jews persisted because of their ability to find ways to survive and even prosper under adverse circumstances, yet this was a form of outright anti-Semitism that was quite new for me. I became angry, said that it was absolute nonsense and that I didn’t want to hear of it and that was the end of our conversation and any future contact. Yet gradually I started to understand that a latent anti-Semitism remained part of Lithuanian psychology; that a bit too often half-joking remarks were made and that, indeed, there was some reason for concern. At the same time, I also sensed that many Lithuanians, in fact, knew quite well what had happened during Nazi-occupation when the way of dealing with their Jewish compatriots had not really been “up to acceptable standards,” but that they preferred to keep silent. They knew, but wouldn’t discuss it. Rather pretend than face the truth, the horrible truth. Changing perceptions So much happened in my Lithuanian life that I hardly had time to sit back and digest. I was active in developing modern mental health care services, in supporting the transition to a civil society and in connecting the country to the rest of Europe. I was full of plans and ideas, too many to implement, and this enthusiasm formed a nice buffer against dealing with less pleasant issues. I was granted Lithuanian citizenship, and, in a way, I felt that finally I found my home in Eastern Europe where my own history and psychological needs could merge with that of the environment that surrounded me. In 2004, Lithuania joined NATO and the European Union, my wife and I got married and we moved to our new flat on the edge of the old town. It was truly a milestone in my life, maybe more than I envisaged at that moment, because although my private life nicely found its track, the country itself started to tilt back to its old ways and habits. After accession to the European Union, the developments in the country slowed down and eventually came to a standstill. Honest, hardworking and intelligent politicians were moved to the sideline and much of the innovation that we had managed to bring about in mental health was questioned, halted and then reversed. And mental health was only a small indicator of what was happening all across the political scene. By 2007, the country had become ossified, a painful reminder that only the upper layer of Sovietism had been removed and that the rest remained virtually unaltered. A country ruled by a government that would have nicely fit on the pack of portraits produced by the Soviet Politburo.

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Decree by President Adamkus providing Lithuanian citizenship to the author

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And again, I noticed that people that I met both in the course of my work and in my private life knew, saw and experienced much more than they outwardly showed, yet many of them preferred not to discuss it openly. Most were keen not to show their anger and discontent but rather sulk and suffer in silence. Some people left the country and decided to invest their energy elsewhere, often with better returns. Others became increasingly commercial and gave up the charitable work we had been carrying out. The number of people who decided to stick around, continue the struggle against all odds and refuse to become cynical could be counted with the fingers on two hands. As happens so often, it was an external factor that opened my eyes to reality. Collaboration with a colleague from South Africa, whose ancestors came from Lithuania, opened up the story of Jewry in twentieth century Lithuania. Looking back, I realize that when I was telling colleagues, family and friends upbeat stories about life in Lithuania as a country in transition, quite a few people made remarks about Lithuania’s troubled past, in particular, with regard to the fate of its Jewish population. And although I have always been immersed in knowing more about the Holocaust and remembering these black pages of history in every detail, in this case the remarks or comments somehow didn’t reach me. Even if they did, it stuck to the surface and never got under my skin. Subconsciously I preferred not to know. That changed altogether when I received the memoirs of my colleague’s ancestors, in which they described daily life in a Jewish Lithuanian shtetl less than ten years before it was abruptly and violently brought to an end. I read the memoirs once, twice, and once again, and I was figuratively speaking “grabbed by the throat.” There was no way I could avoid digging deeper, reading more, and finding out as much as possible about what actually happened from 1941 to 1944. Only then did I realize that from our apartment we looked out right at the place where one of the entrances to the Jewish ghetto had been, and also at the spot where, in 1941, the ghetto inhabitants erected a monument with an “eternal flame” to honor those who had been killed by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators. I also found out that friends were living in the same apartment building where the author of one of the famous diaries of the Vilno ghetto, Herman Kruk, had been living before he was forced to move to the ghetto. I knew we were living close to the formerly Jewish quarter of the city, but I didn’t realize that it was that close. The stones, streets, and houses started to speak to me; it all came gradually to life. It was a moving experience.

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New relationship What I read had not made me happy. It challenged my affection for the country that I started to consider my own. Yet, at the same time, I am grateful that a process was set in motion. I understood not only that my friends and colleagues had been right when they made remarks about the negative role of Lithuanians in the extermination of their Jewish compatriots, but also that things had actually been far worse than they knew or could imagine. It took away this naïve black-and-white image of courageous motherland-loving Lithuanians fighting foreign invaders trying to quell Lithuanian national identity. Instead it opened the doors to a more honest picture; I started to understand the complex mosaic of emotions, convictions and allegiances of a nation that continuously had to choose between stronger neighboring countries, and made some serious mistakes in doing so. Learning more about this history helped me to better understand - and maybe accept - the all-pervasive minority complex that so many Lithuanians possess - their almost automatic tendency of selfvictimization where they use their history as victims as an excuse for crimes and misbehavior. I cannot say that my relationship with Lithuania remained unchanged. It became more honest, less idealistic, and hence more in line with everyday reality. I felt disgust and anger; yet, at the same time, I felt a deep sense of compassion for this country that went through such turbulent times. It helped me realize that civil society in Lithuania has still a long way to go and that the transition process has only just begun. It also made me understand that only when the country finally acknowledges its past and learns to deal with it openly and honestly, can the chapter can be closed and the history can find itself a place in the national conscience.

