Diagnosis: Sane

U.S. doctors clear a dissident

Soviet psychiatrists have a nasty habit of declaring dissidents insane and shipping them off to mental hospitals.

Former Red Army Major General Pyotr Grigorenko got the treatment twice.

When he was allowed to visit the U.S. in 1977, he sent word to Washington, B.C., Psychiatrist Walter Reich that he wanted a second opinion from American doctors. His motives: to clear his name, and raise enough of a hue and cry that he would not be confined again.

Grigorenko, now 70, need not have worried. The old soldier was stripped of Soviet citizenship in 1978, and found asylum (political, that is) in the U.S. Reich and colleagues, including Psychiatrists Alan Stone of Harvard and Lawrence Kolb of Columbia, conducted their elaborate mental and neurological tests anyway. The verdict: the tough, bald-pated general is as solid as the Kremlin's walls, with nary a crack in his mental armor.

At the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Chicago, Reich's team provided fascinating glimpses of the video-taped examination of Grigorenko (Q. "Why did you [engage in dissident acts] if you thought you might be shot?" A. "What's the sense of living one extra year if you continue in the fraud of not facing things?"). Though A.P.A. President-elect Stone sent his evaluation on to Soviet Psychiatrist Andrei Snezhnevsky, who had encouraged the American tests, the findings are not likely to end Soviet psychiatric abuses. Snezhnevsky dismissed the results as a "misdiagnosis," a consequence of "not knowing all the features of community life in [Grigorenko's] native land." -

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