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Ex-Soviet dissident recalls the good bad days
By Seth Mydans International Herald Tribune
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2005
MOSCOW It was in 1978, the peak of the Soviet dissident movement, that
the men who were following Aleksandr Podrabinek stood on his skis to stop him
from sliding away from them.
They worked in teams of eight, around the clock, not so much to find out
where he was going as to wear him down. When he went into a telephone booth, as
the joke had it, they all tried to squeeze in with him.
"I wrote a letter to Andropov," Podrabinek said, referring to Yuri
Andropov, then the head of the KGB, "and I told him, 'You should issue skis to
your agents so they can follow me and not interfere with my recreation."'
Soon afterward, at the age of 24, he was convicted of slandering the
Soviet state in documents he smuggled abroad and was sent into Siberian exile,
as he had known perfectly well he would be.
Podrabinek, whose crime was to write an exposé of psychiatric abuses, may
have been one of the cheekier of the dissidents. But he shared with them a
quality that seems, among a few stubborn people, to stymie repressive states
everywhere. He refused to be intimidated or silenced.
It is a rare state of mind that he called inner freedom but could also be
called orneriness. Podrabinek, for example, said that although he is culturally
Russian, he identified himself officially in Soviet times as Jewish because
Jews were repressed.
"In general, dissidents were people who got fed up with putting up with
lies, with idiots and slaves," he said over dinner recently. "You had to not be
afraid. It's very simple. But you had to reach that point."
That time of severe repression has passed now. Russia may not be a garden
of freedoms as President Vladimir Putin continues to tighten his grip. But it
is not the Soviet Union.
The dissidents, once the brave conscience of their country, have mostly
faded from view, and for Podrabinek, who is now 52, that is as it should be.
"Brecht said it, 'It's an unhappy country that needs heroes,"' Podrabinek
said, referring to Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright. "That's true. They
are not needed in a normal nation."
The dissident heroes in Russia have been replaced by professional human
rights workers, often brilliant and dedicated, with offices and clerical
staffs.
"They are completely different people," Podrabinek said.
"Another generation, another context. They are more efficient. They do it
like work. For human rights defenders, now you have to be good at fund-raising,
at organizing, at talking with the government."
He may well be the last in a line of political prisoners in his family.
His grandfather was executed by Stalin and his father and brother both spent
time as political prisoners.
It is a sign of mellower times that his two grown sons and his teenage
daughter are the first of four generations of his family not to have been
arrested.
The dissidents were by definition misfits, and Podrabinek, for one,
though he seems to be having a good time, has not really made a go of it in
this more normal nation.
He is one of just a few former dissidents who tried to make the
transition to post-communist human rights work, but he acknowledges that he is
not much of a manager or fund-raiser.
In 1987, taking advantage of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost, he created
Ekspress Khronika, a human rights weekly that briefly caught the public eye.
When that folded in 2000, he founded Prima-News, www.prima-news.ru, a
tiny human rights news agency that he said could soon collapse for lack of
finances.
He has about 400 subscribers, he said, but most of them cannot afford to
pay him. The foreign financial support that sustains him could end at any time.
"I'm a poor businessman," Podrabinek said. "I find it uncomfortable to
ask for money, to tell the truth."
A compact, energetic man in a black sweater and a stubble of a beard, he
has not changed much since his skiing days, as youthful and irreverent as ever.
When the Kremlin said in September that it might restrict foreign travel
by scientists, Podrabinek was ready with a naughty sound bite.
"Today they are setting limits on foreign trips for scientists," he told
the radio station Ekho Moskvy, "and tomorrow they will recreate an Iron Curtain
around the country, so that nobody will doubt that we live in the happiest
country in the world."
It was as a young ambulance paramedic that Podrabinek began to chronicle
the widespread use of psychiatric imprisonment to punish and discredit
dissenters.
In 1978 he was exiled to northeastern Siberia, one of the coldest places
in the world, for having sent abroad his book manuscript, "Punitive Medicine."
In 1980, while he was still in exile, the book was published in English
and he was convicted for a second time for the same offense and sent to a labor
camp. He served a total of five and a half years.
Today, in this transitional period of Russian history, Podrabinek said,
people cannot take their freedoms for granted. Things are inching backward, and
it is possible that there will be a need once again for dissidents in Russia.
The other night, he took two young women from his staff to one of
Moscow's new sushi restaurants and talked to them about willpower.
It was willpower that sustained him as a prisoner, he said, and willpower
that seems to be missing in Russia today.
"When I was in solitary confinement I made friends with a mouse, a tiny
mouse that lived in my cell," he said. "I gave it crumbs of bread. When my
hunger got very strong, I got the idea of eating it. When you are hungry, you
stop thinking rationally. But I didn't. I didn't eat my friend."
Even though they have the right to vote and to speak out, he said, the
Russian people today are as passive as they were in Soviet times.
"Russia is a big, heavy country," he said. "A very inert country. People
don't feel their own personal dignity. They don't feel they are true citizens."
And so, as the government takes its small, sliding steps backward, they
do nothing to defend their diminishing freedoms.
"A lot depends on us, how we relate to those in power," he said. "If we
value our personal freedom, we will keep it. If we don't value it, we will lose
it."
In fact, he said, freedom seems to mean less to post-Soviet Russians than
the social and economic improvements in their lives.
"That is what democracy is all about now: money, a good life, material
well-being."
Even the FSB, the successor to the KGB, has grown comfortable and
materialistic, he said, its agents less dedicated than the men who lunged after
him in the snow and stood on his skis.
In those years, there was a real battle raging between good and evil, and
both sides fought hard.
"Of course, they watch," he said of the new generation of secret police.
"That's part of their work. But they aren't as professional as the KGB. They
don't have as serious orders. They follow social movements, politics. So the
professionalism is not as necessary. They get paid, thank God, so they are
happy."
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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