Chapter 26

Reforming against the wind At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the speed is gone from the reform process in mental health in Eastern Europe. The old Soviet professors of psychiatry have recovered from the shock, and have gradually regained their control. Some lost part of their positions as well as the Communist safety net around them, but it turns out that much continues as before. The civil servants in the Ministries are often still the same, reform plans by Ministers and politicians are cleverly neutralized and shelved. The non-governmental organizations, once a new and, at first, threatening phenomenon, turned out to have only limited influence. It is business as usual, combined with new possibilities. The fall of the Wall and the development of a raw form of capitalism opened the doors to the pharmaceutical industry. Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were potentially a huge market with almost half a billion potential clients. And that market was wide open. The Soviet Union was especially undiscovered territory, where medicines like haloperidol, aminazine and sulphozine were the most widely used medications. The region held interest for other purposes as well. Testing new drugs in the West was heavily regulated, and even though the regulations also applied to these countries, the possibility of adjusting or circumventing these rules was incomparable. Take an issue like “informed consent,” where patients were to give permission after having been fully informed. What kind of value does this have when a citizen has learned from birth that he should not think for himself and just follow orders and do as being told? And if, in such a situation, a psychiatrist says that sulphozine is good for you, who is he to doubt this? And so he is “informed” and automatically agrees to give his “consent.” And how many possibilities does a person in prison or one of the camps of the modern Gulag have to refuse, or to question, when he is selected for participation in a drug trial? Does he have the freedom to refuse to participate? It took some time, but already in the middle of the 1990s the first pharmaceuticals arrived. At first it was only a handful. We tried to convince the pharmaceutical companies to invest in our work, to donate funds to the reform of the system. Our psychiatrists, we told them, are the future of their respective countries; they will be in power some time in the future. Invest in them now and they will work with you in the future. And their support would have been very welcome: books had to be printed, journals had to

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be published, and we needed funds for training activities. But in one way or another, our message seemed to be ignored; we didn’t manage to hit the right note. We doubted, analyzed what we did wrong, but we couldn’t find an explanation. Then we noticed that, in fact, they did invest, but purposely not in us or others who tried to bring about change. Their investment was in the old guard, in those who did their best to frustrate our efforts and make sure that everything stayed the same. Those were their allies. Those psychiatric elite did exactly what the pharmaceutical companies wanted. They didn’t organize meetings on medical ethics and weren’t proponents of careful and balanced use of drugs. These were people who were part of the psychiatry that in the past dosaged maximally, who turned their patients gradually into robots or vegetating organisms. They had no problem accepting their pills. In 2002, we organized a conference on corporate sponsorship in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. Naturally, the meeting was about funding from the pharmaceutical industry. All the participants agreed that this should be dealt with, that there should be rules that would limit the influence of the pharmaceutical industry because, in many countries, things had already gone wrong. The training of psychiatrists was sponsored by the pharmaceuticals companies and the conferences were dominated by advertisements of the industry. Psychiatric journals had been degraded to packs of advertisements, followed by so-called scientific articles that explained why the advertised medication was the best since the invention of sliced bread. Participation in international conferences was also financed by the pharmaceutical industry; invitees were expected to participate in certain symposia where the drugs of the inviting firm were pushed. It was a nicely regulated circus, in which step by step the brains of the participating psychiatrists were being washed. One of the speakers in the Vilnius meeting held a long and passionate speech in which he confirmed the need to have rules, and of an ethical code issued by psychiatric associations. The president of the psychiatric association in his country fully agreed. However, the next day the health newspaper published a large advertisement of one of the pharmaceutical firms. A photo of our speaker of the day before was published next to it, praising the advertised drug. And the chairman of the psychiatric association mentioned above did absolutely nothing; the association never adopted an ethical code. Maybe we didn’t fully understand to what extent the old guard had spun a protective net around them. In our enthusiasm and optimism,

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we thought that the change was unstoppable and irreversible. “Time is on my side” is the title of a well-known song by the Rolling Stones, and, with that in the back of our minds, we felt strong. It was the dazzle of victory of the first years after the fall of the Soviet regime. We thought that everything would be different, the Morozovs and Vartanyans would be gone, along with others who furthered the sophisticated system of political abuse of psychiatry. Those very psychiatrists kept the contacts with the outside world to themselves, while, in the meantime, keeping the bulk of Soviet psychiatrists completely ignorant of what was going on Georgi Morozov (r.) with Finish psychiatrist Kalle Achte, April 1985 outside the country. But it turned out not to be that easy. For many years, the old leaders in Moscow kept silent, but slowly the old life returned. The former director of the Serbski Institute, Georgi Morozov, came to his office every day and remained in charge behind the scenes. When he turned 85 years old and was officially congratulated by President Putin, there couldn’t have been a clearer signal. And everywhere on the territory of the former Soviet Union the old professors stayed in power, continued lecturing on the basis of the old manuals of the Moscow School or their own products, and by doing so prolonged the gap between their psychiatry and world psychiatry. During the first ten years, we managed to a considerable degree to resist the influence of the pharmaceutical industry and the hardheadedness of the old guard. We organized our own seminars, published our own books, and initiated our own projects in almost all of the countries of the region. And for a while we even sponsored annual congresses of national psychiatric associations. But when the West got the impression that Communism was now really a matter of the past and that Eastern European countries had gradually changed into civil societies, the foundations started leaving the region one by one. As for Russia, nobody wanted to give money to projects in that country. Russia was at first a black hole, where nothing was possible, and then suddenly it was rich enough, so why should others give money? Gradually the balance shifted, and we found ourselves on the defensive. This was especially true when the larger funds from the European

