Alexandr Podrabinek
Encyclopedia
Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism
The Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism , which was signed on 3 June 2008, was a declaration signed by prominent European politicians, former political prisoners and historians, including past signatories of Charter 77 such as Václav Havel, which called for condemnation of and...
.
Dissident activities in the Soviet Union
After graduating from a medical technical school, Podrabinek worked as a nurse in a medical emergency team. He was engaged in the human right movement in the Soviet Union since the beginning of the 1970s. He wrote a book about the psychiatric repressions in the country in 1977. The book appeared in English translation in the USA under the title "Punitive medicine". He was also editor of the first Soviet underground samizdatSamizdat
Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader...
journal Chronicle of Current Events and a member of Moscow Helsinki Group
Moscow Helsinki Group
The Moscow Helsinki Group is an influential human rights monitoring non-governmental organization, originally established in what was then the Soviet Union; it still operates in Russia....
. He appears in documentary They Chose Freedom
They Chose Freedom
They Chose Freedom is a four-part TV documentary on the history of political dissent in the USSR from the 1950s to the 1990s. It was produced in 2005 by Vladimir V...
.
Arrest and conviction
He was arrested and convicted in 1978 and sentenced to five years of involuntary settlement in SiberiaSiberia
Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...
for criticizing the Soviet system
Anti-Sovietism
Anti-Sovietism and Anti-Soviet refer to persons and activities actually or allegedly aimed against the Soviet Union or government power within the Soviet Union.Three different flavors of the usage of the term may be distinguished....
. He was convicted a second time and sentenced to three and a half years of labor camp
Labor camp
A labor camp is a simplified detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons...
in 1980 for distributing samizdat
Samizdat
Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader...
(underground) literature and publication of the English version of his book. After serving the time, he was allowed to work in a medical emergency team again.
Journalism
Podrabinek started working freely as a journalist only from the beginning of PerestroikaPerestroika
Perestroika was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev...
and Glasnost
Glasnost
Glasnost was the policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions in the Soviet Union, together with freedom of information, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s...
. From 1987 to 2000 he was editor-in-chief of the weekly human right magazine Chronika. Since 2000, he became editor-in-chief of the Prima information agency, which specializes in human right questions.
In 2004, he was involved in publishing and distribution of book Blowing up Russia: Terror from within
Blowing up Russia: Terror from within
Blowing Up Russia: Terror from Within is a book written by Alexander Litvinenko and Yuri Felshtinsky. The authors alleged that the Russian apartment bombings and other September 1999 terrorist acts were committed by the Federal Security Service...
written by Alexander Litvinenko
Alexander Litvinenko
Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko was an officer who served in the Soviet KGB and its Russian successor, the Federal Security Service ....
and Yuri Felshtinsky. Unsuccessful in finding a publisher for the book, authors printed an early draft in Russian for would-be publication in Moscow in 2004. On December 29, 2003, Russian Interior Ministry
Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs
The Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del is the interior ministry of Russia. Its predecessor was founded in 1802 by Alexander I in Imperial Russia...
and FSB
FSB (Russia)
The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation is the main domestic security agency of the Russian Federation and the main successor agency of the Soviet Committee of State Security . Its main responsibilities are counter-intelligence, internal and border security, counter-terrorism, and...
units seized 4,376 copies of the book printed in Latvia and purchased by Alexander Podrabinek's Prima information agency, which had passed customs control and were being trucked from Latvia to Moscow for retail delivery
http://prima-news.ru/eng/news/news/2004/1/14/27149.html. Later it was made clear that the action had been sanctioned during the investigation of divulging state secrets initiated in June 2003. http://prima-news.ru/eng/news/news/2004/1/30/27326.html Podrabinek was summoned by the FSB to come for interrogation on January 28, 2004, but refused to answer the questions.
