Soviet Mental Hospitals Hold No Political Prisoners, Doctor Says

A key Soviet psychiatrist said Thursday that there are no patients in Soviet mental hospitals for political reasons.

Georgy Marozov, chairman of the Scientific Society of Psychiatrists and Neuropathologists, made the statement on the heels of Soviet assurances that Soviet authorities are no longer holding political prisoners in prisons.

“There are no patients in mental hospitals in the U.S.S.R. who are there for political reasons,” Marozov told Tass, the Soviet news agency. “The conscientiousness and competence of individual physicians can perhaps be questioned, but I rule out the possibility of deliberately wrong diagnoses.”

Last week, Moscow’s chief psychiatrist said he had recommended the release of the last four patients being held for anti-Soviet activity. The four had been charged with violating Articles 70 and 190 of the Soviet legal code, which prohibit anti-Soviet propaganda and dissemination of anti-Soviet slander.

Vladimir A. Tikhonenko, the chief psychiatric physician for Moscow, said in an interview that the four “have mental problems, but their condition does not warrant their continued isolation and forced treatment.”

He did not say when the four might have been released.

Marozov said the Ministry of Health recently received from the United States a list of the names of 48 political prisoners in Soviet asylums, and he said the Soviets are “thoroughly studying” it.

He said a group of American psychiatrists are to visit the Soviet Union next month to check on possible human rights violations at Soviet hospitals. He said they will be allowed to “familiarize themselves with the state of these patients and their course of treatment.”

The Soviets maintain that any patients in asylums against their will are there only because doctors have diagnosed mental illness.

Marozov said that lists of political prisoners sent from abroad frequently refer to people who are not in Sovet asylums or even residing in the country.

“Measures for revamping the procedure of registration and observation of mental cases are now being implemented in the Soviet Union,” he said.

Amnesty International, the London-based human rights monitoring organization, has said that the practice of confining dissidents in mental institutions has dramatically declined since 1987.

Last year, the government issued a decree that gave as the sole criterion for forced confinement a person’s threat to his own and society’s safety.