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Commission arrived, because the bureaucrats in Eastern Europe were better equipped than anybody else to deal with the bureaucratic rules from Brussels. They knew exactly how they could manipulate the situation to such an extent that the majority of the funds found their way to the people of their choice, either directly or via fake organizations that were nongovernmental on paper but were in fact run by those same bureaucrats. In addition, the countries themselves became gradually stronger economically and had money to spend. Thus, for example, in Lithuania, millions of euros were spent renovating social care homes, where chronic mental patients and persons with mental handicaps were spending their days far outside the cities and towns.

Global Initiative on Psychiatry, 2005 Soon it will be twenty years since the Berlin Wall came down, and the biggest problem of Eastern European mental health care is still unsolved. Hundreds of thousands of people are confined to these social care homes for the rest of their lives, often under miserable circumstances, without any chance of participating in society. The Western press regularly reports on fires in a “nursing home” in which several people were killed. It sounds so nice, so caring. But these are not nursing homes; it is a euphemism for something that is often no different than a prison. Even if millions of euros are spent on renovations, as happened in Lithuania, it doesn’t alter the basic fact that these people are denied the right to participate in society. Some time ago we visited one of these institutions in the north of Lithuania. We were shown around and the director proudly explained how the living conditions had improved. They even built a swimming pool and a sports hall with training equipment. It looked beautiful. But how was this financed? The answer was quite simple. The more than three hundred

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inhabitants were put under guardianship and their guardian, their collective father, was coincidentally the director of the institution. The guardian received all the social security payments for his three hundred “children” in a separate bank account to which only he had access. The social security payments of the three hundred inhabitants had accumulated for a while and together this large sum of money was enough to pay for a brand-new swimming pool. The director was very proud, and couldn’t understand why we were concerned. But we had no choice but to hope that the director would be decent enough to allow his patients to make use of the pool, and not to reserve it for the staff. How often does it happen that these facilities are only used by the staff of the institution? It is one of the most painful inheritances of the socialist society. Because of the concept that only a productive human being has the right to a place in society, all others were removed and ostracized. That counted for the physically disabled, but also for persons who were mentally handicapped or chronic psychiatric patients. As a result, society never saw these people; they just didn’t exist. Is it then strange that society doesn’t want them back, that people are afraid to have a person with a mental illness as their neighbor? This attitude will take many years to reverse, possible decades. It is not a matter of money, but of changing attitudes, creating understanding for fellow human beings who may look a bit different than others. That is only possible when people really want this change, not only Ministers or average citizens, but also the civil servants who guide the implementation of this policy, the local authorities who must assure continuity, the managers who have to be prepared to change their style of leadership, and also the people in the work force who have to be open to change. If any one of these groups refuses to change, it fails. In one of the countries where we work, a couple of years ago, we opened a day center for psycho-social rehabilitation, where people are being supported to become - or remain - part of society. The center is located in one half of a building; in the other half is a policlinic, an institution where people come for consultation and to get their medication. Many of the people go first to the policlinic to get their pills, and then continue to the neighbors, the day center. Luckily both parts of the building are connected with a door. This is the beginning of a chain of services: the door can be opened and the patients can go to one part of the building to the other! Isn’t it wonderful?

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Here we made a mistake. The door was locked and, in response to our suggestion to open it, came the very simple but effective reaction that the key was lost. We somehow didn’t get the point and pressed further. When the key was found, the door was still not opened. “Why not?” we asked. “Because there is a cupboard standing in front of it,” was the answer. And when we suggested that the cupboard could be put somewhere else it turned out that also a plant was in the way. And then… The door is still closed. The door is a symbol to the division between old and new, between the past and the present, between change and conservatism. The door is a symbol of the fear of change.

Chapter 27

Looking back It was winter, the end of 2007. We had an appointment in the region of Kaliningrad, formerly Eastern Prussia and now a Russian enclave stuck between the two European Union countries, Poland and Lithuania. In order to be able to return the same day to Vilnius we agreed to meet just across the border in the first Russian town on the other side, Nesterov. Even though the traffic was not dense, it took a long time before we could cross the border. One way or another, the Russian custom officers were increasingly fussy. This time there was a problem with the car. It was still in the name of Geneva Initiative on Psychiatry, but the letter authorizing us to take the car into Russia is printed on Global Initiative stationary. The fact that the name was splashed in big letters on the sides of the car, and that I signed the document myself, didn’t make any difference: it didn’t correspond and the customs officer didn’t want to let us through. Eventually, it was the head of the border station who personally gave us permission to continue our journey. Just across the border, we stopped at a petrol station for a sanitary stop. I went inside and asked the girl behind the counter whether they have a toilet. She looked at me with an empty stare. I repeated my question. She continued to look at me with a blank expression and shrugged her shoulders. Did she care that I was looking for a toilet? Did she have a reason for not showing me the toilet? We finally found a little restaurant in Nesterov, a dead border town with an occasional remaining German farm from before the war and, for the rest, typical Soviet concrete structures built after 1945. It was called “Historical Events,” a very fitting name. Inside it was a kind of canteen, with, on one side, metal bars that separate the kitchen from the dining area and makes it look like the dining area in a prison department. The menu was written by hand, the choice was rather limited. Through a low window between the bars, we placed our orders with the waitress and, after a while, our plates were dumped on our table without much ceremony. Long live Russia, but it was as if we traveled back in time, back to the end of the 1980s when the first private restaurants appeared. For a day, we were back in the Soviet Union. The next day, I drove to the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius. The city has changed a lot over the past years. The beautiful historical buildings and churches have been restored; a completely new center with high-rise