In March 2006 Podrabinek was briefly arrested in Minsk
Minsk
- Ecological situation :The ecological situation is monitored by Republican Center of Radioactive and Environmental Control .During 2003–2008 the overall weight of contaminants increased from 186,000 to 247,400 tons. The change of gas as industrial fuel to mazut for financial reasons has worsened...
for involvement in peaceful protests against the re-election of the Belarus
Belarus
Belarus , officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered clockwise by Russia to the northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel ,...
ian president Alexander Lukashenko
Alexander Lukashenko
Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko has been serving as the President of Belarus since 20 July 1994. Before his career as a politician, Lukashenko worked as director of a state-owned agricultural farm. Under Lukashenko's rule, Belarus has come to be viewed as a state whose conduct is out of line...
for the third term.
Recent publications and hiding
Podrabinek's 2007 publications describe revival of the use of psychiatry for political repressions in Russia, including the non-voluntary hospitalization of Larisa ArapLarisa Arap
Larisa Arap is a Russian opposition activist who became a victim of involuntary commitment in the psychiatric facilities of Murmansk and Apatity, soon after publishing a story about mistreatment of patients in the same hospital where she was committed in July, 2007...
.
.
After publishing an editorial on www.ej.ru in September 2009 about a Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
restaurant changing its name from "Anti-Soviet" under pressure from local officials who said it was offensive to "Soviet veterans
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
." The article accused the current Russian authorities of trying to burnish the image of the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
. In the article Podrabinek wrote that the Soviet past was "bloody, false and shameful" and that "The Soviet Union was not that country you portrayed in school textbooks and your lying media". This article was criticized by Nashi
Nashi
Nashi may refer to:*Nashi , a Russian youth movement*Nashi , a former Russian political movement*Nashi pear*Nashi , a northeast wind which occurs in winter on the Iranian coast of the Persian Gulf...
, a nationalist youth movement that began under former Russian President Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin served as the second President of the Russian Federation and is the current Prime Minister of Russia, as well as chairman of United Russia and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Union of Russia and Belarus. He became acting President on 31 December 1999, when...
. Soon after the article was published Podrabinek went into hiding because he said he had received threats and he feared for his life. Nashi denies threatening Podrabinek, but demands an apology and started to picket Podrabinek's Moscow's home, accusing him of "defiling the honor of veterans of the Great Patriotic War (World War II)". Nashi has been accused by critics of engaging in harassment and intimidation.
At a State Duma
State Duma
The State Duma , common abbreviation: Госду́ма ) in the Russian Federation is the lower house of the Federal Assembly of Russia , the upper house being the Federation Council of Russia. The Duma headquarters is located in central Moscow, a few steps from Manege Square. Its members are referred to...
session of October 7, 2009 a deputy from United Russia
United Russia
United Russia is a centrist political party in Russia and the largest party in the country, currently holding 315 of the 450 seats in the State Duma. The party was founded in December 2001, through a merger of the Unity and Fatherland-All Russia parties...
(Robert Shlegel), proposed that the president dismiss head Ella Pamfilova
Ella Pamfilova
Ella Pamfilova is a Russian politician, former deputy of the State Duma, candidate for President in 2000 and former chairman of the Civil Society Institution and Human Rights Council of the Russian Federation.-Biography:...
Russian human rights council for advocating Podrabinek’s rights. The watchdog, led by Ella Pamfilova, had called the protests “a persecution campaign … organized by irresponsible adventurists from Nashi” and said the activists were showing open signs of extremism.
In March 2010 he signed the online anti-Putin manifesto of the Russian opposition "Putin must go
Putin must go
"Putin must go" is a website and a public campaign of the same name organised for the collection of signatures under an open letter demanding the resignation of the Prime Minister of Russia Vladimir Putin...
".
His book
Alexander Podrabinek. Punitive Medicine, Karoma Pub; 1st ed edition (March 1980), ISBN 0-89720-022-5External links
- A Profession Under Stress by John Langone, Time magazine, Jun. 24, 2001
- Punitive Medicine (Russian), from Russian samizdatSamizdatSamizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader...