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Gorbachev's In-Law Left to Rot in
Prison
by John Vennari
While Mikhail
Gorbachev travels the world, speaking of peace, brotherly love and social
justice, his own brother-in-law has been left to rot in an asylum.
 Yevgeny Titorenko, the younger brother of
Raisa, Gorbachev's wife, has spent the past 13 years in a bleak psychiatric
hospital in southern Russia, abandoned by his family.
Mark Franchetti, a
Moscow correspondent writing in the January 28 London Times, reported that
Titorenko, 65, was incarcerated in 1988 in an asylum close to Voronezh, 300
miles southeast of Moscow.
He is confined to a desolate 19th-century brick
building cut off from the outside world by a heavy metal gate and high walls.
He shares a cramped room with six other inmates. The windows are covered by
metal grilles and he is escorted by staff to the lavatory.
The men, who are
rarely allowed to leave their living quarters, live on buckwheat porridge and
cabbage soup. The hospital can rarely afford to buy meat and has enough funds
only for basic painkillers and some sedatives.
According to the staff, neither Raisa nor her
husband had ever visited Titorenko. The last time he received a parcel or any
other assistance from his family was in 1992, when Raisa sent books and food.
She apparently had no further contact with him before her death in 1999.
Titorenko's
only income is a pension of Pounds 20 a month. He has not even received any
assistance from the Gorbachev Foundation, set up by Gorbachev after he was
forced from power in 1991. Supposedly, the Gorbachev Foundation was established
to help charitable causes. It is actually an advocate of rapid
environmentalism, abortion, population control and the anti-Christ global
politics of the United Nations, including the plan to eliminate four billion
people from the world's population.
Three years younger than Raisa, Titorenko graduated
from a naval academy and served in the Soviet navy until 1958, when he left to
work as a builder. He later turned to writing children's stories, publishing
several books which earned him a place in the Soviet Writers' Union. He moved
to Voronezh in the late 1960s, married and had a daughter.
But while his sister
rose up the social ladder, Titorenko drifted in and out of depression and
sought solace in vodka. In the mid-1970s his wife left him.
According to one of
Titorenko's close friends, Raisa took him to see a doctor on several occasions.
There were long spells in rehabilitation clinics, but his condition continued
to deteriorate. Shortly after Gorbachev became the Soviet leader in 1985, he
was given a bigger flat in Voronezh. But he soon took another turn for the
worse.
Determined to avoid a scandal that could have damaged Gorbachev's reputation,
the Kremlin and local KGB officers took swift steps to ensure that Titorenko's
problems remained hidden. Any embarrassment would have been magnified since one
of Gorbachev's first actions as leader had been to confront widespread alcohol
problems with draconian laws that virtually banned the sale of vodka and other
spirits.
Franchetti reports that, according to former friends of Titorenko, the local
police kept him away from prying eyes. His telephone number was changed every
few months so that only a small group of people knew how to contact him. Even
they eventually stopped visiting so as to avoid being harassed by the KGB.
Raisa made
only one mention of her brother in her autobiography, I Hope, which was
published in 1991 and did not mention his confinement.
The few Soviet
journalists who were aware of his addiction dared not write what they knew.
Only one newspaper reported where he was. People in charge of the hospital
still angrily refused to talk about the case.
Eduard Yefremov, a former friend who used to
visit him regularly in hospital, said: "The fact that his sister became the
most powerful woman in the Soviet Union brought no privileges to Yevgeny. If
anything, it made him all the more isolated."
Yefremov explains that Titorenko was left to
himself, cut off rom the outside world by the KGB and was under constant
surveillance. "I myself was once asked by a local Communist party boss to
report on him", said Yefremov. "Being his friend became more dangerous so
people stopped looking after him."
Another former acquaintance of Titorenko's said: "After
all these years in that home there isn't much left of the man he once was. I
have spoken to some of the staff and they say he is wasting away. He has been
abandoned. It is incredible to think that he is Gorbachev's brother-in-law."
Ironically,
Gorbachev was a invited speaker at the Vatican's November 2000 "Jubilee for
Politicians". Likewise, on June 27, 2000, the day after the release of the
Vision of the Third Secret, the Vatican staged a press conference at which
Mikhail Gorbachev was given a place of honor between Cardinals Sodano and
Silvestrini.
This is in stark contrast to the wise policy of the pre-Vatican II period
wherein the Holy See never welcomed with open-arms Ambassadors of Godlessness
such as Mikhail Gorbachev.
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