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buildings has appeared on the bank of the river. The shops were full, and just like elsewhere in Europe, it was winter sale. I committed a traffic offense and was pulled over by the police. After they asked for my papers, I must join them in their car and was asked to take a seat in the back, while they wrote out my ticket. They saw that I had a Dutch driving license, an oldfashioned format that looks like a scrap of paper. They started laughing and one of them started up a conversation in English. He wanted to know what I was doing in Vilnius, how long I have been living there and whether I liked the city. His English was fluent, it was actually the first time I had met an English-speaking policeman in Lithuania. He noticed that I was rushed and apologized for the fact that two more forms needed to be completed. “We can also solve it in a different manner,” he says. “How then?” I ask. “Well, by giving us a contribution for a bottle of alcohol.” The message is clear, they suggested settling this illegally. I put my note of fifty litas in the tray between them. We said goodbye, I returned to my car and continued my trip. Both parties were satisfied. I was able to continue quickly and they had their money. And I had another taste of the new Lithuania: a friendly English-speaking policeman using the old way of buying my way out of traffic tickets. A new face, but old habits. These are just a few examples, and there are hundreds of them. What is important is that the region has changed enormously in many ways, and, at the same time, it has not. Superficially the countries have modernized one by one, but, under the surface, a lot of the old structures and ways of dealing with things have remained unaltered. For one country, it is more so than in others. By now I have been in Lithuania on and off for nine years, and I have been officially a citizen of that country for more than five years. I might be living in Vilnius part time, but, emotionally, I am there every day. And day after day, I have seen the country change. I have also seen how many of the changes are only superficial, and how old power structures are able to maintain themselves and, in some cases, increase their influence, in spite of the process of change. In particular, stagnation is noticeable since the country joined the European Union. When I came to Lithuania for the first time in 2000 the country was, in many respects, ahead of the others in the region. Although Vilnius was a relatively small city with a provincial appearance, at the same time, it had an enormous potential because of its beauty. And on top of that it had a cosmopolitan atmosphere. The population was a mixture of

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Lithuanians, Russians and Poles, who lived next to each other quietly and without noticeable nationalist troubles. While the Estonians were reluctant to speak Russian and often pretended that they didn’t know the language, Russian was no problem in Lithuania. A cozy atmosphere, it seemed, and a population that was less closed and less Scandinavian than their Latvian and Estonian neighbors to the north. Lithuanians are a proud people, proud of their history and also proud of their constant resistance to foreign oppressors. In Soviet times, it was the underground Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church that was published in samizdat till the collapse of the regime; the Lithuanians were the first to dare to declare themselves independent in 1990, and managed to hold on in spite of strong pressure, an economic blockade and military action by Gorbachev. In order to prevent a storming of the parliamentary building, they put huge concrete blocks around the building; part of that blockage is still visible in the form of a monument. Since the country joined the European Union, these blocks especially seem more a blockade against further Europeanization of the country. The country has been going through a crisis that could best be described as a depression for quite a few years. This depression started with a populist movement led by the gherkin tycoon Vladimir Uspaskikh, who combined shady economic and political ties with Moscow with the language of the underbelly of the nation. That underbelly is frustrated and angry because the new wealth in cities such as Vilnius, Kaunas, and Klaipeda is, to a large degree, not reaching them. In the provinces, there is deep poverty along with serious and widespread alcohol abuse, and a disproportional percentage of elderly. More than half of the population in rural areas is over 65 years of age; the young adults have moved away to the cities and abroad. A brain drain of highly educated people has started because they can earn much higher wages abroad than in their own country. Lithuania is emptying at high speed; in Ireland alone more than 24,000 Lithuanians are registered, and probably at least as many are working there without any registration. Since the country became independent, more than half a million of its citizens has emigrated officially - that means 20% of the population. A shocking number. The blossoming of the movement of Uspaskikh was short lived, but his place in the political arena was almost silently taken over by a coalition without a face and without a vision, and with only one “purpose” – to make sure that nothing changes. Since, the country has been ruled by a government of one-dimensional Soviet portraits, supported by the ministerial

