If chills did not run down your spine when you heard the tune for the Soviet national anthem, written to glorify the mass-murdering dictator Joseph Stalin, playing for Russia at the Winter Olympics this year in Italy, if you do not shiver every time you hear about Russian people favoring Vladimir Putin, a proud KGB spy, with 70%-plus approval in opinion polls, then perhaps you are ready for this: Russia is re-weaponizing psychiatry as a method of dealing with anti-Kremlin dissent, just as in Soviet times.
Two major articles from leading newspapers have documented the early stages of the phenomenon. First in June there was a piece from the Los Angeles Times. It reported, for instance:
Albert Imendayev collected the signatures he needed to run for the legislature last fall in this city on the banks of the Volga River. He met with supporters, prepared his campaign material. He would have made the ballot had it not been for one thing: He was hauled off to a mental asylum. Only days before he was required to appear at the local election commission to finalize his candidacy, an investigator from the prosecutor’s office met Imendayev at the courthouse with three police officers. They kept him locked up until a judge could be found to sign the order committing him for a psychiatric evaluation.
Then last week came a second piece from the Washington Post:
On March 23, police and emergency medical personnel stormed Marina Trutko’s home, breaking down her apartment door and quickly subduing her with an injection of haloperidol, a powerful tranquilizer. One policeman put her 78-year-old mother, Valentina, in a storage closet while Trutko, 42, was carried out to a waiting ambulance. It took her to the nearby Psychiatric Hospital No. 14. The former nuclear scientist, a vocal activist and public defender for several years in this city 70 miles north of Moscow, spent the next six weeks undergoing a daily regimen of injections and drugs to treat what was diagnosed as a “paranoid personality disorder. She is also very rude,†psychiatrists noted in her case file.
The Post concludes: “Trutko is new evidence that Soviet-style forced psychiatry has reemerged in Russia as a weapon to intimidate or discredit citizens who tangle with the authorities, according to human rights activists and some mental health professionals. Despite major reforms in the early 1990s, some officials are again employing this form of repression. It quotes Lyubov Vinogradova, executive director of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia, stating: “Abuse has begun to creep back in, and we’re seeing more cases. It’s not on a mass scale like in Soviet times, but it’s worrying.â€
Of course, everything has to start somewhere. There was a time when Stalin wasn’t Stalin, he was just Mr. Dzhugashvili. Stalin became Stalin incrementally, because nobody intervened when intervention was still possible. Ms. Vinogradova is right to be worried, and not merely or even mostly by the prospect of the re-weaponization of psychiatry. Indeed, if one elects a proud KGB president, one probably shouldn’t be surprised that this will occur, and one must remember that to be effective this strategy only needs to strike fear into the population as to when it will be used, not necessarily become widespread in practice. What’s also quite terrifying is the total absence of any serious opposition to developments of this kind amongst the one-fifth of the population that still opposes Putin. In fact, with the national television networks utterly under the Kremlin’s thumb, many Russians will simply remain oblivious of the fact that these events are transpiring until the men in white coats come knocking. A documentary entitled “Secrets of the Kremlin†currently airing on the Discovery Channel contains an episode in which Vladimir Putin is interviewed in the Kremlin library by a group of Spanish journalists. One confronts him insistently about the sending of Mikhail Khodorkovsky to solitary confinement at his prison in Siberia for possessing documents about his legal rights as a prisoner and Putin, amazingly, claims to know nothing about the incident even though, as the outraged journalist pointed out, it had been widely reported in Russia (the Kremlin obviously wanted to send the message that those, like Khodorkovsky, who get in its way will never have a moment’s peace, not even in prison). When Russian state-controlled TV news reported the conference that night, they made no mention of the confrontation, editing out the question.
The Post reports further:
The Independent Psychiatric Association says that the number of activists being wrongfully hospitalized in mental facilities totals dozens of cases in recent years and is increasing. Doctors and the courts are complicit with investigators who insist on a forced psychiatric evaluation or treatment, it says. Activists have also documented an increase of family or business disputes in which wrongful hospitalization provides an opening to seize a person’s property, Vinogradova said. Most of the targeted activists are not affiliated with major human rights groups. Rather, like Trutko, they are stubborn gadflies who are involved in long-running feuds with local authorities. Their sometimes intemperate complaints against authorities are used to open criminal investigations for slander. This allows authorities to seek hospitalization. Unlike Soviet dissidents, these activists are put away for relatively short periods of a week to several months.
As examples the Post lists Roman Lukin, a businessman in the Volga River city of Cheboksary, was hospitalized last year for “unexplainable behavior†after he held up a sign on a public square calling three judges “creeps,†and Nikolai Skachkov, who protested police brutality and official corruption in the Omsk region of Siberia, was ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation last year because investigators said they suspected he was suffering from “an acute sense of justice.â€
This too is not at all surprising. Naturally, we would see the progression of weaponization proceed from an early stage where it was used rarely and against minor figures, a test phase both to refine the mechanism and learn what opposition if any would result, to a later stage when more significant figures would come under attack. This merely means that right now is perhaps the only opportunity that human rights activists will have to intervene and prevent the situation from escalating to a full-blown Soviet era disaster. As Boris Panteleyev, head of the St. Petersburg Committee for Human Rights, told the post: “Psychiatry in this country has always been a tool of the authorities, a tool for managing people and pressuring people. And it still is.â€
This is not to say that the authorities rely solely upon psychiatry to control dissent. Just as in Soviet times, today’s Kremlin has no fear of using much more direct methods. For instance, Russian blogger Vladimir Rakhmankov is currently being tried for writing a perfectly innocuous post satirizing President Putin’s effort to encourage Russian families to have more babies and halt the nation’s disastrous population slide. He faces up to a year at hard labor or a fine totaling more than one year’s average wages for writing:
And so it came to pass that Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, also found his thoughts turning to reproductive matters, and decided that he himself should become the phallic symbol of the country. And so he issued an edict unto his minions that they propagate themselves and be multiplied, with no exceptions, and further that a clutch of petrodollars be unleashed to reward those found in compliance. And verily, Putin is remarkably like the phallic symbol of the country - in all senses - and a perfect personification of the national drive to increase the population. Indeed, now it is possible to conceive of a mascot to signify the national effort: the presidential body with his head in the shape of a penis. A new national idea.
Here again, we see these initial assaults being aimed at people who can easily be dismissed as “gadflies†as a means of testing how far and how fast the Kremlin can curtail public dissent. If there is no serious intervention, we can only expect much higher-level assaults in the future.
And the Kremlin need not even go so far as to use the courts or hospitals. As previously documented on Publius Pundit, it can simply buy up offending newspapers like the leading opposition daily Kommersant, whose editor just resigned after the paper’s purchase by a Kremlin-friendly oligarch. Or it can go to the other extreme and simply liquidate those it doesn’t care for. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that since Vladimir Putin came to power twelve journalists have been murdered in contract hits and not one killer has been brought to justice.
We see no significant questioning of Putin’s leadership in any of these areas, much less do we see organized opposition; this may well be because those who might oppose are already struck dumb with fear at the prospect of being put away in a mental institution, locked up in prison or simply killed outright. But Russia is experiencing relatively good economic times now, and the Kremlin has not had time yet to put in place a fully effective set of truly draconian anti-democratic measures, so now is the best hope for intervention. The more time passes, the less likely it will appear and the more likely we are to condemn another generation to worry about the evil forces behind the Iron Curtain. More worrying than the Kremlin’s policies is our own seeming inability to learn from past mistakes where Russia is concerned.
