Introduction: It is written concerning these Soviet psychiatric hospitals, "When people were arrested and sent to Gulags, there had to be a legal procedure, documents had to be issued, interrogations had to be conducted, it was burdensome for the authorities, so, they devised a short cut to that procedure -declaring them crazy and sending them to the pshikushka which were the special "psychiatric hospitals" run by the military. A simple order from the authorities was enough to send people to the pshikushka, they were stripped of all their rights, locked in without a term, and given very powerful psychiatric drugs, subjected to brain surgeries, electro-shocks, and dreadful human experiments".
The Moscow Times further revealed in 2013: "In the Soviet period, punitive psychiatry was so widespread that one fourth of the dissidents accused of political crimes were declared 'mentally ill.' Even more widespread was the practice of compulsory hospitalization without court order, done simply on the orders of the KGB. Each year the highest authorities in Moscow sent up to 1,000 people to psychiatric hospitals. These were people who had come to the capital in order to fight for the justice denied in their hometowns. The same situation could be observed in the provinces."
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| A Soviet "pshikushka" (psychiatric hospital) |
What follows are excerpted from the Lives of Saints, Martyrs, and Confessors who suffered, and often were killed in these "special hospitals" of the Soviet Union:
Fr. Basil Shipilov was in prisons and psychiatric hospitals in the Soviet Union continuously from the age of 17, except for a year of freedom in 1949-50. In the 1920s the farm belonging to his family was confiscated, and the family was deported to Siberia as forced labour on a collective farm which was encircled by barbed wire.
The crops failed. The family was starving. His father could not feed the family and was shot dead while trying to get out in search of food. His mother soon died of starvation. Some nearby monks looked after Basil and taught him to read and write. He grew to love God and wanted to serve him as an Orthodox priest. Basil joined an underground seminary but was arrested when the secret police discovered it. He was ordained in prison.
For his pastoral care of the other prisoners, and for performing baptisms, he was given a 25-year extension to his sentence, but was amnestied in 1949. He used his freedom to care for the starving population of a large area in Central Siberia. At great risk to himself, he often tried to supply the needs of the 20,000 prisoners in a local labour camp by collecting berries in the forests. No other food was available. For a year he preached and cared for the sick and dying, but eventually, in 1950, he was arrested for "anti-Sovietism".
Labelled a schizophrenic at Moscow's Serbsky Institute for Forensic Psychiatry, he was sentenced to indefinite confinement in institutions for the criminally insane. He spent many years in prison psychiatric hospitals, first at Kazan, and later at Sychevka. There the officer in charge told him: "If you don't give up your faith, you will stay here - unless they kill you."
And doctors told him: "No one knows about you. No one will ever find you. Anything can happen to you."
In 1977 he was transferred to the closed wing of an ordinary psychiatric hospital near Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. He suffered the administration of dangerously large doses of insulin even though he was not a diabetic. He sustained a severe skull fracture and developed epilepsy. He was repeatedly beaten for crossing himself and for fasting.
In 1979 he was officially declared to be "discharged", but in 1988, when he was 65 years old, he was still there, and still expected to fulfill the work norms or be punished. Apparently no place could be found for him in a Soviet old people's home. The state refused to allow Basil to live with a Soviet host who had offered to open his home to him. He wanted to come to the West, and a suitable host was ready to receive him.
A fellow prisoner said that Fr. Basil was a small man who would pray fervently twice a day for the suffering he saw around him. Speaking of those orchestrating the abuse of psychiatry, he commented to a friend: "Many people here are in very great sin, and we must pray for them."
The last news of him was that he had been moved to a hospital in Krasnoyarsk.
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| A Soviet "pshikushka" (psychiatric hospital) |
Fr. Alexis (according to some sources, Leonid) Kotov was first sentenced in 1939. In 1945 he was sentenced to death, which sentence was commuted to ten years. He spent an additional twenty years in special psychiatric hospitals.