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bureaucracies that have actively resisted change for twenty years and now see this position supported from above. It is a political development that is also visible in many of the other new countries in the European Union. The countries have been guided into the EU at high speed, and now that the booty has been collected, the country falls back into apathy, in maintenance of the existing interests and of fixed power structures. Looking at daily life, it seems that the process of change has silted up in good yet unrealistic intentions, old power structures, invisible networks of interests, deep political disinterest among the general population and, last but not least, the immigration of exactly that slice of the population that should push for changes in society. It is a sad recognition that offers little hope for the future. Even the first post-Soviet generation does not provide a solution. Contrary to their parents their interest in politics is almost zero; they have no political vision or interests and are only going for material gains. Even interest in the recent past is absent; there is no interest in the Soviet era that still dominates a large part of daily life. It is as if they don’t want to be confronted with what happened, as if it doesn’t concern them. Maybe the past is too painful, too raw. Better not to know, than to have to give it a place in your daily life. Thus, I find myself in a strange position: I know more about the past than the youngsters around me. I am more a part of the past of this country than Lithuanian youth are, even though it should be a foreign country to me. Thus, only one conclusion is possible: it is not a foreign country anymore, the foreign country has swallowed me and I have become part of its history. I never served my time, but for the rest of my life I am a prisoner of my memories of the Soviet era.

Epilogue Looking back at the developments over the past thirty years, it seems almost impossible to avoid a sense of somberness. As a young, idealistic and driven student, I enthusiastically started a long road with the ultimate goal of gaining freedom for a people living under a totalitarian regime for more than sixty years. The road turned out to be full of beautiful and instructive moments but, in particular, also of moments of sadness and pain, both for the people with whom I connected my fate and for myself. A lot of naivety and idealism was lost in the course of time, crushed or pushed away by the scheming, merchandising or outright betrayal by people of whom I expected it the least. Gradually, I also got to know myself better, including my weaknesses and bad character traits, which were not always the most pleasant moments. As a result of the pressure and tension caused by the events around me, that process was maybe quicker than it normally would have been. I always compared it with “tropical years,” the years that colonial civil servants were allowed to count for years in service abroad, as a result of which they could retire much earlier. Only, for me, there was no prospect of early retirement, not even when the Soviet Union disintegrated and the prisoners who were so dear to me were released. In many respects it was a fantastic time, seeing the Berlin Wall fall both in the literary and figurative sense, and being there when communist dictatorships collapsed. The impossible had been reached; a dream had become a reality suddenly and, above all, unexpectedly. Initially, it felt like a state of permanent drunkenness, but soon reality set in and we realized that it would take a long time, maybe even generations, before the effects of communism would be eradicated. The hangover was worsened by the fact that dissidents turned out to be regular people, even those who had suffered for many years in the camps and to whom you had gradually ascribed supra-human qualities. In some instances, they even turned out to be unpleasant people, quite difficult to deal with, and sometimes far from being a democrat. Some even had almost fascist views, or were downright anti-Semites, and the knowledge that you had spent costly hours on their case was sometimes difficult to accept. This disillusion, combined with the search for a new direction in their work, resulted in a gnawing depression. Some dissidents couldn’t manage this, others looked for another goal in life, I was able to escape from this trap by plunging myself into a new relationship. After a number of years, a new direction had been found: the beginning of a whirlwind of initiatives, projects, meetings and conferences

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and, above all, the building of new relationships with a new type of dissident movement, the movement of reformers in mental health. The enthusiasm was back, and also the idealism, fueled by the experiences and lessons learned from the time of the dissident movement, that prevents many mistakes and disappointments. New friendships were built, while a number of cross-connections between the old dissident movement and the new one –in the persons of Yuri Nuller and Semyon Gluzman – helped to guarantee an emotional continuation for me. The world of psychiatry opened up for me, the unending complexity of the human mind and behavior, and while the increasing insight helped me to find my way in the world of mental health, the knowledge also helped me to reconsider experiences from the past and to gradually accept them. As a result, the most painful spots and open wounds of the past were healed and everything found its place in my memory. Work, and the growing number of friendships in various countries, helped me to become even more part of their history in which I participated every day. In fact, some people were convinced that my ancestors were from Eastern Europe or that I had grown up in that part of the world. I felt at home there and, thus, managed to build for myself an identity that provided an answer to the feeling of not belonging anywhere, of having been born in the ocean between Canada and The Netherlands. My “not being Dutch” found its place, and my “not being Canadian” became less and less important and when eventually a “not being Lithuanian” was added, my chair had three legs and stability was guaranteed. My love for a Lithuanian woman completed my quest and gave me the peace of mind that I had longed for during so many years. My adoption of Lithuania as my home also resulted, however, in a different sense of being part of it, a pride for a country that I was now allowed to call my own but for which I increasingly developed a sense of compassion. Compassion for what the population had to suffer during the past decades, but also compassion for what I saw happening in front of my eyes. Compassion, and also feelings of shame that the country evokes simultaneously, because of the latent anti-Semitism, the blatant corruption, the severe conservatism and the homophobia. In addition, the country seemed to not be able to look back at its past honestly and openly and eventually leave it behind. I shared the pain of my dear ones over the direction that Lithuania was taking, but also felt that, again, I would never be fully accepted as equal.

