'Patients' to repeat hunger strike

ACTION ¡RADES NOW NO ALF/ FOR THE 1926 TWO OPPOSITIONISTS in Leningrad's special psychiatric clinic will repeat the 80-day hunger strike they staged last spring in protest against their imprisonment.

Last March Viktor Fainberg and Vladimir Borisov manded to be allowed to consult lawyers and take their cases to court, but the authorities have taken no action.

The two men slammed the 'shameful practice' imprisoning political dissidents "special psychiatric hospitals' and conducting 'refined tortures' change people's political convictions.

The hunger strike ended after promises that their cases would be taken to court and conditions at the hospital improved.

ainberg (38) is a philologis who emonstrate in Red Square on August 25, 1968, against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

He was sentenced for 'lying inventions, denigrating the Soviet state and social order' and was diagnosed as a schizophrenic.

There are no details of Borisov's vase identity because there prisoners of the same name at the hospital.

Conditions are reported to have grown worse after three including former Soviet army captain, attempted to escape last September.

And the authorities' attitude toughened after the abuse of psychiatric science in the USSR was raised at a recent international conference in Mexico.

Obstacles were also put in the path of lawyers attempting to open court cases.

Inmates claim they have been beaten up by orderlies and given injections or drugs which cause mental and physical suffering.

Three former prisoners at the hospital have offered to give evidence at the trial, of Moscow oppositionist Vladimir Bukovsky, who has given the most detailed account so far of conditions there.

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