Yuri Belov writes: "When I was in Sychevka psychiatric hospital of the MVD, I met quite a few Orthodox ascetics. I shall first tell you about Fr. Alexis (Kotov), who, according to the witness of Joseph Terelya, was killed by nurses in 1976, when they had already taken me out of Sychevka. I first met Fr. Alexis in 1966 in Lefortovo, then in the Serbsky institute where he was undergoing a psychiatric examination. He was one of those people who speak the truth boldly, to one's face. For this, already in Stalin's time, he was thrown out of his job and exiled. In exile he tore down Stalin's portrait from the walls, for which he was sentenced to 10 years in Mordovia. Then began his wandering through the psychiatric hospitals: Kazan, Leningrad, Sychevka Special Psychiatric Hospital. He was killed in Sychevka for his honorableness: while working in the kitchen, he refused to cover up the nurses' theft of food."
However, in 1982 USSR News Brief reported that Fr. Kotov - who is described as a priest and poet who managed to smuggle some of his poetry out of hospital through his fellow prisoner, Glaphira Kuldysheva, "is to this day in Vladimir special psychiatric hospital, despite repeated promises that he would be released in the very near future." It is not clear whether this is the same Fr. Kotov as the one said to have been killed in Sychevka special psychiatric hospital.
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Yuri Belov continues: "A great impression was made on me in Sychevka SPH by Fr. Vladimir (Karmanov), from Yerevan. They kept him in Sychevka for more than ten years, but he did not deny his faith, although Rybkin himself, the chief psychiatrist of the MVD, came into his cell and swore a communist's oath: 'Deny your faith, and I'll set you free without a commission. I myself will escort you out.' Fr. Vladimir did not deny his faith and returned to Armenia as an old man already, having spent in all more than twenty years in camps and insane asylums.
I recall how another acquaintance of mine in Sychevka, Fr. Vladimir (Soloviev) from Gzatsk in Smolensk province fervently and unceasingly prayed for whole days at a time, remaining on his knees for hours without paying any attention to the mockings and beatings of the sanitarians, the blows of the sick atheist fanatics. How many times they beat him and scoffed at him, including the chief doctor himself, Major Layamets! They freed him after twelve years of tortures in the hell of Sychevka and held him for more than a year more in the Gedeon region psychiatric hospital near Smolensk. There was a great mass of such people, many of whom didn't even have pallets. The head doctor immediately said to Fr. Vladimir: 'You're holy - you can manage without a bed.' So he remained on the floor, without a mattress, for more than a year. After that they sent him to his native land, but to a Siberian geriatric psycho-colony, where he was condemned, it seems, to die."
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| A Soviet "pshikushka" (psychiatric hospital) |
The martyred servant of God Michael Vasilyevich Avdeyev came from a strongly Orthodox peasant family, and he was directed by pastors who were confessors and martyrs of the Catacomb Church. He lived in Orenburg, and worked as a lorry-driver. At the time of his violent death, which took place in 1977, he was 35 years old.
Because of something wrong in the lorry he was forced to lie down under it and carry out repairs. As a result he caught a chill in his kidney and was admitted into a therapeutic hospital with the diagnosis: nephritis. He felt very ill and began to do what is "not allowed", even "in thought only", in the Soviet Union - to pray out loud in front of everyone, and, according to the Christian custom, to ask forgiveness of all those in the dormitory, saying that he was going to die. And he was not mistaken...
The Soviet doctors were called to this "disorder in the ward", and, of course, since he believed in God and prayed to Him, they certified "sudden insanity", "madness" in the sick man. For the Soviet State recognizes as completely normal only those people who do not pray and do not believe in God. And in the given case, evidently, there was clearly seen such an "impudent demonstration" of religious feelings and convictions. Therefore Michael Vasilyevich was quickly transferred to the psychiatric section of the hospital with the label: "socially dangerous patient".
But here he showed himself to be the same as in the therapeutic hospital. He continued to pray in front of everyone in the ward, and he asked everyone's forgiveness, saying: "I'm dying, I'm dying!"
