1979, USA. Alexander Dvorkin who recently immigrated to the United States gives an interview as part of the Recent Soviet Immigrants in America project. The interviewer is Lynn Visson, the interviewee is Alexander Dvorkin.
The interviewee is a man whose name and methods are perhaps central to our series of research articles. We recently discovered a transcript of an old audio record of this interview in the archives 1. The transcript was stored in the William E. Wiener Oral History Library of the American Jewish Committee. We decided to post this photo archive on our website.
But first, let’s highlight a few characteristic quotes from it:
“Question: Did you yourself have any experiences with mental hospitals?
Dvorkin’s answer: Yes. First I went there myself because I didn’t want to go into the army, and I knew that… I was still at the university then, but I knew that my university career soon will be over, and I went there to save myself from the army. And after, twice I was taken there with the police.”
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“First time I was just taken to the police because I didn’t work, and they wanted to know why. Then they started to beat me, and I had a razorblade, so I cut my wrist…”
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“Question: Well, what did people do when they got together?
Dvorkin: Get stoned.
Question: But where could you get drugs from?
Dvorkin: Got the hash from Asia and Caucasus, the Crimea and all that southern part. Got all the heavy drugs from the hospitals because they have a special savings in the medical savings of drugs. And they had to change it every five years, to destroy it, to get new ones… But drugs, all drugs are very good after five years, nothing happens to them… so people would just sell a lot of them, the people who were in charge of these reserves, and that’s how most part of drugs are gotten in the Soviet Union.”
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“…Well, all of us, again, were mental patients, so instead of a penalty we would get confined to a year in mental hospital, year or more, but actually a year is about the deadline. After a year, you can get a lot of the stuff back, and a lot of the things that you got there, it’s neobratimye (irreversible).”
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“… Well, I have just much less spare time here than I had there, there practically all the time was mine. But there I was getting stoned all the time, but here I don’t.”
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Sources:
1. https://archive.org/details/alexander-dvorkin-interview-june-19-1979