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It is the red line through my life, the search for a home, for a place where I belong, and in doing so continuously finding a connection to a group that never accepts me fully as one of their own. It is as if the pioneering of my parents, the looking for a new future and a new “home” has continued inside of me. But perhaps I don’t even want to be fully accepted and belong to something completely. Maybe I want to continue searching, in order to be able to digest life fully in all its diversity and complexity. “Home is where your heart is” is for many an old and meaningless saying. For me, it is a reality, my daily life. I have found my home, and this is irreversibly connected to the region to which I lost my heart at far too young an age. The road is now open for a new phase, one in which the peace of having a “home” and the experiences of the past decades can be connected to new initiatives, new trials and a further exploration of the human mind and behavior. I notice it is becoming more difficult to find the enthusiasm, the energy to open my skin and allow the stimuli of new experiences enter my being. Disappointments and failures of the past not only enrich a person, they also make one more hesitant to enter new challenges with an open mindset. The meeting in the mountains of Georgia was also, for me, refreshing and crucial. It proved to me that now a bridge exists between the old and the new, and that in spite of the fact that the reformers are disappearing because of death or other reasons, continuity is guaranteed, allowing for the courage to take on new challenges. During one of the young generation meetings, at the beginning of this century, an expert in the field of crisis intervention started his lecture with a purposely provocative statement: “A crisis is not a disaster, it is not the end; to the contrary, it is the beginning of a new challenge, a new possibility.” His words were meant for the participants, but unintentionally they have helped me during the past years through many crises. Now, at the beginning of a new and yet unknown road, they form a comforting guide that helps to turn an initial somberness into a desire to take on a new challenge.

Historical data 18 December 1976: Vladimir Bukovsky is exchanged at Zürich airport against the Chilean communist leader Luis Corvalan 14 May 1978: arrest of Aleksandr Podrabinek. December 1979: The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan, an international campaign is initiated to boycott the Olympic Games in Moscow in July 1980 out of protest 22 January 1980: Nobel Prize winner and dissident Andrei Sakharov is exiled to Gorki 16 September 1980: Irina Grivnina is arrested. December 1980: the predecessor of Global Initiative on Psychiatry – The International Association on the Political Use of Psychiatry – is founded in Paris. 13 February 1981: Anatoly Koryagin is arrested. 10 November 1982: Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev dies and is succeeded by Yuri Andropov, former Chairman of the secret service KGB. 31 January 1983: The Soviets withdraw from the World Psychiatric Association (WPA), knowing that otherwise they will be be expelled from membership because of continued political abuse of psychiatry July 1983: World Congress of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) in Vienna, conditions are put to the return of the Soviets to the WPA. Anatoly Koryagin is elected honorary member of the organization. 9 February 1984: Yuri Andropov dies and is succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko 5 September 1984: Valery Marchenko dies in the central prison hospital in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) after the authorities refuse to transfer him to a neighboring hospital to have him connected to a kidney dialysis machine. 10 March 1985: Konstantin Chernenko dies and is succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev.

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29 October 1985: Irina Grivnina arrives in The Netherlands and is welcomed at Amsterdam airport by political leaders such as Ed Nijpels of the Liberal party and Dick Dolman, Speaker of the Dutch Parliament. 8 December 1986: Dissident writer Anatoly Marchenko dies in Chistopol prison as a result of a hunger strike. March 1989: Founding of the Independent Psychiatric Association, the first psychiatric association in the Soviet Union that is not controlled by the State. 9 April 1989: Soviet troops attack a peaceful meeting of Georgian nationalists in the center of Tbilisi; 20 people are killed. October 1989: World Congress of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) in Athens; the Soviets are allowed to return to the WPA under conditions and after they publicly admit that the abused psychiatry for political purposes is a systematic manner. 9 November 1989: fall of the Berlin Wall. 14 December 1989: Andrei Sakharov dies. 11. March 1990: Lithuania restores independence, the first Soviet republic that leaves the SSR; Moscow reacts with threats and blockades. 13 January 1991: Soviet troops attack the television tower in he Lithuanian capital Vilnius, during which thirteen citizens die. On February 4, 1991, Iceland is the first country to recognize the independence of Lithuania. January 1991: Founding of the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association 19-21 August 1991: Coup d’état in Moscow against Mikhail Gorbachev. The coup fails and marks the end of the Soviet Union. 25 December 1991: The Soviet Union formally ceases to exist. September 1993: the Network of Reformers in Psychiatry is founded in the Slovak capital Bratislava. April 1998: the Association of Reformers in Psychiatry (ARP) is officially founded during a constituent assembly in The Netherlands. The ARP would eventually fail and cease to exist.

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1 May 2004: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia join the European Union. 1 January 2007: Bulgaria and Romania join the European Union.

