The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  Not that the intellectual inquisition in Russia had died out with Stalin. It wasn’t as widespread as in the 1930s, but it was no less vicious.88 The first details about the dark side of Russian psychiatric hospitals had been released to the West in 1965, with the publication of Valery Tarsis’s Ward 7, after which a number of psychiatrists in Europe and North America made it their business to investigate Soviet practices. But it was the forced hospitalisation of Zhores Medvedev on 29 May 1970 at Kaluga Psychiatric Hospital, just south of Moscow, that drew the attention of the world to what was being done in the name of psychiatry.

  A Question of Madness, which was written by Zhores Medvedev and his brother, Roy, a professional historian, reads like a Kafka novel. Early on in 1970, the manuscript of a book that Zhores had written was seized by the KGB in the course of a raid on the flat of a friend. Zhores was not especially worried when he found out that the KGB had seized the book – which was unfinished and not at all secret – but he did begin to grow anxious when he was asked to attend Kaluga Psychiatric Hospital to discuss the behavior of his son, who was then giving the Medvedevs some cause for concern, going through an ‘awkward’ or ‘hippie’ phase. As soon as he arrived at the hospital, Zhores was locked in the waiting room. When, through a window, he saw his son leave, Zhores realised that he was the chief object of concern to the authorities. On that occasion he picked the lock and escaped, but a week later he received a visit at home by three policemen and two doctors.89 From their conversations, it became clear that Medvedev had caused offence with a book he had written, originally called Biology and the Cult of Personality but later changed to The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko, in which he had exposed the shameful history of Soviet genetics. This book had appeared in the West in 1969, published by Columbia University Press, while Lysenko was still alive (he died in 1976). Zhores was forcibly removed to Kaluga, where both the hospital psychiatrists and a commission sent out by the central authorities tried to make out that he was an incipient schizophrenic, about to become a danger to himself and others.90 The authorities had, however, reckoned without Zhores’s relatives and friends. For a start, his brother Roy was an identical twin. Schizophrenia is known to be (partly) inherited, and so, strictly speaking, if Zhores showed signs of the illness, so too should Roy. This clearly wasn’t true. Many academicians complained to the authorities that they had known Zhores for many years, and he had never shown any abnormal symptoms. Peter Kapitsa, Andrei Sakharov, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn all rallied to Zhores’s support, and as a result the matter received wide publicity in the West.91 But it was still nearly three weeks before he was released, and during that time, as the account the Medvedevs jointly wrote shows, the netherworld of psychiatry was exposed. Various psychiatrists claimed that Zhores showed ‘heightened nervousness,’ ‘deviation from the norm,’ was ‘ill-adapted to the environment,’ suffered a ‘hypochondriac delusional condition,’ and had ‘an exaggerated opinion of himself.’ When questioned by family relatives, these psychiatrists claimed that only experienced doctors could detect the ‘early stages’ of mental illness.92 Other psychiatrists were brought in as part of a ‘special commission’ to consider the case, including Professor Andrei Snezhnevsky, Professor Daniel Lunts, and Dr Georgy Morozov, head of the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry, which would be revealed as the worst of the Soviet psychiatric institutions involved in psychiatric-political terror. Despite this, Zhores’s friends succeeded in forcing his release on 17 June and having him reinstated to the Lenin Agricultural Academy as a senior research fellow, to work on amino acids. In this instance there was a happy ending, but later research showed that between 1965 and 1975 there were 210 ‘fully authenticated’ cases of psychiatric terror and fourteen institutions devoted to the incarceration of alleged psychiatric cases who were in fact political prisoners.93

  Chilling as they were, the special psychiatric hospitals in Russia only dealt with, at most, hundreds of people. In comparison, the world revealed by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn concerned perhaps 66 million people and, together with the Holocaust against the Jews, must rank as the greatest horror story of human history.

  The Gulag Archipelago is a massive, three-volume work, completed in 1969 but not published in English until 1974, 1975, and 1976. Solzhenitsyn’s previous books, particularly One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and Cancer Ward (1968) had made him well known in the West.94 Born an orphan in the Caucasus in December 1918 (his father had died in a shooting accident six months before), in an area where there was a lot of White Russian resistance to the Bolsheviks, Solzhenitsyn grew up in the early 1930s, as the Communist Party strengthened its grip on the country after Stalin’s Great Break.95 Despite poverty and hardship he shone at school, and then at university, in physics, math, and Marxism-Leninism.96 He had a ‘good’ war (he was promoted to captain and won four medals) but was arrested by secret agents in early 1945. His letters had been intercepted and read: among his ‘crimes’ was a letter referring to Stalin as ‘the man with the moustache,’ and photographs of Nicholas II and of Trotsky were found among his belongings. Convicted as a ‘socially dangerous’ person, he was moved from prison to prison and then to Novy Ierusalim, New Jerusalem, a corrective labour camp, and to Marfino, a scientific sharashka that at least had a library. By 1955 he was living in a mud hut in Kol Terek; this was exile rather than imprisonment, and it was here that he contracted, and was successfully treated for, cancer. These experiences became his first masterpiece, Cancer Ward, not published in English until 1968.

