How Putin’s Russia is weaponising psychiatry against its critics

15 Nov 2024 | News and features, Russia, Volume 53.03 Autumn 2024

There is no bigger crime than the killing of the soul. “Stop punitive psychiatry!” read the sign held by activist Oksana Osadchaya at a solo protest in the centre of Moscow in June.

The activist – who is visually impaired – was making her protest even though the tiniest acts of dissent can lead to severe punishment.

She was taken to a police station where she wasn’t allowed to meet her lawyer at first, and was released without charge only after being held for several hours.

Osadchaya’s desperate act of protest was meant to draw attention to the use of enforced psychiatric treatment in Russia against defendants in politically motivated cases.

According to independent media outlet Agentstvo, at least 33 such cases have been documented since 2023, when people arrested for opposing the war in Ukraine started being sentenced. Between 2013 and 2022 there were just 22.

A new bill, which will become law in 2025, will allow the police to gain access to the medical records of people suffering from certain mental illnesses and who are deemed by psychiatrists to be a threat to public order.

Dmitry Kutovoy, a member of Russia’s Psychiatric Association, told Index he had concerns that amending legislation could contribute to creating a system of oppression using psychiatry. He warned that the authorities might put pressure on medical workers to designate certain people as “activists, political opponents, and so on”.

One recent high-profile case was that of Viktoria Petrova, who was arrested in May 2022. She was accused of “spreading false information” about the Russian military in anti-war social media posts.

Activist Anush Panina went to support Petrova during her trial in St Petersburg.

“All of a sudden, the court announced that the hearings would be closed to the public, and sent her to a psychiatric hospital,” Panina remembered, speaking to Index from exile.

“It was outrageous and frightening.”

Panina suspects Petrova was punished for continuing to speak up while in detention and on trial. In her final statement to the court, Petrova said that Russia’s war in Ukraine was “a crime against humanity”.

Panina felt it was “convenient” for the authorities to put an end to the public trial on grounds of medical confidentiality and said that, at previous hearings, bogus experts who had analysed Petrova’s social media posts had proved to be so incompetent that people were laughing at them.

At the psychiatric unit, Petrova was brutalised by the medical staff, according to her lawyer Anastasia Pilipenko.

She was forced to undress while male nurses were watching, and after she refused to take a shower in front of them, they twisted her arms and threatened to beat her. She was tied to a bed and injected with heavy medications which left her barely able to speak for two days.

Adding that it was unclear whether the abuse had been ordered by the Kremlin, Panina said Petrova’s treatment course could be extended indefinitely, and a medical commission would convene every six months to decide whether to prolong it. In August, soon after Panina spoke with Index, Petrova was released from the psychiatric unit. She will now be observed on an outpatient basis.

Kutovoy said that cases of inhumane treatment such as Petrova’s were, at least for the moment, “isolated incidents”. He added, however, that enforced psychiatric treatment in Russia today was nevertheless “as scary as it sounds”.

“Patients’ rights aren’t really respected,” he explained, adding that heavy medications were given to them at high dosages.

Kutovoy said that, in theory, enforced treatment was ordered by the court instead of punishment. “In practice, however, it’s still punishment – just in a different form,” he said.

But considering the long prison sentences handed out to dissidents under President Vladimir Putin, enforced treatment may be the lesser evil in certain circumstances. This seems to be the case with Viktor Moskalev, another defendant in an anti-war criminal case who was sent to a psychiatric ward.

In March 2023, he was arrested for “spreading false information” about the Russian army after making two comments about war crimes committed in Ukraine on the e-xecutive.ru website.

Moskalev’s lawyer, Mikhail Biryukov, told Index that in 2005, his client had been diagnosed with a mental illness in a private clinic. He was now in remission, and “has a prospect of being set free [from the psychiatric unit] earlier than if he were in prison”.

Abuse of psychiatry to persecute and intimidate state critics was a popular practice in the Soviet Union. Dissident Alexander Skobov was condemned to compulsory psychiatric treatment twice, in the 1970s and the 1980s.

In May this year, he was sent to a psychiatric unit again, for “examination”. He is accused of posting messages justifying terrorism on social media, as well as of taking part in a terrorist organisation, and could face up to 22 years in jail.

“The repressive machine is looking for new methods of persecution,” Kutovoy said. “It’s just the way it works.”

According to Kutovoy, this trend points towards a punitive mechanism of using psychiatry being in demand by the authorities. He said there had been an increase in the number of involuntary hospitalisations of arrested political protesters.

“A person is arrested holding a sign, is taken to a police station, and a psychiatric team is called,” he explained. “Then the psychiatrists have to decide whether there is a need for involuntary hospitalisation.”

If they conclude that’s the case – and, a few days later, decide that this measure must be maintained – the court can order long-term compulsory treatment.

Kutovoy emphasised that in many cases, psychiatrists refused to send dissidents to hospital against their will. Alexey Sokirko, for example, was arrested in July for wearing a T-shirt which read: “I’m against Putin”. Police officers called a psychiatric team after Sokirko asked them whether an “I’m against Stalin” tag would be allowed. In the end, the doctors concluded that there was no need for involuntary hospitalisation.

