1. Alexander Pinkhosovich Podrabinek is a Soviet dissident, journalist and commentator.
23 Facts About Alexander Podrabinek
1. 2.
In 1987, while still forced to live outside Moscow in internal banishment, Podrabinek became the founder and editor-in-chief of the Express Chronicle weekly newspaper.
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Alexander Podrabinek enrolled in the Department of Pharmacology of a medical institute in 1970 and worked as an assistant in a biology laboratory at Moscow State University of Medicine and Dentistry.
4.
From 1971 to 1974 Alexander Podrabinek studied at a college for medical auxiliary staff and received certification as a paramedic.
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Alexander Podrabinek went on to work in the Moscow ambulance service.
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For political reasons, Alexander Podrabinek was denied entrance to medical school, and, at the age of 20, began working for the ambulance service instead.
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At an early age, Alexander Podrabinek became acquainted with dissident circles in Moscow and began to take part in their activities.
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On 5 January 1977, Alexander Podrabinek launched the Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes.
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Alexander Podrabinek, supported by Velikanova, rejected the proposal and later held a press conference at the home of Andrei Sakharov, publicly asserting his refusal to given in to such blackmail.
10.
On 15 August 1978, Alexander Podrabinek was convicted of "anti-Soviet slander", sentenced to five years' banishment or internal exile, and was first transported to the Irkutsk Region, Siberia.
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In 1987, Alexander Podrabinek founded the weekly samizdat newspaper Express Chronicle, which appeared in Russian and English between 1987 and 2000.
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In March 1989, Alexander Podrabinek participated in the founding of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia.
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Alexander Podrabinek started working as a journalist during the Gorbachev years.
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In 2004, Alexander Podrabinek became involved in the distribution of Blowing up Russia: Terror from within, the expose written by Alexander Litvinenko and Yuri Felshtinsky.
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Alexander Podrabinek was summoned by the FSB for questioning on 28 January 2004, but he refused to answer their questions.
16.
In certain articles for Novaya gazeta, and comments on Radio Liberty, Alexander Podrabinek expressed concern that the use of psychiatry for political repression was reviving in Russia, in the enforced hospitalization of Larisa Arap, for instance.
17.
In 2009, Alexander Podrabinek was targeted by the nationalist youth movement Nashi after writing on the Yezhednevny Zhurnal website about a Moscow eating place opposite the "Soviet" Hotel which had renamed itself the "Anti-Soviet" Restaurant and put up a sign using its popular nickname.
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Since 2014, Alexander Podrabinek has been host of the "Deja vu" programme on Radio Liberty and his articles have been published by the Institute of Modern Russia.
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Alexander Podrabinek has been interviewed, talking about his past as a Soviet dissident, in two documentaries: They Chose Freedom and Parallels, Events, People.
20.
Alexander Podrabinek remains active and vocal as an opposition figure today.
21.
In March 2010 Alexander Podrabinek signed the online anti-Putin manifesto of the Russian opposition "Putin must go".
22.
On 4 May 2016, Alexander Podrabinek published An Open Letter to the Prosecutor of Crimea.
23.
In October 2017 Alexander Podrabinek drafted and launched a petition, calling on Russia's citizens not to support the hypocrisy of the Russian authorities who, on the one hand, unveiled the massive Wall of Sorrow a monument in Moscow to the victims of political repression, and, on the other, were responsible for the re-appearance of prisoners of conscience and political prisoners in post-Soviet Russia.