Inmate Only Pretended to Take Mind-Altering Drugs : Ruse Saved Sanity, Soviet Dissident Says

For almost six months, Viktor Davydov conned doctors in a Soviet psychiatric prison into thinking he was taking the mind-altering drugs they gave him. The ruse saved his sanity, perhaps his life.

“Thanks to that, I am alive and talking to you now,” Davydov, now 28, said as he sipped tea in a Vienna cafe.

The thin, prematurely gray Soviet dissident recalled the small, pale yellow cell lit by a bare bulb where he and three mental patients huddled in thin blankets against the cold and spent winter mornings scratching frost off the inside of the window.

Meals, toothbrushes and water came through a metal slot in the door. A nurse appeared three times a day--with guards outside in case of trouble--and gave each patient a pill, peering inside his mouth to make sure he swallowed the medication.

“If she found out you hadn’t, she did nothing, but she wrote it down and you got an injection the next day,” Davydov said.

But Davydov discovered that he could conceal the pill behind his front teeth on a scrap of bread and dispose of it once the nurse and guards had gone. He credits this with saving his life.

By the time he was 27, Davydov had spent nearly four years in Soviet prisons and psychiatric hospitals.

His experience was not unique: Amnesty International estimates that since 1977, Soviet authorities have banished 110 dissidents to psychiatric hospitals. The World Psychiatric Assn. puts the number at 200.

When he was 18, Davydov secretly taped Russian passages of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” off broadcasts of a West German radio station. With friends he laboriously transcribed the recordings and circulated samizdat copies in Kuibyshev, a city of 1.5 million in the central Soviet Union.

Four months later he was questioned by the KGB security police. In the next five years, he was arrested twice and expelled from the university, where he was studying history, for criticizing the Soviet government.

Unable to Concentrate He still remembers in detail the mind-altering drugs forced on him in the Blagoveshchensk special psychiatric hospital in eastern Siberia, where he spent more than two years under “compulsory treatment”--a sentence with an indefinite term.

“About 15 minutes after you take the pill you start feeling weak and tired,” he said. “You read to the end of a sentence and you forget the beginning. Three words are all you can remember.

“Politics, religion, your future, your past--you can’t concentrate on anything but your own body and how to overcome this feeling of pins and needles.

“It’s as if your whole body has fallen asleep,” Davydov said. “You can’t stay in one position--you can’t sit or lie. So you pace the room until you are exhausted and collapse on the bed.

“During the first few days I thought I was going insane. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ I thought. I couldn’t rule my own body. Then I realized it must be the drugs. But others didn’t understand what was happening to them. You can’t reason when you’re in that state.”

Half prison and half hospital, Blagovechchensk houses about 700 people in a poorly maintained building on the Amur River near the Soviet-Chinese border.

Inmates given drugs at the walled-in facility may physically survive but become mentally deranged, he said. Five to six people die every year.

Avoiding the daily dosage, whether by concealing it or coughing it up after the orderlies leave, becomes the most important thing of all, Davydov said.

Once a day, one of the two or three doctors in the department whisked through the cells asking, “Are there any questions?”

“But if you say ‘yes,’ they say, ‘We’ll talk another time.’ You soon learn it’s better not to have any questions,” Davydov said.

Once or twice a month, a doctor summons inmates to talk about “politics.”

“They asked me how I became a dissident and about my subjective views. Was I mentally ill or not? Was I ill when I criticized the government?

“At first I told them I was completely sane. Then I understood it wasn’t a good idea to tell them that. I realized they wanted me to think I was insane. The main idea was for them to teach me that I was mentally ill. That was the doctors’ task,” he said.

Davydov described the chief doctor during one period of his imprisonment as a sadistic woman in her early 60s whose job was to “discipline” the patients.

“She asks you questions and studies you. Maybe you’re too quiet, or too happy. She sees this abnormality and tells a nurse to give you an injection. If you ask why and insist you’re all right, she will only increase the dose. There’s no medical basis to it at all,” he said.

On July 28, 1983, Davydov was suddenly released. Last October, he was allowed to leave the country. He hopes to go to the United States next year.

He attributes his short imprisonment to support by Amnesty International and other Western pressure, and to letters his parents sent to Soviet leaders.