Those ‘crazy’ people arrested in communist countries

In 1963, Russian poet Joseph Brodsky was seized and sent to a mental institution.  At his trial the following year, authorities charged the 24-year-old with “social parasitism” and called him a “pseudo-poet in velveteen trousers.”  He had failed to “fulfill his constitutional duty to work honestly for the good of the motherland.” 

“Who has recognized you as a poet?  Who has enrolled you in the ranks of poets?” asked the judge.

“No one,” Brodsky replied.  “Who enrolled me in the ranks of the human race?”

Brodsky was committed to a mental institution for examination, where he spent three weeks.  Hospital workers pumped him with tranquilizers and repeatedly woke him during the night.  He was given cold baths and wrapped in wet canvas that shrank and cut his skin while drying.

Years later when Brodsky was being considered for exile, officials examined his mental health records.  They consulted leading Soviet psychiatrist Andrei Snezhnevsky, who, without personal examination, diagnosed Brodsky with “sluggishly progressing schizophrenia.”  The poet was “not a valuable person at all and may be let go.”