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Political Changes at Home Chapter 24: Political Changes at Home “Yesterday they gave me freedom… What should I do with it?” Vladimir Vysotsky While leading Soviet psychiatrists remained intransigent and continued to deny that anything was wrong in Soviet psychiatry, attributing outside actions to being part of a Cold War slander campaign, Soviet society started to change with an ever-increasing speed and eventually found itself on a rollercoaster out of control. In April 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev had been appointed General Secretary of the CPSU, following a long period of ailing and almost invisible Soviet leadership. Gorbachev was of a younger generation that had not participated in the Great Patriotic War (as the Second World War was called in the Soviet Union) and had seen Stalin’s terror from the other side: his maternal grandfather had been subject to repression.14 Initially very little changed and, in particular, the political repression of dissidents continued and even worsened, but by the end of 1986 a fundamental shift took place. The catalyst was the death of the well-known writer and dissident Anatoly Marchenko, who had served most of his life in prisons and camps and had been on hunger strike for three months in Chistopol prison.15 The 14 Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (born 1931) was the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, serving from 1985 until 1991, and also the last head of state of the USSR, serving from 1988 until its collapse in 1991. He was the only Soviet leader to have been born after the October Revolution of 1917. Gorbachev was born in Stavropol Krai into a peasant family, and oper- ated combine harvesters on collective farms. His maternal grandfather, a veteran Communist, narrowly escaped execution after having been branded a Trotskyite. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1955 with a degree in law. While in college, he joined the Communist party of the Soviet Union, and soon became very active within it. In 1970, he was appointed the First Party Secretary of the Committee of the CPSU of the Stavropol Krai (Kraikom), First Secretary to the Supreme Soviet in 1974, and appointed a member of Politburo in 1979. After the deaths of Soviet Leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by Politburo in 1985. Gor- bachev’s attempts at reform as well as summit conferences with United States President Ronald Reagan contributed to the end of the Cold War, ended the politi- cal supremacy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. 15 Anatoly Tikhonovich Marchenko (1938-1986) was an influential and well- known Soviet dissident, author, and human rights campaigner. Initially a Robert van Voren 317 Soviets’ decision to let him emigrate came too late: while his wife was preparing the emigration documents, he succumbed to a variety of ailments and malnutrition. At that moment, the CSCE was having one of its major conferences in Vienna, and the death of Marchenko caused uproar. The Americans threatened to walk out and freeze the process of détente, and Gorbachev understood that something fundamental had to be done. He called Andrei Sakharov, the dissident leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who had been exiled to Gorki in late 1979 after criticizing the invasion of Afghanistan, and asked him to come back to Moscow “to serve his country.” Sakharov agreed. Release of political prisoners Less than two months later the first political prisoners were released, and one of them was Anatoly Koryagin, the imprisoned psychiatrist and Honorary Member of the WPA. “At the beginning of February 1987, the situation changed dramatically for Koryagin. Galina [Koryagina] 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 worker on a drilling gang, and not of intellectual background or upbringing, he became radicalized, and turned to writing and politics, after being imprisoned as a young man on trumped-up charges. During his time in the labor camps and prisons he studied, and began to associate with dissidents. He first became widely known through his book My Testimony, an autobiographical account of his then-recent sentence in Soviet labor camps and prison, which caused a sensation when it was released in the West in 1969. It brought home to read- ers around the world, including the USSR itself that the Soviet gulag had not ended with Stalin. He also became active in the Soviet human rights movement and was one of the founder members of the influential and much-emulated Moscow Helsinki Group. He was continually harassed by the authorities, and was imprisoned for several different terms, spending about 20 years in prison and internal exile. He died in Chistopol prison hospital at the age of 48 on December 8, 1986, as a result of a three month long hunger strike he was conducting, the goal of which was the release of all Soviet prisoners of con- science. The widespread international outcry over his death was a major factor in finally pushing then-General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to authorize the large-scale release of political prisoners in 1987..
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