23 October 2025
Simon Cosgrove reviews: Alexander Podrabinek, Between Prison and Freedom: Memoir of a Soviet Dissident [translated by Marian Schwartz with an introduction by David Satter], University of Notre Dame, 2025, Hardback, 448 pp., $38, ISBN 9780268209650
Between Prison and Freedom is Aleksandr Podrabinek’s moving memoir, in an eloquent translation by Marian Schwartz, of his early life and subsequent years of imprisonment in the Soviet Gulag (1953-1983). Although a volume about the Soviet era, for many contemporary readers the book will have a grim feeling of familiarity. As well as being a document of great historical interest, more than three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union Podrabinek’s account pertinently invites us to consider why people become dissidents in an authoritarian/totalitarian society, how to resist the pressure to conform and compromise, and, more bleakly, how to survive the rigours of torturous imprisonment?
Becoming a dissident
Podrabinek became a dissident at least in part because of discrimination he and his family experienced in the Soviet Union for their Jewish identity and heritage (his father lost his job and moved his family to Elektrostal outside the capital because of the Stalinist campaign against ‘cosmopolitanism’ and the ‘Doctors’ Plot,’ while he himself was denied entrance to Moscow State University because of the quota restricting Jewish entrants). Another reason was his early discovery of the dissident movement. For Podrabinek reading the underground Chronicle of Current Events was ‘an earthshaking discovery.’ He writes: ‘An entire world of resistance, solidarity and mutual support opened up to me’ (p. 13). Personal character also played its part. The young Podrabinek’s determination, stubbornness, courage, resistance and commitment shine through on almost every page. As a young man he fell out with his father and went to live in Moscow where he found work as a paramedic for the city ambulance service; he also chose to be officially designated in his internal passport as Jewish (he could have opted for Russian since his mother was an ethnic Russian [p. 13]). He lived by his own maxim: ‘It isn’t fate that disposes of us, but we ourselves who choose our fate’ (p. 42).
Involvement in the dissident movement followed, associating notably with dissidents of an older generation (not least, Nadezhda Mandelstam [pp 22-3]). He travelled widely visiting political prisoners, accompanying relatives on their visits and undertaking tasks on behalf of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Fund for Political Prisoners. Aged 20 in 1973 he decided to write a book about punitive psychiatry in the Soviet Union (p. 48), setting up in 1977, together with Vyacheslav Bakhmin, Irina Kaplun and Feliks Serebrov, a Working Commission within the Moscow Helsinki Group to investigate the use of psychiatry for political purposes (p. 52).
As Podrabinek’s profile as a dissident rose, he became better known abroad. In 1977 a summary of his book Punitive Medicine was presented by Amnesty International at the Sixth International Congress of Psychiatrists in Honolulu. Among the supporters of Podrabinek and the Working Commission were the academic Peter Reddaway and the English psychiatrist Harry Lowber (p. 179). Subsequently, when Podrabinek was put on trial, Reddaway and Lowber set up international committee in his defence (p. 208).
Refusing to compromise
Podrabinek’s increasing profile as a dissident made him a more likely target for repression. The question he then faced was, to what extent should he compromise with the Soviet authorities? In 1977, following his first arrest and 15-day jail term for anti-Soviet activity (p. 91), he was given a choice either to emigrate together with his father and brother Kirill or face imprisonment (pp. 149-50). ‘A clear conscience,’ he writes, ‘is more precious to me than my well-being. I was born in Russia. This is my country, and I have to stay in it, no matter how hard it is here and how easy in the West’ (p. 150). He never seems to have doubted his ability to resist: ‘All the investigators’ ploys […] will turn to dust when they clash with you if you are free and know your own worth, if you can’t be bought or intimidated. It’s hard, especially at first, but it’s worth it’ (p. 107). His brother Kirill was sentenced to 30 months in a penal colony on trumped up charges and in May 1978 Podrabinek himself was sentenced to five years’ internal exile in the Siberian far north on a charge of slandering the Soviet regime under Article 190.1 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSF (p. 187).
Podrabinek’s initial experience of exile inspired rather than depressed him. Arriving in distant Chuna, ‘it felt like I’d landed in heaven’ (p. 236). His visitors included dissident colleagues Bakhmin, Irina Grivnina and Alla Khromova: ‘We were warmed by ardent friendship, devotion to one another, and the firm confidence that we would be victorious, no matter what happened to us’ (p. 237). He married Alla Khromova, got a job in the local health system and their first child was born.