  He arrived back in Moscow in June 1956, after an absence of more than eleven years, aged not quite thirty-eight. Over the next few years, while he was teaching outside Moscow, he wrote a novel initially entitled Sh-854 after the sharashka he had been in. It was very shocking. The story concerned the ordinary, everyday life in one camp over a twenty-four-hour period. The shock lay in the fact that the camp life – the conditions described – are regarded by the inhabitants as normal and permanent. The psychology of the camp, so different from the outside world, is taken for granted, as are the entirely arbitrary reasons why people arrived there. Solzhenitsyn sent the manuscript to friends at Novy mir, the literary magazine – and what happened then has been told many times.97 Everyone who read the manuscript was shocked and moved by it; everyone at the magazine wanted to see the book published – but what would Khrushchev say? In 1956 he had made an encouraging (but secret) speech at the Party Congress, hinting at greater liberalisation now that Stalin was dead. By coincidence, friends got the manuscript to the Soviet leader at a time when he was entertaining Robert Frost, the American poet. Khrushchev gave the go-ahead, and Sh-854 was published in English in 1963, to world acclaim, as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.98 This marked a high spot in Solzhenitsyn’s life, and for a few years – a very few years – he was lionised in Russia. But then, in the mid-1960s, Khrushchev clamped down on the liberalisation he had himself started, and Solzhenitsyn lost the Lenin Prize he should have won because one member of the committee, the director of the Komsomol, alleged that he had surrendered to the Germans in the war and had been convicted of (an unspecified) criminal offence. Both allegations were untrue, but they showed the strength of feeling against Solzhenitsyn, and all that he stood for.

  From 1965 he began to work on his history of the camps, which would become The Gulag Archipelago. Since his disillusion with Marxism he had returned to ‘some sort of Christian faith.’99 But Russia was changing again; Khrushchev had fallen from power, and in September 1965 the KGB raided the flat of some of Solzhenitsyn’s friends and seized all three copies of the manuscript of another book, The First Circle. This described four days in the life of a mathematician in a sharashka outside Moscow, and is clearly a self-portrait. Now began a very tense time: Solzhenitsyn went into hiding and found it difficult to have his writings published. Publication of The First Circle and Cancer Ward in the West brought him greater fame, but led to a more open conflict with the Soviet authorities. This conflict
culminated in 1970, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but the authorities made it clear that, if he went to Sweden to collect the prize, he would not be allowed back.100 And so, by the time The Gulag Archipelago appeared, Solzhenitsyn’s life had taken on an epic dimension.

  The new project was a massive exercise, as it had to be.101 The gulag was overwhelming, a massive intervention in so many millions of lives that only an equally vast project could do justice to what was indeed ‘the greatest horror story of human history.’ Besides the eight years he spent in the camps, it took Solzhenitsyn nine years – April 1958 to February 1967 – to compile the book.102 Parts of the story had escaped before, but Solzhenitsyn’s aim was to present such a mass of material that no one would ever again doubt the gross and grotesque abuses of freedom in Soviet Russia. Eighteen hundred pages long, it is all but overwhelming – but, as a literary work as well as a record, that was Solzhenitsyn’s aim.

  The book first appeared in the West in Paris, on 28 December 1973. At the end of January 1974 the BBC World Service and its German counterpart began broadcasting excerpts from The Gulag in Russian. In the same week the German version of the book was published, and smuggled copies of the Russian version began to appear in Moscow: they were passed from hand to hand, ‘each reader being allowed a maximum of 24 hours to read the entire volume.103 On 12 February Solzhenitsyn was arrested. At 8:30 A.M. on Wednesday the fourteenth, the Bonn government was informed that Russia wanted to expel Solzhenitsyn and asked if the Germans would accept him. Willy Brandt, the German chancellor, was at that moment chairing a session of the cabinet. Interrupted, he immediately agreed to Russia’s request. The Gulag was published in the U.K. and the United States later that spring. Worldwide, by 1976, according to Publisher’s Weekly, the first volume sold 8 to 10 million copies (2.5 million in the United States, a million-plus in Germany, and just under that in the U.K., France, and Japan). All together, Solzhenitsyn’s books have sold 30 million copies.104

