In a case reminiscent of Soviet persecution of dissidents, a prominent Russian poet is to be confined to a psychiatric hospital this week. Her supporters claim it is an attempt to force her to reveal details of drug-taking by the children of Moscow's political and business elite, writes Mark Franchetti in Moscow.

Alina Vitukhnovskaya, 24, who is in prison facing an apparently trumped-up charge of selling drugs, has been told she will be moved to the notorious Serbsky Institute, to which opponents of the former communist regime were sent after being falsely diagnosed insane.

"This is political persecution," said Konstantin Kedorov, a writer and one of many Russian intellectuals who have rallied to her cause.

Vitukhnovskaya, whose work is preoccupied with a rejection of morality, was first arrested more than three years ago after writing a magazine article about the growing popularity of LSD among affluent young people.

Armed agents stormed her flat and discovered a small quantity of drugs, which she said had been planted. She was accused of selling LSD worth £9 in a metro station to two adolescents she claimed she had never met.

Vitukhnovskaya and her supporters believe she was arrested because the FSB, the KGB's successor, wanted her to provide compromising information about the children of leading Muscovites for use against their parents.

"They told me I would serve eight years unless I gave them a list of names," wrote Vitukhnovskaya in her prison diary. "They put me under enormous pressure and made it clear they were interested in rich kids with powerful daddies. I have always refused to reveal my sources."

She spent a year in an overcrowded remand prison, where she slept on the floor, but was released after it emerged that the FSB had forged the identity of one witness and beaten two others into testifying against her.

She was rearrested on the same charges in October. "It's an outrage. The FSB won't give up," said Masha Gessen, a friend of Vitukhnovskaya and author of a book on the Russian intelligentsia. "She'll be dead when they are finished with her unless something is done to free her."

Last week Mark Ames, the American-born editor of The Exile, an English language newspaper, offered to marry Vitukhnovskaya, even though he has never met her, in order to make her eligible for American citizenship. He hoped that this might help her to be released.

(The Sunday London Times, 1/11/98)

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