Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (133 page)

Under Stalin, as in Germany under Hitler, opposition was conspiratorial or non-existent. A totalitarian regime does not normally become internally vulnerable until it attempts to liberalize itself. There were some tentative moves in this direction under Khrushchev. Part of the Gulag structure was dismantled, though its core remained. On 25 December 1958 new ‘Fundamental Principles of Criminal Law and Procedure’ were enacted, giving theoretical rights
to the accused and provoking the first legal debate ever held in the Soviet press. But this reform from above was bound to produce instability, and so reversal, since Soviet Russia was not a society under the rule of law. Marxism had never produced a philosophy of law. The only true Soviet legal philosopher, Evgeny Pashukanis, argued that in the socialist society Law would be replaced by Plan.
⁶⁷
This was logical, since the notion of an independent legal process was incompatible with the notion of an inevitable historical process interpreted by a ruling Marxist élite. Pashukanis’s own case proved it: law was replaced by plan – Stalin’s – and he was murdered in the 1930s. The 1958 enactment could not be applied in practice because it would have given the courts the beginnings of an independent status and so allowed them to erode the monopoly of power enjoyed by the party. Even under Khrushchev no Soviet court ever returned a verdict of ‘not guilty’ in a political case; nor did a Soviet appeal court ever overturn a guilty verdict in a political case – thus preserving an unbroken record of entire subservience to the ruling party from Lenin’s first year of power until the present.
⁶⁸

More important was Khrushchev’s relaxation of censorship. The Presidium refused his request to change the system, so he authorized some publications on his own responsibility.
⁶⁹
Heterodox material appeared in the press and in book form. In 1962 Alexander Solzhenitsyn was able to publish
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
, perhaps the most influential book to circulate freely in Russia since the Revolution. But the same year there were mass protests at Novocherkassk against food price increases. On 2 June troops fired on the mob, killing many. Riots were and are a recurrent feature of Soviet society, serving as in feudal times the role of strikes and politics, to draw attention to grievances. The June riot was on an unusually large scale and may have played a part in Khrushchev’s downfall two years later. Even before he disappeared, however, he refused to allow publication of any more books about the camps. According to Roy Medvedev, our most valuable informant, the dissent movement dated from 1965, the year after Khrushchev’s fall, and there was something approaching mass protest in 1966–7, when the
samizdat-type
of underground publication was at its peak.
⁷⁰
The repression began at the same time, with the trial of two leading dissenters, Sinyavsky and Daniel, in February 1966. This ended any pretence of judicial reform or liberalization generally. Shortly after it two high-ranking secret police officers were appointed judges of the Soviet Supreme Court. The worst phase of the repression was 1968–70, beginning with the ‘trial of the four’ (Galanskov, Ginzburg, Dobrovolsky and Lashkova) in January 1968. This, one of the best-documented of Soviet trials, was a predetermined political farce,
which showed that the Soviet system remained, in essentials, a totalitarian tyranny, no more capable of self-reform than of the squaring of the circle.
⁷¹

After 1970, there was some relaxation of the new terror. Those in the West who, as part of the
détente
policy, urged acceptance of the Soviet demand for the Helsinki Conference on ‘European Security and Co-operation’ (July 1973 – July 1975), argued that the Soviet leaders could be forced to respect human rights as part of the agreement. This became the official policy of the Ford and Carter administrations. Under Principle Seven of the Helsinki Accords, the Soviet government undertook to ‘respect human rights and fundamental freedoms’. But this was merely another treaty to be broken. In fact the Helsinki process led directly to a resumption of widespread repression, not only in Soviet Russia but elsewhere behind the Iron Curtain. For it encouraged dissenters to come out into the open. They formed monitoring groups ‘To Promote Observance of the Helsinki Accords’ in Moscow, the Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and Lithuania. Similar movements sprang up in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland and other satellites. Information about violations of the Accords was passed to Western journalists.

