Word: dnepropetrovsk
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...away for years in mental hospitals, like the notorious Serbsky Institute in Moscow. There low-calorie diets and drug treatments produce pain and suffering as acute as more physical methods of repression. One dissenter, Cybernetics Specialist Leonid Plyushch, now living in Paris, testified that he was kept in the Dnepropetrovsk Special Hospital for 30 months after getting a spurious diagnosis of "torpid schizophrenia" with "reform-making illusions." Plyushch saw beatings applied to other patients. He himself received insulin and heavy doses of sulfur which caused "discomfort so intense that all you could do was endlessly search for a new position...
Plyushch, 37, who still considers himself a "neo-Marxist," was remanded to the Dnepropetrovsk special mental hospital in July 1973 after prison doctors had diagnosed him as a schizophrenic. Once there, he recalled last week: "The horror of the psukhushka [madhouse] got to me. There were more patients than beds, and in two beds shoved together I was put in the middle place of three. Patients twisted in pain from administration of drugs. One of them had his tongue hanging out, another his eyes popping, a third walked curved in an unnatural manner...
Mentally Sick. These more or less ordinary terrors, however, were less frightening to him than the attempts by doctors at Dnepropetrovsk to convince him that he was mentally sick. "You had to admit to the doctors that you were ill. In the beginning, I argued. Then I came to the conclusion that they were right." Plyushch's cause was taken up by Amnesty International, a London-based organization that seeks to dramatize the plight of political prisoners. The Communist parties of France, Italy and Britain demanded his release. Presumably, it was in response to pressure from European Communists that...