Engineer Anatol Oprea from Edineþ has been monitored by a psychiatric clinic for nearly 24 years. For as long he has been trying to prove that he is a victim repressive psychiatry. “I have never been mentally ill. Insane was the system that put me in a mental house only because I didn’t fit in their standards of ‘homo sovieticus,’ A. Oprea said. Like him, other individuals who were ‘treated’ by force in psychiatric clinics continue to look for justice, although the Law on Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repressions has been in effect since 1992. The establishment of a commission to study the communist regime gave them new hopes. The Moldovan President a.i. Mihai Ghimpu promises that the commission will also examine the cases of hospitalization of people in mental hospitals for political convictions.
Diagnosed As Insane Based On… Urine Tests
Anatol Oprea, now 64, was declared mentally ill in 1986 because he was wearing a protection mask on the street. He had problems with his lever and thought that the polluted air was the reason, and so, he made himself a mask and was wearing it periodically, covering it with his scarf so that it didn’t draw attention. Going to the Republican Clinical Hospital (RCH) for a routine checkup he told the doctor about the mask. The latter told him he needed a more complex examination of his lever and sent him to “Codru”. Anatol Oprea says he had no idea that the mental hospital was located there. He understood what was going on only when the door closed behind him like a trap and the doctor told him that only a mentally ill person would walk on the street wearing a mask. He did not object and accepted to be hospitalized hoping that a man who was from his village and worked as professor at the clinic would help him. And that one ‘helped’ him and diagnosed him with ‘slowly progressive schizophrenia, paranoid syndrome’ prescribing him treatment for 75 days. “He did not subject me to any investigations! He only did some urine tests!” Oprea says. He supposes that his mask bothered the authorities who either considered it a mockery or didn’t want to acknowledge openly that there existed an environment pollution problem.
Revengeful Bosses?
The former work colleagues of Anatol Oprea remember that they were surprised to hear that he had got into the madhouse because they knew him as a healthy person, both physically and mentally, and didn’t notice any deviations in him. “He was an honest and principled man, with unordinary thinking who always told the truth straight in the face, and therefore he often had problems with his bosses. That is why the latter wrote in the characteristics asked by the doctors that A. Oprea had an inadequate behavior. They destroyed his life,” says Victor Moraru from the village of Trinca, district of Edineþ, who had worked with A. Oprea at the same construction company. Nicolae Petrovici, another former colleague of Oprea said that the latter ‘was made insane’ due to his principledness. He remembers a case when Oprea was sanctioned by a big fine because he dared to correct a project that had been done perfunctorily by others. Gheorghe Nistor, engineer at “Apã-Canal” in Edineþ, who has known A. Oprea since university years, also believes that the diagnosis was fabricated. “He was the best student in our class, president of the class, a brilliant engineer,” Gh. Nistor says.
After coming back from treatment, A. Oprea couldn’t find a job anymore. They refused to accept him anywhere on the grounds that…he was mentally ill. He now lives very hard, from temporary earnings, and cannot benefit even from pension. The most painful thing for him is that in his hometown people look suspiciously at him and whisper at his back. The mayor of Edineþ, Constantin Cojocaru, said that he knows Anatol Oprea very well and many times takes his advice into account. At Oprea’s suggestions, engineering improvements were made in the public garden, at the children’s library, and in other places. “I didn’t notice Anatol Oprea to have any mental disorders; on the contrary, he is person showing logic, intelligence and coherence,” C. Cojocaru says and acknowledges that he doesn’t hire Oprea because the latter… is being monitored by the mental hospital.
He Wants Rehabilitation
For nearly 24 years, Anatol Oprea has never stopped looking for justice in order to get rid of the ‘mentally ill’ stigma. In 1988 he turned to the former main psychiatrist of Moldova, Mihai Hotineanu, but in vain. The latter convoked a commission most of which was made up of the same doctors on whom Oprea had complained. Only after the breakup of the USRR, in 1992, did A. Oprea go on a hunger strike next to the ªtefan cel Mare monument in Chisinau. But he says he was forced into a police van and taken to Buiucani Sector Police Station. He was released only after his friends interfered. He continued to file complaints and to make approaches… He turned for help to the members of the Parliament. At the end of 1990s, he received an answer to one of his interpellations, signed by the Head of Section no.8 of the Mental Hospital, Ludmila Cunicovskaia, who said that a soviet instruction was applied against Anatol Oprea (Instruction No. 06 – 14/93, signed by the Ministry of Health of the ex-USSR and approved by the USSR Prosecutor in 1970s). Under that document, inconvenient individuals with “dangerous” political convictions for the soviet society were ‘diagnosed’ and hospitalized by force in madhouses. In 1991, when Moscow publicly recognized that psychiatry was used in USSR as a political repression tool, the instruction was annulled. But it seems that not in Anatol Oprea’s case. The coming to power of the liberal–democratic forces gave him hope. He has recently addressed a letter to the Moldovan President a.i. Mihai Ghimpu and to the other leaders of the Alliance for European Integration, as well as to the Prosecutor General, insisting that his case be investigated. He says he hasn’t received an answer yet but he is determined to go to court and to reach even the ECHR.
