Professor Bill Bowring’s guest this week on “25 Questions” is Aleksandr Podrabinek, human rights defender and journalist. In 1977, Aleksandr launched the Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes, along with Viacheslav Bakhmin, Irina Kaplun, Feliks Serebrov and A.A. Voloshanovich. Following publication in samizdat of his book Punitive Medicine [Карательная медицина], in 1978 Aleksandr was convicted of ‘anti-Soviet slander,’ sentenced to five years’ internal exile and transported first to the Irkutsk region of Siberia, then to Yakutia. After the English edition of Punitive Medicine appeared, in 1981 Aleksandr was sentenced to three years in a local penal colony. In 1987, while still forced to live outside Moscow in ‘internal exile’, Aleksandr founded the Express Chronicle weekly newspaper of which he was chief editor. In the 1990s Aleksandr set up and ran the Prima Information Agency. More recently, he has published widely in Novaya gazeta, Ezhednevny Zhurnal, Radio France Internationale, Radio Liberty and the Vot-Tak media project. The video can be viewed below and on our YouTube Channel.