A wave of violent persecution followed, beginning in 1975 and reaching a climax in the years after 1977. Leaders of the monitoring groups were the chief victims. In some cases the
KGB
followed a new policy of issuing dissenters with exit visas and driving them out of their own country. But many others got long prison sentences with forced labour. Thus the Helsinki Accords radically increased the volume and ferocity of human rights violations in Soviet Russia. The farce culminated in the follow-up meeting in Belgrade, 1977–8, when the Soviet delegation produced elaborate documentation about persecution of Catholics in Ulster and blacks in America but flatly refused to discuss Soviet practice. Immediately after the meeting broke up, two members of the Ukrainian monitoring group got seven years’ hard labour each, the founder of the Moscow group, already held fifteen months in custody without trial, was sentenced to seven years in a ‘strict’ camp, and the most famous of Soviet dissidents, Andrei Sakharov, was accused of ‘hooliganism’, followed by house arrest and internal exile.
⁷²
The trials of the Georgian monitoring group evoked sinister echoes of the Stalin period, with fabricated charges of spying for Western intelligence agencies, and suggestions of torture and forced confessions.
⁷³

In one respect Soviet policy towards opposition elements was consistent, from the first phase of Lenin’s rule to the early 1980s: dissent has always been treated as a mental disease, and dissenters have always been liable to suffer ‘treatment’ in special Soviet
psychiatric hospitals. The first known case was in 1919, when Lenin had Maria Spiridonova, a leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, sentenced by the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal to internment in a sanatorium.
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The large-scale, systematic use of psychiatric punishment began in the late 1930s, when the
NKVD
built a special 400-bed penal establishment in the grounds of the regular mental hospital in Kazan. By the late 1940s, the Serbsky Institute, the main Soviet centre for teaching and research in criminal psychiatry, had a special department for ‘political’ work.
⁷⁵
By the early 1950s, at least three establishments ‘treated’ cases of political prisoners, since we know of one man, Ilya Yarkov, who suffered in all of them. Psychiatric punishment was given chiefly to offenders under the catch-all Article 58 of the criminal code, dealing with ‘anti-Soviet acts’: Yarkov’s fellow-inmates included Christians, surviving Trotskyists, opponents of Lysenko, heterodox writers, painters and musicians, Latvians, Poles and other nationalists.
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The system, far from being abandoned, greatly expanded under Khrushchev, who was anxious to persuade the world that Soviet Russia no longer imprisoned political offenders, merely the unbalanced, and was quoted by
Pravda
(1959) as saying: ‘A crime is a deviation from the generally recognized standards of behaviour, frequently caused by mental disorder …. To those who might start calling for opposition to Communism … clearly the mental state of such people is not normal.’
⁷⁷

The West first became aware of Soviet penal psychiatry in 1965 with the publication of Valery Tarsis’s
Ward
7, and thereafter efforts were made within the psychiatric profession to obtain documentation of specific cases and to raise the issue at meetings of the World Psychiatric Association.
⁷⁸
These efforts were partly frustrated by the anxiety of some (chiefly American) psychiatrists to preserve Iron Curtain participation in the body at any cost, partly by the skill with which the Soviet psychiatric establishment covered its tracks and, in 1973, arranged a Potemkin-type visit to the Serbsky.
⁷⁹
Nevertheless during the period 1965–75 details of 210 fully authenticated cases were obtained.
⁸⁰
In addition to the first psychiatric punishment prison in Kazan, at least thirteen other Special Psychiatric Hospitals were opened in the 1960s and 1970s. No Westerner, whether psychiatrist or not, was allowed to visit an
SPH
. But it was established they were under the control of the Ministry of the Interior (
MVD
) not the Ministry of Health, were headed by military officers and run administratively like prisons. Reports from former prisoners showed the
SPHS
bore a marked resemblance to the experimental prison-clinics run by ss doctors as part of Himmler’s race-programme, in both the cruelties practised and the type of doctor in charge. The most common torture, the wet canvas ‘roll-up’
method, appears to have been invented by a Dr Elizaveta Lavritskaya, one of the most hardened of the creatures described by Yarkov
⁸¹
Details of tortures, beatings and the punitive use of drugs were provided at US Senate hearings in 1972.
⁸²
The worst offenders were identified as Professor Andrei Snezhnevsky, Director of the Institute of Psychiatry at the Academy of Medical Sciences, who led the campaign to diagnose dissent as a form of schizophrenia; Professor Ruben Nadzharov, his deputy; Dr Georgy Morozov, head of the Serbsky; and Professor Daniel Lunts, regarded by the dissenters as the worst of the practitioners of psycho-terror. As with the ss, some of the doctors held military rank: Lunts was variously identified as a
KGB
colonel or a major-general in the
MVD
. These men were allowed to travel abroad to represent Soviet psychiatry, had salaries three times as large as other psychiatrists, and enjoyed access to the luxuries and privileges of the higher echelons of the Soviet ruling class.
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Psychiatric punishment expanded greatly under Brezhnev, though following the campaign of exposure in the West it was confined largely to the humble worker-protester unlikely to attract outside attention. For the prominent, there were many increasingly severe grades of oppression, none of which need even involve a trial. Commenting on the exile of Sakharov to Gorky, Medvedev noted: ‘From Gorky Sakharov could be sent to Irkutsk in Siberia, to Tomsk, or to Chita. Worse every time …. The important thing is that the victim must always have something to lose, therefore something to be afraid of.’
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At the end of March 1977, Brezhnev made it brutally clear that a return to liberalization was out of the question:

In our country it is not forbidden ‘to think differently’ from the majority …. It is quite another matter if a few individuais who have … actively come out against the socialist system, embark on the road of anti-Soviet activity, violate laws and, finding no support inside their own country, turn for support abroad, to imperialist subversive centres …. Our people demand that such … activists be treated as opponents of socialism, as persons acting against their own motherland, as accomplices if not actual agents of imperialism …. We have taken and will continue to take against them measures envisaged by our law.
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The identification of political criticism with treason, indeed with active treachery, was of course the basis of the Lenin-Stalin terror. Brezhnev made it clear it could be resumed at any moment. Provision for it was made in the new version of the constitution, ratified by the Supreme Soviet on 7 October 1977. Article 6 affirmed the total monopoly of political power and state activity of the Communist
Party. Article 62 read: ‘Citizens of the USSR are obliged to safeguard the interests of the Soviet states, and to enhance its power and prestige.’ The first of these contradicted Article 2, which said all power belonged to the people. The second contradicted Article 49, which gave the citizen the right to criticize state bodies. Articles 6 and 62 were thus the totalitarian heart of the constitution, giving the ruling class all the authority it needed to subject internal opponents to whatever degree of terror was thought necessary. Dissent continued even under the Brezhnev repression. In 1977–80, for instance, twenty-four
samizdat
publications appeared regularly. The number of individual
samizdat
items circulating passed the 100,000-mark in 1980.
⁸⁶
But any kind of organized political activity, or wide diffusion of heterodox views, became totally impossible. During the 1970s, in short, while the legitimate authority of American government was being recklessly eroded, the autocratic power of Soviet government was being systematically reinforced. The process reached a logical conclusion after the death of Brezhnev in 1982, when Yuri Andropov, who had been head of the
KGB
for fifteen years, during which he had institutionalized psychiatric punishment of dissidents, became the Soviet ruler.

Operating from a base of political stability, Soviet global power expanded steadily during the Seventies. The most striking and visible sign of this expansion was the spectacular growth of the Soviet navy. In many ways it was comparable to the German naval programme of the 1890s and 1900s: it was not justified by any need to protect traditional lines of supply and communications but was deliberately aimed to change the existing balance of maritime power.
⁸⁷
Like the British navy in the nineteenth century, American sea-air power was the great stabilizing fact in the post-war world. In 1945 America had 5,718 ships in active service, including ninety-eight aircraft carriers, twenty-three battleships, seventy-two cruisers and over 700 destroyers and escorts. As late as June 1968, the USA had 976 ships in commission.
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But in the 1970s the American fleet shrank rapidly, to thirteen carriers and their escorts. Meanwhile the Soviet navy expanded. At the end of 1951 it was still possible for Admiral Carney, commander of
NATO
forces in Southern Europe, to dismiss Soviet naval power in the Mediterranean: ‘He said it was possible there were a few “maverick” Soviet submarines in the Mediterranean and they might be able to push in some others in preparation for a war. But they couldn’t support them long.’
⁸⁹
The big change came after 1962, when the Cuban missile crisis persuaded the Soviet leadership that, if they wished to expand Communism outside the Eurasian land-mass, they would have to build a big surface navy.