Index of Names A Akhmatova, Anna 53, 255 Akhmetov, Nitzametdin 126 Adenauer, Konrad 46 Afanasyev, Yuri 103 Agazade, Nazim 235 Agt, Dries van 23 Agt, Van (Ambassador) 23 Albrekht, Vladimir 104 Alekseeva, Ludmila 74 Amalrik, Andrei 76, 86 Amalrik, Gyuzel 76 Andreiko, Dr. 229 Andropov, Yuri 11, 35, 69, 70, 104, 187, 289 Arbatov, Georgi 88

Borisov, Vladimir 76 Bosshardt, major Alida 84, 87 Bowis, John 251 Brezhneva, Galina 69 Brezhnev, Leonid 4, 15, 41, 51, 69, 104, 135, 187, 196, 211, 212, 262, 289 Brodsky, Vladimir 30, 32 Broek, Hans van den 80, 137 Brouwer, Ina 84 Brucan, Silviu 167

C Carmiggelt, Simon 43 Ceaucescu, Elena 167 Ceaucescu, Nicolae 167, 170,171, 172, 174 Chazov, Evgeni 97 B Chernenko, Konstantin 69, 104, 187, 289 Bakhmin, Viktor 49 Chopivsky, George 160-161 Bakhmin, Vyacheslav 5, 6, 9, 45, 49, 141 Chuprikov, Anatoly 145 Bandera, Stefan 109 Churchill, Winston 8 Bastiaans, Jan 66 Corea, Steve 186 Batovrin, Sergei 29, 30 Corvalán, Luis 7, 289 Beckers, Ria 83 Costa e Silva, Jorge Alberto 118, 129, Berner, Peter 65, 66 132, 133 Bezemer, Jan 43 Bieber, Helmut 46, 47, 259 D Biegel, Anne 82 Daniel, Yuli 38 Birley, Jim 62, 128, 131, 139, 143-145, 180 Diana, Princess 234 Bles, Gérard 46, 47, 116 Dmitrieva, Tatyana 188 Blom, Hans 198 Doesschate, Roelof ten 128, 131 Bukharin, Nikolai 177 Dolman, Dick 86, 87, 290 Bukovsky, Vladimir 6-9, -9, 23, 29, 35, 36, Doorn, Jack van (pseudonym) 78, 81 37, 41, 42, 43, 46, 49, 57, 74, 75, 77, Dudayev, Dzhokhar 217 78, 80, 113, 121, 194, 245, 267, 289 Durand, Charles 46 Bogoraz, Larisa 36, 39, 77, 99, 104, 106, Dzerzhinsky, Feliks 58 108, 193, Böll, Heinrich 50 E Bomba, Jacek 235, 237 Es, Andrée van 84 Bonner, Yelena 102-104 Evenhuis, Albert-Jan 83 Bonnie, Richard 179 Evsegneev, Roman 188 “Boris the Gypsy” 69

294 F Fainberg, Viktor 76, 77 Fernig, Chris 84 Frank, Anne 159, 208 Fulford, Bill 185

Index

Kaplanas, Isaak 267 Karamanlis, Kostas 119-121, 127 Kennedy, John F. 192 Keukens, Rob 204 Khodorkovski, Mikhail 262 Khrushchev, Nikita 15, 53, 71, 196 G Kim, Yuli 49 Gerutis, Albertas 265 Kiselyov, Yuri 27-28, 54, 108 Glastra van Loon, Jan F. 240 Klarenbeek, Bob 93 Gluzman, Semyon 112-116, 121, 125Knevel, Andries 44 130, 134, 139-143, 145, 149, 151Kooijmans, Peter 162-163 152, 154, 157-163, 177, 179, 188, Kopelev, Lev 50 192-197, 199, 203, 204, 208-210, Koppers, André 240 218, 226, 229, 233-236, 286 Koryagin, Anatoly 38, 48-49, 63, 65, 67, Gorbanevskaya, Natalya 126 88, 96-98, 111, 112, 114-116, 119Gorbachev, Mikhail 18, 39, 70-72, 86121, 124, 127, 128, 131, 133, 139, 88, 98, 112, 135, 180, 187, 202, 283, 140, 180, 289 289, 290 Koryagin, Galina 96, 98 ‘s Gravesande, Maya 168 Koryagin, Ivan 96 Gribanov, Viktor 82 Koupernik, Cyrille 45-46 Grigorenko, Pyotr 113, 194 Kovalyov, Ivan 105 Grigorenko, Viktor 152 Kovalyov, Sergei 41, 104-106, 199 Grivnina, Irina 33, 45, 48, 49, 73, 74, 78, Kozhurina, Tatyana 184, 202 82-89, 95-97, 101, 103, 105, 107, 192 Kravchenko, Raisa 224-225 Grivnina, Masha 73, 87 Kruk, Herman 272 Gromyko, Andrei 71, 212 Kuhn, Catherine 46, 47, 116 Kukobaka, Mikhail 188 H Kuznetsov, Eduard 74 Hillesum, Etty 208 Kuznetsov, Valery 142-143, 225 Horst, Aliona van der 197, 199 Husak, Gustav 211-212 L Langen, Claus-Einar 46 I Lanovoi, Viktor 115, 116 Iliescu, Ion 169, 171, 174 Lown, Professor 97 LeGuay, Martine 46, 47 J Lentz, Jacob 198 Janmaat, Hans 82 Lieh Mak, Felice 129 Jaruzelsky, Wojciech 57 Lisovenko, Vitaly 145, 147, 166, 226, Johnson, Dale 202 227 Juhacz, Pal 66 Lubarsky, Kronid 74, 99 Low-Beer, Gery 63, 143 K Lubbers, Ruud 80 Kabanov, Modest 130 Luitse, Simon 9, 93-95 Kalanta, Romas 181

