"We share these experiences -- everybody who was under the Soviet system," said Camelia Doru, a Romanian who attended the three-day seminar on the rehabilitation of torture victims at the Ukraine Hotel. "The Russians exported the same methods of repression everywhere, but we also had some local color. In our prisons, the political prisoners were forced to torture their colleagues."
Like the centralized planning in other realms, there was a uniformity to political repression as well, with the secret police from throughout the Soviet bloc going to Moscow for training. It is logical, the seminar's organizers said, to pool the resources of groups offering treatment just as the torturers once worked together.
"Especially in the compulsory psychiatric hospitals, the KGB agents were masters," said Marina Berkovskaya, medical director of the Moscow-based group, Compassion, which co-sponsored the seminar with the Danish International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims. "It is important for people to know. Without this work, we will return to the gulag."
While the seminar's participants agreed that torture is no longer widespread in Russia today, much discussion focused on the psychological treatment of former political inmates of labor camps and mental hospitals.
"No one can restore the broken lives of Stalin's victims, but they are entitled to a dignified, decent old age," Berkovskaya told about 75 people gathered Thursday in a conference room at the Ukraina hotel. "This rehabilitation is possible."
Semyon Gluzman, a Ukrainian doctor who spent 10 years as a political prisoner, presented portions of a study on a group of 22 people who were confined in Soviet mental hospitals. After recounting the regimen of beatings, isolation and adminstration of unneeded drugs, Gluzman described how the ex-inmates function today.
"Now, the things they fought for are quite usual. Their health is ruined and no one wants them. In many cases they've lost their families," Gluzman said. "Their problem is that they are often nostalgic about their sweet time in prison. They are lost."
Compassion, like other groups at the seminar, has a fairly broad definition of torture and also works with those living in the midst of armed conflicts. In the war zones of the ex-Soviet Union, Berkovskaya said, Compassion offers psychological treatment so that people, especially children, can avert crippling pschosomatic disorders.
"These children who are growing up in areas of organized violence are the mankind of the 21st century. That's why it is important to label this kind of torture as an absolute evil," Berkovskaya said. "Without treatment they will give birth to an unhealthy generation."
"For the five-year-old Armenian boy, whose father is dead and brother is in the army and lives through shellings every day, all he knows is that the Azeri is his enemy. And the same is true of the Azeri boy. This is not just an abstract problem."
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