FROM HELL TO THE POTTERIES
Thomas Quirke on a
Russian prisoner whose troubles did not end on his release
THE committal of a Soviet dissident, Nikolai Baranov, to a mental hospital by a London magistrate this month was the latest tragic chapter in a tragic life. He had been arrested after an incident at a bus stop in Kentish Town during which he allegedly stabbed a man waiting in the queue and threatened the driver of the bus. Baranov had gone missing from his flat in Newcastle-under-Lyme the day before. Police who were called to the flat found the windows boarded up and the gas turned on. The committal was a bitter blow, too, for the Amnesty group from North Staf- fordshire that had looked after him since he arrived in Britain in August following a 23-year ordeal in labour camps and psychiatric hospitals.
During his first month here Baranov was seen by four psychiatrists, who issued a statement declaring that there was `no evidence of psychosis or of another formal mental illness'. His 'compulsory detention and treatment for such a prolonged period was unjustified', they said. And when the 49-year-old former mechanic spent the first three months of freedom in the home of an Amnesty member, Gerry Nussbaum, a classics lecturer at Keele University, he showed no signs of mental disturbance. When I myself interviewed him in Decem- ber, I found an intelligent and deeply religious man whose conversation ranged from Dostoevsky to the inadequacies of British plumbing. 'Though deeply scarred by his experience,' I wrote, 'he is not broken by it.' Unfortunately, the double burden of having to readjust to freedom after so long behind locked doors, and to an alien country and culture, was, finally, too heavy.
Baranov's was an unusual case. He was not a scientific or artistic celebrity with a academic or cultural community waiting to welcome him. He spent five years in a labour camp for distributing pamphlets on behalf of a clandestine Christian organisa- tion. After his release he was arrested again when he went to the Swedish Embas- sy to ask for help in emigrating from the Soviet Union. The authorities declared him 'unaccountable for his actions' and he spent the next 14 years forcibly confined in maximum-security psychiatric hospitals. The last was a Leningrad hospital for the criminally insane, where, he said, he shared a tiny room 23 hours a day with a murderer and a man who had tried to kill a workmate with an axe. 'Compared with the hospitals,' he told me, 'the camp was paradise on Earth. I can think about it with warmth and pleasure, as something holy or joyful. The hospitals were another story. I was particularly badly treated. Murderers were in for longer but I got the worst treatment.' Baranov was one of the first beneficiaries of glasnost, being freed after Neil Kinnock raised his case with Gor- bachev during a visit to Moscow. Amnesty arranged a press conference in London in September, during which Baranov detailed his sufferings, which were then featured on the television news and in the serious dailies.
His new home was a cramped housing- association flat near the centre of Newcastle-under-Lyme found for him by the local Amnesty group. At first he kept himself busy by corresponding with other freed prisoners throughout Europe. But it was the first time he had lived alone and he told me he was finding it difficult. During his periods of freedom in the Soviet Union he had lived with his mother. Even in the Potteries he could not escape the con- ditioning of decades of imprisonment. Whatever time he went to bed, he woke up at 6.30 — reveille time.
His second problem was that he spoke only a few words of English and was finding it very hard to learn the language. He spent six hours a week at classes and in conversation. 'I think the English language does not come from God,' he told me ruefully. His lack of English prevented him mixing with the friendly locals, restricting his immediate circle of acquaintances to a group of East Europeans living in the town and to a few Russian-speaking lecturers at nearby Keele University. Thirdly, Baranov apparently found it hard to accept that interest in his sufferings had been short-lived and that he would not be the focus of continuing media attention. Fourthly, he suffered the inevitable disillu- sionment of one who has escaped hell and found he has not arrived in heaven. He was saddened by what he described as the West's 'moral degeneracy' and 'obsession with materialism'. He said: `To enjoy the fruits of freedom in the West one must pay for it, and not a small amount of money.' He wanted desperately to write a memoir of his ordeal but a fellow camp !ornate living in France advised him that the West has already sated itself with memoirs about the camps' and that he would not find a publisher. In addition, his relative lack of sophistication might have made it difficult for him to adjust to the complexities of life in the West. Moreover, though his twin sister, Elena, and her teenage son had accompanied him to Bri- tain, relations between them could, by all accounts, have been better. Elena and her son, who is attending sixth-form college in nearby Stoke-on-Trent, have not settled terribly well either. With no English, no Job and no wife for support, Baranov's prospects appeared bleak indeed. The North Staffordshire Amnesty group, which lobbied for seven years to free Baranov, is now worried that his breakdown might be exploited by the Soviet authorities to discredit the campaign against the detention of dissidents in Psychiatric hospitals. They also fear it could damage Amnesty. What the affair has undoubtedly done is expose the lack of professional help avail- able here to political refugees once the television lights have been turned off and the media circus has moved on. As one Concerned neighbour put it: 'If a British patient had just spent 23 years in a special- regime psychiatric hospital, one would hope he would not be stuck in a flat by himself without any structured support. What chance has a Russian who has been through a terrible ordeal?' Janet John- stone, director of Amnesty's British sec- tion, agrees that her organisation is not equipped to run an 'after-care' service. We exist to identify political prisoners and to get them freed. Most freed prisoners stay in their own countries. Very few come to Britain. I know of only a handful from Russia. The North Staffs group were tak- ing care of him and they did a lot.' The group feels it did everything possi- ble to help Baranov and no one could doubt the commitment of Gerry Nussbaum and his wife, both devout Christians. Nikolai was looking forward to moving in to his flat,' he said. 'He called it his little palace. He would certainly not have accepted any form of supervision. When he is well again, perhaps we should look at an arrangement with closer supervision. But it appears that, as with many refugees, all the care and love he received couldn't compen- sate for the loss he felt.' What had impressed me about Baranov was his lack of bitterness about his lost 23 years. 'I am not a vengeful man,' he told Me. 'Solzhenitsyn called Soviet prisons a spiritual Auschwitz — extermination camps for the spirit. But I can't call them that because God was closer to me there than here. My life and suffering must be a testimony for people in the West. It's as if my life were a fable with a moral at the end, a Golgotha.' He continued, in words that now have an added poignancy: 'For a believer there is no such thing as another's misfortune. It is all one's misfortune. Everything is in common, whether misfor- tune or joy.'
Thomas Quirke is a feature writer with the Birmingham Post and Mail.
Previous page
