Free Republic

DURING 15 years of confinement in psychiatric institutions in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, Dimitri Gerasimenko was starved and repeatedly beaten. The indignities did not end with his death five years ago at the age of 30.Staff at the ramshackle asylum 50 miles from Bishkek, the capital, have never told his mother Raisa, 65, how he died. All her attempts to retrieve his remains have been met with prevarication, compounding her grief. “First I was asked for money if I wanted the body back,” she said. “Then I was told Dimitri had been sent to a medical academy. When...

On a visit to Moscow in 1990, Baroness Cox, President of CSW, was made aware of the plight of children in State care. About half a million of them were (and most still are) living in large, old, State Institutions. Baroness Cox was asked by some concerned Russian childcare professionals to research the legitimacy of these children being placed in such conditions. The results of the research were published in the report “Trajectories of Despair”. It showed that two thirds of the children in these institutions had been wrongly diagnosed as oligophrenic (small-brained) and were in fact of normal developmental...