We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
„Kui Teile minu kirjutis meeldis, siis levitage, kuidas heaks arvate...”.
- Authors
Kaasik, Peeter
- Abstract
After the suppression of the active forest brother movement (Estonian patriotic partisans), resistance in Estonia was still nowhere near broken. Passive resistance continued until the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of the more widespread forms of manifesting resistance was the dissemination of "nationalist" leaflets and the scrawling of corresponding slogans on board fences and the walls of buildings in public places. "Anti-Soviet" letters sent to the editorial offices of journalistic publications can be placed in this category. In this case, our interest is focused on letters written in colourful style sent to the newspaper Edasi (Forward) in October of 1982. Their author, Ivo Värav, let the editors know in a provocatively flagrant tone what he thought of communists and the Soviet regime. There were six letters altogether and they were sent at intervals of a few days. The editorial office initially decided to place the letters in the newspaper's archives, but later they were nevertheless handed over to the local KGB department. The letters and expert analysis of the letters was not carried out until a year later in connection with a criminal case initiated on 5 December 1984 concerning the distribution of leaflets in the city of Tartu. It was ascertained that one and the same individual had written the leaflets and the letters to the newspaper. Värav was arrested on 13 December 1984 and the union republic level psycho-neurological expert commission in Tallinn pronounced Värav mentally incompetent on 23 January 1985 already and recommended that he be sent to a special psychiatric hospital for internment. The Criminal Chamber of the ESSR Supreme Court handed down a decision to that effect on 28 February 1985. Värav was released from psychiatric hospital by decision of the People's Court of the City of Tartu on 9 August 1988 and the Presidium of the ESSR Supreme Court issued a certificate of rehabilitation in 1990, which declared the repressions applied to him to be unlawful. This is an example of a method that the Soviet regime used in the struggle against dissidents. Since with the assistance of doctors, the security organs, the prosecutor's office and the court considered it necessary to declare the arrested person mentally ill, and as such to be particularly dangerous to the Soviet regime, persons in this category were as a rule to be sent to strict regimen special psychiatric hospitals under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union. These hospitals were not so much health care institutions but rather detention centres where dissidents who had become particularly troublesome were sent in addition to mental cases interned for extremely serious criminal assaults. Even regardless of whether actual mental disorders had also been ascertained in the case of the individual under consideration, this can be viewed more as a punishment and not as treatment in the case of dissidents.
- Subjects
ESTONIA; SOVIET Union; NATIONALISM; ANTI-communist movements; VARAV, Ivo; ESTONIAN history, 1940-1991; PSYCHIATRIC hospitals; DISSENTERS; POLITICAL prisoners
- Publication
Tuna, 2013, Issue 1, p96
- ISSN
1406-4030
- Publication type
Article