Alexandr Podrabinek

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A.Podrabinek

Alexandr Podrabinek (Russian: Александр Пинхосович Подрабинек; born August 5, 1953) is Russian journalist, human rights activist, and editor-in-chief of Prima information agency ^[1]

1 Dissident activities in the Soviet Union
2 Arrest and conviction
3 Journalism
4 Recent publications
5 His book
6 See also
7 References
8 External links

[edit] Dissident activities in the Soviet Union

After graduating from a medical technical school, Podrabinek worked as a nurse in a medical emergency team. He was engaged in the human right movement in the Soviet Union since the beginning of the 1970s. He wrote a book about the psychiatric repressions in the country in 1977. The book appeared in English translation in the USA under the title "Punitive medicine". He was also editor of the first Soviet underground samizdat journal Chronicle of Current Events and a member of Moscow Helsinki Group. He appears in documentary They Chose Freedom.

[edit] Arrest and conviction

He was arrested and convicted in 1978 to five years of involuntary settlement in Siberia for criticizing the Soviet system. He was convicted second time to three and a half years of labor camp in 1980 for distributing samizdat (underground) literature and publication of the English version of his book. After serving the time, he was allowed to work in a medical emergency team again.

[edit] Journalism

Podrabinek stared working freely as a journalist only from a beginning of the Perestroika and Glasnost. From 1987 to 2000 he was editor-in-chief of the weekly human right magazine Chronika. Since 2000, he became editor-in-chief of the Prima information agency, which specializes in human right questions.

In 2004, he was involved in publishing and distribution of book Blowing up Russia: Terror from within written by Alexander Litvinenko and Yuri Felshtinsky. Unsuccessful in finding a publisher for the book, authors printed an early draft in Russian for would-be publication in Moscow in 2004. On December 29, 2003, Russian Interior Ministry and FSB units seized 4,376 copies of the book printed in Latvia and purchased by Alexander Podrabinek's Prima information agency, which had passed customs control and were being trucked from Latvia to Moscow for retail delivery [1]. Later it was made clear that the action had been sanctioned during the investigation of divulging state secrets initiated in June 2003. [2] Prodrabinek was summoned by the FSB to come for interrogation on January 28, 2004, but refused to answer the questions.^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5]^[6]^[7]^[8]

In March 2006 Podrabinek was briefly arrested in Minsk for involvement in peaceful protests against the re-election of the Byelorussian president Alexander Lukashenko for the third term.

[edit] Recent publications

His recent publications describe revival of the use of psychiatry for political repressions in Russia, including the non-voluntary hospitalization of Larisa Arap. ^[1].