OSA / Guide / RIP / 1956 / RFE/RL Background Reports : Subjects | Browse | Search

The text below might contain errors as it was reproduced by OCR software from the digitized originals,
also available as Scanned original in PDF.

BOX-FOLDER-REPORT: 66-2-47
TITLE:             Another Soviet Dissident Committed to an Insane Asylum
BY:                G.V.D
DATE:              1970-8-21
COUNTRY:           Soviet Union
ORIGINAL SUBJECT:  Dissent

--- Begin ---

RADIO FREE EUROPE Research

COMMUNIST AREA

This material was prepared for the use of the
editors and policy staff of Radio Free Europe:

0702

USSR: Dissent

21 August 1970

ANOTHER SOVIET DISSIDENT COMMITTED
TO AN INSANE ASYLUM

(See end for Summary)

Two Western news agencies have reported yet another
instance of a Soviet citizen committed to an insane asylum
for exercizing the rights of freedom of speech and press
as guaranteed in Article 125 of the Soviet Constitution.
According to the sources, 19-year-old Olga Ioffe was committed
to a psychiatric institute yesterday after being charged
with anti-Soviet agitation. [1] Her commitment was the result
of a psychiatric examination that concluded she was suffering
from chronic schizophrenia. By now, the practice of committing
persons to an insane asylum because their expressed views
differ from official policy or because they criticize aspects
of the Soviet system is, unfortunately, becoming standard
procedure.

-------------------------

(1) Reuter and AFP, 21 August 1970. Reuter and The Chronicle of
Current Events, No. 11, 31 December 1969, give Miss Ioffe1s
age as 19 while AFP lists it as 20.

[page 2]

Vladimir Bukovsky, another young dissident and former
student at Moscow University who s??t six years in prisons,
insane asylums and concentration camps for making critical
speeches at Komsomol meetings, protesting against the trial
of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel and supporting
Yuri Galanskov and Aleksei Dobrovolsky at the time of
their trial three years ago, recently commented, on this practice to
to a Western correspondent:

As a matter of fact, the inmates, the patients of
this hospital [the Leningrad special psychiatric
hospital] are prisoners, people who committed such
actions which are considered as crimes from the
point of view of the authorities but which do not
exist as crimes from the point of view of the Law.
And in order to isolate them somehow, in order to
punish them somehow, these people are being
declared Insane and kept in the ward of the
psychiatric hospital...to such hospitals are sent
people who basically cannot be punished, because
there is nothing they can be punished for, and
[psychiatric] hospitals are just able to get rid
of them, and take them away from sight at the
same time. [2]

This is the exact treatment now given Miss Ioffe.

The nature of her" "crime" is a concern that Stalinism and
the well-known Stalinist type of tyranny not be re-introduced
by the present Soviet leadership. Her activities to this effect
began in 1966 when she and another student of the No. 16 special
language school in Moscow, Irina Kaplun, together with nine
other pupils, all under 16 years of age, pasted up leaflets which 
stated, "there must be no repetition of the Stalin period,
everything depends on us." [3] Three hundred of these leaflets 
were posted and sent to private persons in Moscow. The KGB soon
interrogated the girls at sessions lasting from four to six hours,
during which time they were asked the names of the adults
behind their activity and told: "'If you think that some things
in our country are not quite as they should be, then you ought
to come and see us at the KGB and talk it over with us.'" [4]

---------------------

(2) Quoted from the text of an interview in Moscow by CBS    
correspondent William Cole, telecast in the United States
on 28 July 1970.

(3) The Chronicle of Current Events, No. 11, 31 December 1969.

(4) Ibid.

[page 3]

Irina Kaplun was told that "'she ought to be thankful that
her uncle [5] had been rehabilitated at all, they [the Soviet
authorities] might well not have done it.'" [6] Perhaps due
to their age, they were not subjected to legal proceedings
although two of them were expelled from the Komsomol, one
from the school, and all were given reprimands with entries
in their personal records. Similar action was also taken
against their teachers.

Last year, Kaplun and Ioffe, both of whom were continuing
their education at Moscow University, were preparing a protest
directed against the celebration of Stalin's ninetieth birthday
[21 December 1969]. On the 1st of December, six Moscow
apartments were searched by the authorities and Kaplun and Ioffe
were arrested. During the search of the latter's apartment
and in her presence, several samizdat texts as well as copies
of her own poetry, various papers, verses written by her
father, Yu. M. Ioffe, and a typewriter were confiscated. [7] 
Escorted by ten men, she was taken in for questioning and
officially placed under arrest at nine o'clock that evening.
Four days later, another 19-year-old student, Valeria Novodvorskaya,
was also arrested for distributing leaflets, the contents of
which were a poem criticizing the Communist Party for the
evil it perpetrated on the country and people of the Soviet
Union. [8] She was also charged with anti-Soviet agitation and
propaganda (Article 70 of the RSFSR Criminal Code) and committed
by a Moscow court, the proceedings of which took place without
her knowledge, to the special psychiatric ward in Kazan prison.
This is very likely also the case with Olga Ioffe and probably
with Irina Kaplun. 

Although Olga Ioffe, as well as Irina Kaplun and Valeria
Novodvorskaya were acting as individuals rather than as part
of a well-organized protest group, their activities are part
of the democratic movement in the Soviet Union which, although
as yet only a loose conglomerate of persons who protest against

------------------------

(5) A revolutionary who worked in the Profintern the
international trade union organization), the Communist
International , and the CPSU Central Committee and who was a
victim of Stalin's purge in 1938 and rehabilitated in 1956.
Ibid.

(6) Ibid.

(7) Ibid.

(8) Ibid., and The Chronicle of Current Events, No. 13, 28
April 1970.

[page 4]

the , violation of basic civil rights and maintain contact
through samizdat, continues despite official persecution.
In the words of Pyotr Yakir, a prominent dissident and
member of the Action Group for the Defense of Civil Rights
in the Soviet Union:

We see that they arrest all of us because we are
unpleasant people to the authorities and we
criticize them. The problem is, however, that
one should never go back. If we are not here,
there will be others, and there are many of
them already now, many young people. And all
people, all thinking people in the Soviet Union,
they will never return to what has been before.
They will be beaten, they will be killed, but
despite this the people will think differently. [9]

Summary: Two Western news agencies today
reported that Olga Ioffe, a student from
Moscow University, arrested last December
in connection with a protest she was
preparing warning against the dangers of
a return to Stalinism, has been committed
to an insane asylum. This paper describes
her previous activity and the circumstances
of her arrest and commitment.

G.v.D.

-----------------

(9) Quoted from the text of an interview in Moscow by CBS
correspondent William Cole, telecast in the United States on 28 July 1970.

  OSA / Guide / RIP / 1956 / RFE/RL Background Reports : Subjects | Browse | Search