The rest of the story was recounted by a boy who was in this ward. To the question: what happened that Avdeyev so suddenly, on the first day of his stay in the hospital, died?, he replied: "A doctor entered with a big syringe and said: "'You're feeling ill? We shall give you an injection, and it will immediately make you feel better!'
When he had given this injection, the sick man didn't even move. He died immediately!"
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| Metropolitan Philaret (ROCOR) |
The following declaration was adopted by the Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia at a meeting held in Frankfurt on June 26-27, 1971:
Terrible news has reached us from Russia. The Soviet authorities have not been capable of fashioning a Soviet Man malleable in every respect to the pressures of a totalitarian government. Religious people, and those citizens vindicating their right to think otherwise than in terms of party directions, have been whisked away towards so-called “special psychiatric hospitals”. Subjected to drugs, they are numbed and can no longer defend their faith; they are inevitably helpless.
Vassily Ivanovitch Chernyshev, professor of mathematics, who was confined in the Leningrad “Special Psychiatric Hospital”, writes: “Although I am afraid of death, I would rather be shot. How horrible, how loathsome is the mere thought that my soul will be soiled, crushed! Man’s individuality vanishes, his brain is numbed, his sensibility destroyed, his memory lost. But what is worse, as a result of the “treatment”, the delicate texture of human personality is coarsened, and this – brings death to creation. People forced to take “aminazin” cannot so much as read after taking the drug. Their mental process becomes an increasingly coarse and primitive one”.
N. I. Chernyshev testifies that for more than 25 years, N. I. Broslavsky – a sane man, has been languishing in the same “hospital”. He is offered freedom if he denies his faith in God.
Just recently, a work entitled “Notes from the Red House”, by Guenady Mikhailovich Shimanov, has reached the West. After further “treatment”, the author expects to be released from the “hospital” and sent back to his beloved wife, a “feeble-minded, slobbering-mouthed, giggling individual”.
– “There has been some progress!” – the psychiatrist will say, “he has already lost his faith in God. Yet it is true that he reasons with some difficulty and can hardly move his tongue around, but his previous logic was merely a superficial one; as a matter of fact, he was raving”.
G. N. Shimanov proclaims, nevertheless: “The Lord’s will be done in everything! Whether they drive me mad, whether they let me keep my mind, all is good and beautiful under God’s heaven. I accept everything as a child does from the hands of its father – be it joy, bitterness, reason or madness, be it light or darkness, good or evil…”
“Special Psychiatric Hospitals” are known to exist in Kazan, Sychevka (Smolensk region), Leningrad, Cherniahovsk, Minsk, Dniepropetrovsk, Orel. It is very likely that they are also to be found in other regions. In many psychiatric hospitals special wards have been set aside for “treatment” against dissidents of all complexions.
The names of 60 victims of such “treatment” have been published abroad.
The Moscow Patriarchate, recognized by the atheistic government of the USSR, and kept under its control, maintains a stony silence.
We, Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, living abroad in freedom, cannot remain silent.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn has called the confinement of sane people in psychiatric hospitals as “tantamount to sending them to gas chambers”.
In the name of the Russian Orthodox Church and in the name of our suffering nation, we are appealing to the conscience of the world.
It must condemn communist crimes as it condemned the crimes of National Socialism.
It must induce governments of the free countries to express their disapproval through the medium of international organizations and public communications. It must stand up for those people mutilated by doctors who have become executioners.
Prayers must be said for our persecuted brethren.
+ Metropolitan Philaret, President of the Synod of Bishops of The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia
Archbishop Philotheos, Administrator of the Berlin and German Diocese
Archbishop Anthony of Geneva and Western Europe, Administrator of the Austrian Diocese
Bishop Nathanael, Father Superior of St. Job Pochaevsky’s Monastery in Munich
Bishop Jacob of The Hague, Head of the Russian Orthodox Mission in Holland
Bishop Paul of Stuttgart