Testimonies of Ex-Psychiatric Doctor
The use of repressive psychiatry in the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR) is confirmed not only by the patients. In 1998, the psychiatrist Alexei Maºec made shocking disclosures in the Chisinau press about concrete cases from his practice. He spoke about individuals that had been sent to mental treatment for political reasons – inconvenient people who wrote complaints and criticized the Soviet power – whom he subsequently released from hospital finding them perfectly healthy. After those disclosures, the doctor was asked to resign ‘of his own accord’ from the Clinical Hospital of Psychiatry. However, he supported his statements at various conferences, both in Chiºinãu and abroad, joining his colleagues from Romania, Russia, Bulgaria, France etc., who openly speak about the terrible phenomenon that took place also in other countries of the former socialist camp. Alexei Maºec identified tens of Moldovan individuals who had to suffer from repressive psychiatry. He still continues to look for possible victims although, he says, it is more and more difficult as time goes by – many people have died or have been brought to insanity as a result of the ‘treatments’ with psychotropic drugs. Maºec says that in the Mental Hospital of MSSR, as in the entire ex-USST, there were used various methods of torture, including shots of haloperidol, sulphasine etc. in doses exceeding several times the right norm. Used without correctors, i.e. preparations that decrease their negative effects on the body, they cause serious mental changes and stupendous pains.
Maºec also talks about how the political ‘patients’ were caught: in the middle of the night, by specially selected hospital attendants from among former prisoners. Brought to the mental hospital by the ambulance, the inconvenient individuals were examined by a special commission that was uniformly diagnosing them with the same: ‘slowly progressive schizophrenia” or ‘paranoid syndrome’. Maºec says that that was a diagnosis invented at the Serbski Institute of Moscow, at the order of the Communist Party, or such states are not classified as pathologies in the list of mental diseases in western countries. “It was enough for a party or KGB chief to call the mental hospital for an individual’s fate to be sealed,” Maºec says. According to him, psychiatry staff was promoted not so much by their professionalism but especially by their level of obedience to the ‘almighty’ party, so that many members of the ‘famous’ commission advanced very fast in their careers.
Officially: No ‘Political’ Patients
We tried to speak with a number of workers at the RCH on this topic. All of them denied having ever treated healthy people. The current main psychiatrist of Moldova Anatol Nacu refuses to comment on abuses in psychiatry saying that he had never heard of healthy people being hospitalized by force. The hospital’s deputy director Ion Catrinici who has been working here for 38 years, says the same thing. Moreover, he says that the individuals who claim to have been hospitalized by force for political reasons suffer from mental diseases exactly for the reason that they consider themselves victims of the psychiatry. It is hard to say today what the scope of repressive psychiatry in MSSR was. The number and names of all people who have been put through the psychiatric mixer of the former regime are not known for sure. Some mental hospital employees say that those involved in that shameful practice made sure to cover their traces so that the compromising medical files were deliberately destroyed. At the interpellations of judges and lawyers about certain former patients, the facility says that they had never been hospitalized and the official explanation for the disappearance of the hospital’s archives is that it was lost during a flood. Nonetheless, some victims –former professors at the Chisinau Technical Institute, Mihai Andronic and Vasile Munteanu, finding witnesses of their forced detainment in the mental hospital, managed to rehabilitate themselves through court ten years ago.
Treated for Anti-Soviet Ideas
M. Andronic and V. Munteanu did not fight the system; on the contrary, they considered themselves devoted communists. However, the patriotic ‘fever’ played pranks on them. Inspired by the thaw during Hruschov times, they started to criticize certain negative phenomena (for instance, the incompetence of the leadership). Thus, after being denounced by a colleague, V. Munteanu was taken from home by ambulance by a team of doctors and people from the security service. They searched him but didn’t find any compromising materials, so they didn’t start a criminal case against him but sent him for mental treatment for 75 days. Being tortured with overdoses, he lost so much weight that was looking like a detainee from a concentration camp; he couldn’t walk and partly lost his sight. He remembers the reply of the head of the division, when he asked him one day to let him go home: “I will treat you for your dislike for the soviet power.” That doctor still has an important position at the mental hospital. V. Munteanu was released when he ‘retracted’ his ideas. That was the only possibility for ‘political patients’ to save themselves, says Alexandru Podrabinek, author of the book “Corrective Psychiatry,” mentioning that those who refused to acknowledge that they had cured themselves from ‘their sick ideas’ risked to remain in the prison-hospitals for many years.