However, less than two years into his exile, he was rearrested on 13 June 1980, again on charges under the Article 190.1 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (for publishing a letter about SALT-II in US, continuing work on Punitive Medicine and disseminating samizdat [p. 279-1]). In January 1981 he was sentenced to three and a half years in a penal colony (p. 306). Before the trial he had felt heartbroken leaving his family: ‘We […] looked at each other through the thick window glass, saying goodbye, possible forever.’ Yet at no point would he compromise his beliefs. Indeed, he relished this second trial, as his first, as an opportunity to speak in ‘the one public place where you could set forth your anti-Soviet views with impunity’ (p. 213). Even when, three years later, near the end of his sentence he feared he might not be released because of his uncompromising stance, he saw freedom rather as a temptation for those weak of will than something for which one could justifiably sacrifice one’s beliefs: ‘The temptation of freedom is the greatest of all temptations.’ (p. 417). The flip side of this tough attitude towards himself was that Podrabinek never had any time for dissidents who did, in one way or another, compromise with the authorities (p. 372).
Surviving imprisonment
In the penal colony, the authorities sought to break Podrabinek. Their weapons were primitive: ‘cold, hunger, and loneliness’ (p. 335). Of these, ‘solitary is the number one weapon, the simplest and cheapest.’ (p. 336). As a result, Podrabinek served nearly his entire sentence in solitary confinement (p. 337). Partly for this reason, he had few opportunities to meet other political prisoners, although Ukrainian dissident Slava Chornovil was a rare exception (pp. 330-333).
Podrabinek dealt with the vicious and vindictive treatment to which he was subjected partly through his indomitable will to resist, but also a growing sense of resignation: ‘You get used to anything. That’s the way life is,’ he notes (p. 309). Reading of the experience of dissidents who had gone before him such as Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had also given him strength: ‘I was no novice in this world, though I’d landed here for the first time’ (p. 315). While he found himself able to withstand solitary confinement (‘solitary didn’t frighten me’ [p. 342]), it nevertheless had a profound impact on him. He forgot how to talk and was always hungry, malnourished, experienced hallucinations and almost always sleep-deprived (p. 343-9). There were episodes of sheer brutality when he was physically tortured by colony personnel. He also came to realise death was a likely outcome: ‘Suddenly I saw the whole prison and myself as if from the side and thought that this wasn’t the worst place for a life to come to an end. I wouldn’t give in to them’ (p. 354). From this acceptance of death came a different kind of strength: ‘If you make your peace with the fact that they’re going to take your life, you become completely free’ (p. 354).
A third factor, along with his refusal to compromise and a sense of resignation, that enabled him to cope with his treatment in prison was what he calls his ‘taste for life.’ Throughout this memoir he recounts how this ‘taste for life’ buoyed him up and sustained him. We see this in his reaction to letters he received, which he describes as ‘my greatest joy in prison’ (p. 341). After he was diagnosed with TB, he vividly describes his feelings when taken out of his cell to go to the prison infirmary:
‘I hadn’t been outside for a year. Free camp life made a powerful impression on me. What struck me most was the young green grass underfoot, and I couldn’t stop myself from ripping up a tuft for myself. Walking on the earth was great. Feeling the breeze on my cheeks was very strange. The three hundred meters from the strict-regime cell to the infirmary gave me masses of new impressions.’ (p. 384)
And later when he was moved to a prison hospital:
‘We rode for a long time. A different, totally forgotten life washed over me: the smell of road dust, green trees flashing past, the summer wind blowing into the van, the sensation of movement and speed. Suddenly I discovered that the world was in fact much bigger than the prison cell I’d grown so used to.’ (p. 385)
It was only on the day of his release – 26 December 1983 – that Podrabinek finally understood his sentence was not going to be extended. He felt ‘overcome by the feeling of a miracle come true’ (p. 420). In closing this memoir, the reader can share in this sense of a miracle. But we also leave the book with something rather different: an understanding that what made Aleksandr Podrabinek a dissident also gave him the strength to resist the temptations of compromise and enabled him to physically and mentally survive his prison ordeal while remaining true to, and affirming, his resolve. He was, always and everywhere, even in prison, free.