  Gulag – GUlag in Russian – stands for Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerei (Chief Administration of the Labour Camps). Throughout his long book, Solzhenitsyn is unsparing in the detail. From the techniques of arrest to the horrors of interrogation, from the ‘ships’ of the archipelago (the red-painted cattle trains that transported the prisoners) to the maps of the 202 detention camps, from the treatment of corpses to the salaries of the guards, nothing is omitted.105 He tells us how the ‘red cows,’ the cattle trucks, were prepared, with holes carved out of the floor for drainage but steel sheets nailed down all around, so no one could escape.106 We learn the name of the individual – Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel, a Turkish Jew, born near Constantinople – who first thought up the gulag.107 We learn the death rates of the various camps and are given an unsparing list of thirty-one techniques of punishment during interrogation. These include a machine for squeezing fingernails, or ‘bridling,’ in which a towel is inserted between the prisoner’s jaws like a bridle and then pulled back over his shoulders and tied to his heels, with his spine bent. The prisoner was then left for several days without food or water, sometimes having first been given a salt-water douche in the throat.108

  But as Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn’s biographer, says, the book is not just a series of lists or statistics. Solzhenitsyn re-creates a whole world, an entire culture. His tone is ironic, not self-pitying, as he gives us the jokes and the jargon of life in the camps – camps that, he tells us, varied widely, from prospecting camps to railroad-building camps, transit camps to collective labour camps, island camps to juvenile camps. He shows that people were sent to the camps for absurd reasons. Irina Tuchinskaya, for example, was charged with having ‘prayed in church for the death of Stalin,’ others for showing friendliness to the United States, or a negative attitude toward state loans. Then there is the jargon. A dokhodyaga is a man on his last legs, a ‘goner’; katorga was hard labour; everything that was constructed in camps was, they said, built with ‘fart power’; nasedha was ‘stool pigeon,’ and reality was deliberately reversed so that the worst camps were referred to as the most privileged.109 However, as horror is piled on horror, as page after page passes – as the weeks and months pass for those in the gulag (and this is Solzhenitsyn’s intention) – the reader gradually comes to realise that although countless millions have been murdered, the human spirit has not been killed, that hope and a black sense of humour can keep those who survive alive, not thriving exactly, but thinking. In one of the last chapters, describing a revolt in the Kengir camp that lasted for forty days, the reader feels like cheering, that reason and sanity and goodness can prevail, even though in the end the revolt is brutally put down, as we know it will be.110 So the book, though nearly choking with bleak horrors, is not in the end an entirely bleak document, as Solzhenitsyn intended. It is a warning to all of us of what it means to lose freedom, but it is a warning to tyrants as well, that they can never hope to win in the end. The reader comes away chastened – very chastened – but not despairing. As W. L. Webb said, reviewing the book in the Guardian, ‘To live now and not to know this work is to be a kind of historical fool missing a crucial part of the consciousness of the age.’111

  The un-freedoms in the Communist world, described by Solzhenitsyn and the Medvedevs, or those which took place in the Cultural Revolution in China, were far worse than anything that occurred in the West. Their extent, the vast number of their victims, underlined the fragility of freedom, equality, and justice everywhere. And, just as the 1960s had opened with Hayek’s and Friedman’s examinations of freedom, so the decade closed with other philosophers addressing the same issues, after years of turbulence in the name of civil rights.

  In his 1969 book Four Essays on Liberty, Isaiah Berlin built on Hayek’s notion that, in order to be free, man needs an area of private life where he is accountable to no one, where he can he left alone, free of constraint. Born in 1909 in Riga, part of the Russian empire, Berlin had moved to Russia when he was six. In 1921 his family had moved to Britain, where he was educated at Oxford, becoming a fellow of All Souls and subsequently professor of social and political theory and founding president of Wolfson College. In his essays, Berlin made three points, the first that liberty is just that: freedom.112 In a famous sentence, he wrote, ‘Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience.’113 Berlin was at pains to point out that one man’s freedom may conflict with another’s; they may indeed be irreconcilable. His second and third points were that there is an important distinction between what he called ‘negative’ freedom and ‘positive’ freedom. Negative freedom is, on this analysis, ‘a certain minimum area of personal freedom which on no account must be violated; for if it is overstepped, the individual will find himself in an area too narrow for even that minimum development of his natural faculties which alone makes it possible to pursue, and even to conceive, the various ends which men hold good or right or sacred. It follows that a frontier must be drawn between the area of private life and that of public authority…. Without adequate conditions for the use of freedom, what is the value of freedom?’114 Berlin argued that this doctrine of negative freedom is relatively modern – it does not occur in antiquity – but that the desire not to be impinged upon, to be left to oneself, ‘has been a mark of high civilisation.’ Negative freedom is important for Berlin not merely because of what it stands for but also because it is a simple notion, and therefore something men of goodwill can agree upon.