, 1980 For political reasons, Podrabinek was denied entrance to medical school, (His medical father, himself the son of an "
Enemy of the People" shot in 1937, did not discourage him.) After reading the notes that dissident poet
Vladimir Gershuni's smuggled out of the
Oryol Special Psychiatric hospital, Alexander became interested in the
political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR. Soon he was a contributing editor to the
Chronicle of Current Events (1968-1982), covering psychiatric issues. In January 1977, he also travelled to Siberia as a courier for the Relief (Solzhenitsyn) Fund, delivering money to the needy families of political prisoners, held in the camps or forced to live in exile.
Punitive Psychiatry On 5 January 1977, Podrabinek launched the
Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes. The Commission at first had three other members (Vyacheslav Bakhmin, Irina Kaplun and Felix Serebrov), and its consultant psychiatrist was A.A. Voloshanovich. Around the Commission formed a circle of supporters "without whom we could have done nothing," comments Podrabinek. "The volume of work was too great.". They visited psychiatric hospitals, wrote appeals to hospital doctors, and published information on psychiatric abuse in their own information bulletins, and in other samizdat publications like the
Chronicle of Current Events. In 1977, Podrabinek published
Punitive Medicine [Карательная медицина], the Russian edition of his book on the systematic abuse of psychiatry for political purposes in the USSR. In December 1977, the KGB approached Podrabinek's father Pinkhos, and threatened to arrest and imprison both his sons (Kirill was suffering from TB) if the three of them did not agree to emigrate to Israel. On 15 August 1978, Alexander Podrabinek was convicted of "
anti-Soviet slander", sentenced to five years' banishment or internal exile, and was first transported to the Irkutsk Region, Siberia. (His brother Kirill, meanwhile, was convicted of possessing an offensive weapon and was sent to a camp for ordinary criminals.) After the English edition of
Punitive Medicine appeared, Podrabinek was again charged with political offences — he was by then exiled to
Yakutia in the Soviet Far East — and at his trial in Ust-Nera on 6 January 1981, he was sentenced to three years in a local corrective-labour camp.
Return from the Far East In autumn 1986, prompted by
Anatoly Marchenko's hunger strike in
Chistopol Prison, Podrabinek, veteran dissident
Larisa Bogoraz, and lawyer
Sophia Kalistratova launched a campaign for the release of the Soviet Union's hundreds of political prisoners. They sent letters requesting a wide amnesty to the presidium of the
USSR Supreme Soviet and to
Mikhail Gorbachev, the new leader of the Soviet Communist Party. There was no response. Then they began sending their two letters to prominent members of the artistic and technical intelligentsia: to writers, poets and artists; and to scientists and scholars. The result was disheartening. With notable exceptions, e.g. the world-famous animé artist
Yury Norstein, very few would put their name to such a document. In 1987, Podrabinek founded the weekly
samizdat newspaper
Express Chronicle, which appeared in Russian and English between 1987 and 2000. As the first uncensored media outlet in the USSR, with the
Glasnost journal of
Sergei Grigoryants, the
Chronicle drew the interest of Western journalists in Moscow . The
Chronicle circulated in a hundred major Soviet cities. In March 1989, Alexander participated in the founding of the
Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia. ==Career as a journalist==