Dr Koryagin
Plight PsYchi of Dr Anatoly Koryagin, the Russian
atrist now in prison in the Soviet Union?
K Three years ago, on 13 February 1981, Dr twelve-Year was arrested and later given. a exposing sentence for his part in publicly psychiatry Government's abuse of ppress dissent. Sent to a Urals labour camp, he then incurred the n.her displeasure of the authorities by °Driv.ing medical treatment to fellow tr soners, and as punishment was r,,I.Isferred to the even harsher regime of
• -n_istopol prison.
vit:tere, in protest at not having seen his art," and three children since before his series Dr Koryagin subjected himself to. a which of prolonged hunger strikes, during si lef.," he was forcibly fed. When a meeting unallY allowed, in August last year,.his old or could not recognise him. Sir' In the new atmosphere of tentative
bloc, between Britain and the Soviet
°toe, could not the British Government attempt
to alleviate the present appalling He is now seriously ill, suffering from malnutrition and protein deficiency, which has caused his body to become swollen with excess fluid. Recently he has been repeatedly and systematically beaten by prison warders. On one occasion it is reported that the window of his room where the beating took place was left open and his screams were heard by people in the street below.
Friends in Moscow believe that Dr Koryagin is being treated with such special brutality because the KGB is determined to extract from him a denunciation of his own writings critical of Soviet political psychiatry; in particular, a false confession that his paper 'Unwilling Patients', smuggled out of the Soviet Union and subsequently published in the Lancet, was a defamatory fabrication paid for by `Western interests'.
Everyone concerned with the fate of this quite exceptionally courageous man is urged to send telegrams and letters, protesting about his illegal and brutal treatment, to the Soviet authorities; specifically, to the governor of Chistopol prison: 422950 USSR, Tatarskaya ASSR, g. Chistopol, uchr. UE-148/st-4, Captain Romanov; and to the regional director of the Ministry of Internal Affairs: 422950 USSR, Tatarskaya ASSR, g. Chistopol, Ispolkom Gorodskogo Soveta, Upravleniya Vnutrennikh• Del, Upolnomochennomu.
Fiona Mackenzie
Working Group on the Internment of Dissenters in Mental Hospitals, 12 Rosemary Cottages, Rosemary Lane, London SW14
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