They tried to fabricate a case against Mihai Andronic as well, accusing him of sharing the anti-Soviet ideas of a colleague of his, Alexandru ªoltoianu, whose case was a resounding one in 1970s. He refused to give false testimonies against ªoltoianu and therefore started to be persecuted at work, then forced to write a request for exclusion from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and after that was fired from the Technical Institute. After that he could get employed only as an ordinary worker. Believing that everything that had happened to him was a mistake of the system, Andronic thought it needed edification, and so, he sent a letter to the head of the Supreme Soviet of those times with a proposal to form an opposition communist party, for a “brotherly and honest competition in the Soviets.” Back in 1970s, such words sounded like blasphemy. After that letter Mihai Andronic was invited to the neurology clinic, being taken by car directly from his work, and taken by force from there to the mental hospital. Prior to that, his boss had been obliged to sign a calumnious letter against him addressed to a number of institutions. He was rehabilitated in 1997 by Botanica District Court. Prior to the lawsuit, when he had asked for a certificate confirming he had been hospitalized for four months (he needed that certificate for calculations of his pension pay), the administration of RCP answered that they had never had such a patient. However, in the court hearing, one of the older doctors recognized that M. Andronic had been her patient.
Gheorghe David Case
Proof of the atrocities of the former regime is also the case of the famous dissident Gheorghe David, a brilliant engineer who went through the sufferings of the mental prison of Dnepropetrovsk (Ukraine), author of breathtaking disclosures, published in the magazine “Basarabia” (1990, No.8). After returning to MSSR, the doctor Alexei Maºec diagnosed him as ‘completely healthy’. The national courts refused to rehabilitate him, i.e. to recognize him as victim of political psychiatry, and so, he filed a complaint with ECHR, which ruled in his favor. Unfortunately, he died a few months before finding out about his victory. Gheorghe David’s niece Ana Glib from the village of Pepeni, district of Sângerei, recalls that her uncle was a real patriot and ‘wondered about many things from the times he was young’. He often wrote letters to Moscow, gave interviews for “Free Europe” and western newspapers in which he openly spoke about the ethnical affiliation of Bessarabians, about Bessarabia’s occupation by the USSR etc. Many personalities who knew him or even were his friends, among whom the publicist Nicolae Negru, say that Gh. David was in full possession of his faculties. He was declared mentally ill after he had sent a letter to Mihail Gorbaciov in which he talked about national identity and the Latin alphabet, and criticized the introduction of Soviet troops in Afghanistan. The KGB couldn’t forgive him this latter part, N. Negru says. A copy of the letter subsequently reached “Free Europe.” After that David was brought from Dnepropetrovsk to the Codru Mental Hospital. He was released after Gheorghe Ghimpu asked for his release at one of the national meetings. After that, Gh. David managed to make two new inventions and taught at the Technical University for the rest of his life.
Hospitalized For Claiming Her Property Back
Another victim of the former regime about whom the doctor A. Maºec remembers was Fevronia Navranciuc, a woman who after returning from Siberia had the courage to ask the authorities to give her house back, which had been seized, or to give her another one because she didn’t have a place to live. The woman was taken from the party district office directly to the mental hospital where she was kept for the rest of her life. Two years ago, when we tried to find out something about this woman, we were told by the information office of RCP that such a person was not in their list of patients. A. Maºec also remembers Pelagheia Smirnova, an ordinary woman from Strãºeni who was kept for ten years in the Kazan closed regime hospital (one of the most well-known mental prisons in USSR) for writing a letter to Nikita Hruºciov in which she complained about the endless queues after bread. After being released, A. Maºec diagnosed her as ‘healthy’, like many other political patients who reached his office.
In Commission’s Attention
As many specialists say, among whom the Romanian psychiatrist Ioan Popa, the author of the volume “White Book of Romanian Psychiatry,” the phenomenon of political psychiatry must be elucidated until the end because there is danger it may recur. The media have signaled incidents of use of psychiatry as a political weapon also after the fall of the communist regime. Lawyers say that there are incidents even today of abusive use of psychiatry, diagnosing certain individuals as ‘mentally ill’ in order to deprive them of their goods.
The Moldovan President a.i. Mihai Ghimpu who was asked for his opinion in this issue said that the victims of repressive psychiatry had formally been rehabilitated through the Law on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repressions, adopted by the Parliament in 1992. M. Ghimpu says however that this painful leaf of history will be in the attention of the commission for studying the communist regime that was recently established, calling those who suffered to contact the commission. The historian Igor Caºu, commission’s deputy chairman, said in this regard that the archives of the security service would be researched to establish the extent to which psychiatry had been used as method of repression on the territory of our country. The historian Anatol Petrencu, specialist in modern history, also asserts that psychiatry was widely used as a repression tool in ex-USSR. He does not doubt that this happened in ex-MSSR as well and that the doctors should acknowledge it and thus correct the mistakes and crimes they had committed against innocent people.
At present, doctor A. Maºec works on preparing the so-called “white book of political psychiatry,” similar to those published in other countries of the former socialist camp, and asks all those who had to suffer to contact him. The former political ‘patients’ want their good names to be rehabilitated and be granted material damages for the years wasted in mental prisons and for those when they couldn’t find a job due to discrimination.
Alina Rusu
Investigative Journalism Center
This investigation has been produced within the Journalists for Human Rights Media Campaign, implemented by the Investigative Journalism Center with the support of the US Embassy in Moldova. The responsibility for this article belongs to the author.