Index M Mao Zedong 242 Maksimov, Vladimir 74, 75 Mandelshtam, Osip 53 Marchais, Georges 126 Marchenko, Anatoly 38-40, 72, 98, 99, 290 Marchenko, Pavel 38 Marchenko, Valery 79, 113, 194, 289 Mercer, Ellen 64, 111, 115, 117, 118, 123-124, 128, 139, 141, 179, 186, 229 Meyer-Lindenberg, Johannes 131, 133, 139 Mikhailenko, Hanna 199 Michnik, Adam 57 Mulyava, Volodymir 151-152, 154 Morozov, Georgi 277 Morozov, Pyotr 127, 131-133 Munro, Robin 242, 243, 247

295

259, 262, 264, 277 Polubinskaya, Svetlana 177, 179, 235, 237 Pristaiko, Volodymir 26, 164, 196-197, 208, 226 Puras, Dainius 180-81, 186, 188, 234, 235, 251 R Radchenko, Volodymir 164, 195-196 Radzinsky, Oleg 29-30 Ratushinskaya, Irina 23-24 Rawnsley, Kenneth 65 Reagan, Ronald 87, 121 Reddaway, Peter 9, 17, 46, 47, 80, 124, 246 Reikhelhaus, Oksana 228-229 Reikhelhaus, Oleg 229 Reshetov, Yuri 130-131 Reve, Karel van het 43 Revenok, Anatoly 143-146 Romila, Aurel 169, 174-175 Roth, Loren 123, 201 Rubinstein, Renate 43 Rychener, Hans 265

N Nasynnik, Oleg 142-144 Neumann, Jochen 66-67, 141 Nijpels, Ed 82-84, 86, 87, 290 Niklus, Mart 19, 99 Nuller, Yuri 177-179, 181, 184, 186, 188, 217, 258-259, 286 S Saakashvili, Mikhail 265 O Sabshin, Melvyn 65, 118, 141 Okudjava, Bulat 49 Sakharov, Andrei 40, 41, 50, 78, 80, 85, Osipova, Tatyana 105 88, 98, 101, 102, 103-105, 106, 120, 289, 290 P Savenko, Yuri 116 Palach, Jan 181 Savimbi, Jonas 36 Paler, Octavian 174 Schulsinger, Fini 65-66, 117, 129, 132 Papandreou, George 120 Serebrov, Feliks 48-49 Patten, Chris 244 Schifter, Richard 125 Pernis, Hans van 204 Shuster, Savik 75-76 Pfeiffer, Jan 235, 237 Sicilia, Carolina 219 Pichot, Pierre 65 Simons, Hans 152-153 Plyushch, Leonid 126 Shalamov, Varlam 54, 178 Podrabinek, Aleksandr 5, 21, 41-42, 45, Shemiakhin, Mikhail 255 47, 124-125, 194, 289 Shevardnadze, Eduard 71 Putin, Vladimir 4, 105, 217, 256, 258, Shevchenko, Taras 151, 154

296

Index

Shumlyanski, Viktor 143 Shcharansky, Anatoly 38 Smiley, Xan 23 Solms, Hugo 46 Solozhenkin, Valery 217-218, 235 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 7, 52, 98, 246 Soros, George 183, 221 Spijkers, Fred 240-241 Stalin, Iosif 26, 38, 40, 53, 56, 70, 74, 84, 108, 135, 144, 178, 196, 241 Stango, Antonio 75-76 Starovoitova, Galina 259 Statkevicius, Algirdas 127 Stefanis, Costas 66-67, 117, 129 Stus, Vasyl 85 Stork, Coen 167 Swildens, Heleen 82 T Tarasyuk, Boris 165-166 Tarsis, Valery 26 Ternovsky, Leonid 45, 48 Ternovskaya, Olga 48 Thatcher, Margaret 8 Thijn, Ed van 87 Tiganov, Professor 132-133 Tiso, Josef 183 Tomov, Toma 180, 214, 233-237, 251 Tochilov, Vladimir 177, 184, 217, 235 Tsimbalyuk, Professor 229 Tsvetaeva, Maria 53 Tsvigun, Semyon 70 Tuculescu, Valerian 170-175 U Uspaskikh, Vladimir 283 Uyl, Joop den 83 V Valladares, Armando 36 Vartanyan, Marat 61, 67, 112, 114, 121, 127, 130, 201, 277 Veldmeijer, Jan 80, 101, 137, 163, 177, 209, 220

Vianu, Ion 169-170 Voikhanskaya, Marina 77 Voinovich, Vladimir 51 Vologodski, Aleksandr 107-108 Vonnegut, Kurt 85 Voorhoeve, Joris 83, 87, 148, 150, 240 Visotsky, Harold 124, 129, 131, 133 Vysotsky, Vladimir 49 W Walesa, Lech 55, 60 Wang Wanxing 245-246 Weinberger, Friedrich 46, 139 Woytyla, Karol 55 Wolzak, Henk 42-45, 77-78, 81, 137 Y Yakir, Iona 53 Yakir, Irina 53, 54, 97, 112-114, 192, Yakir, Pyotr 53-54, 178 Yeltsin, Boris 105 Yudin, Yuri 142-144, 157, 195 Z Zinoviev, Aleksandr 50 Zharikov, Nikolai 127,131-132 Zhivkov, Todor 180 Zhulynsky, Mikola 162 Zuokas, Arturas 268