Kutovoy said he wished he could speak out more openly on the issue of punitive psychiatry. However, he added: “In Russia today, it’s impossible to make a statement which is not in line with the political agenda [of the state]. And there is an obvious connection between cases of abuse of psychiatric care and the political agenda.”

Anything is possible: 35 years on from the fall of the Iron Curtain

8 Nov 2024 | Czech Republic, Europe and Central Asia, Germany, News and features, Poland

There is a grainy photograph on the first page of the January 1990 edition of Index on Censorship magazine showing a group of twenty or so smiling friends of various ages. They are dressed in the non-descript shabby style favoured by most European intellectuals of the period. They could easily be mistaken for a group of academics on a field trip if it weren’t for the sign in Polish behind them which reads: State Border: Crossing Forbidden.

The picture was taken on 9 July 1988 at a secret location on the Polish-Czech border. This unruly band of comrades has been brought together by the bitter and often lonely struggle against Stalinism, their friendship formed in an underground network of Polish-Czech solidarity. The cause often seemed hopeless and at the time the picture was taken this obscure group of writers and activists could never have imagined that the whole edifice they had spent their lives opposing was about to collapse.

As it turned out, this photograph represented one of the most extraordinary gatherings of dissidents in the whole of the Cold War. Look closely and you can see Václav Havel, the Czech dissident playwright, who would become President of Czechoslovakia just 20 months after the photo was taken. Ján Čarnogurský, a Catholic anti-communist activist, who became the Prime Minister of Slovakia in 1991 is also there as is Jan Ruml, who went on to become the Czech interior minister from 1992 to 1997. Jan Urban led the Civic Forum campaign in the elections of 1990, but decided not to become Prime Minister in the new government. A year on, Jacek Kuroń, known as the godfather of the Polish opposition, would be the minister for employment in the first Solidarity government.

Mirosław Jasiński, a leading member of Polish-Czechoslovak Solidarity became a prominent Polish diplomat. Among them also are opposition journalists Petr Pospíchal and Petr Uhl, who founded the East European Information Agency and Adam Michnik, perhaps Poland’s most celebrated journalist, who became the first editor of the independent newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza in May 1989 and later an MP before returning to journalism.

The only woman in the photo is Anna Šabatová who went on to become the ombudsman of the Czech parliament and was the first East European woman to receive the United Nations Human Rights Prize.

No one predicted the events of 1989, the 35th anniversary of which, will be celebrated this year. The first signs came in the spring of that year, when the Polish government and Solidarity reached an agreement to legalise the free trade union and hold elections. In June, the Communists were humiliated at the polls and in August Solidarity’s Tadeusz Mazowiecki became Prime Minister.

A parallel process in Hungary saw the creation of independent parties in February 1989. By the beginning of May, the authorities had dismantled the barbed wire on the frontier with Austria. The borders of the old Communist bloc started to fray and then come apart at the seams. In September, Budapest announced that East Germans would be given passage through Hungary into Western Europe. Young people across Eastern Europe began to make their way in numbers to Vienna to get their first taste of western consumer goods and freedom. Then, in November, the
movement became irresistible as the Berlin Wall itself crumbled and fell under the weight of sledgehammers. In Czechoslovakia, the Velvet Revolution ushered in the peaceful transition to democracy and by Christmas, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was gone. Crucially, unlike in 1956 and 1968, the Soviet army did not intervene.

For young people across Europe, these were life-changing events. As a wide-eyed 23-year-old journalist, I travelled across Eastern Europe in December 1989. In East Berlin, I spoke to students loyal to the regime whose world had been turned upside down, who asked me to reassure them about the key role played by the Communist Party of Great Britain in the fight against racism and the National Front. In Leipzig I saw the thousands of people taking part in candlelit demonstrations around the city. In Prague I grumbled to two journalists who worked for the trade union newspaper that there would soon be a McDonald’s on Wenceslas Square and witnessed their pure delight as they looked me in the eye and said “Yes!” I remember a mixture of emotions among the people I met: hope and optimism about the future of an undivided Europe, certainly, but also a degree of fear and uncertainty about whether the transition would remain peaceful. Common to everyone though was the feeling of pure surprise. Absolutely no one had expected this, even a year earlier.

Index’s co-founder, the poet Stephen Spender, captured this feeling well in his speech to English PEN at a party for his 80th birthday on 6 December 1989, published in the February 1990 edition of Index magazine. He suggested that a motto for his kind of writer, opposed both to Stalinism and McCarthyism, should be “the politics of the unpolitical”, but asked what the role of such writers should be after the end of the Cold War.

“It is essential to ask this question because we are now entering what less than even a year ago was an almost unthinkable period,” he said. “How unthinkable is to me made vivid by recalling that at the beginning of 1989 I remarked to Isaiah Berlin, who, like me, has in 1989 reached his 80th year – he and I each other’s oldest living friend – that the one thing I wished to see was the collapse of the dictatorships in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. He agreed but said that this would not happen in our lifetimes. Well, now it has happened, and the results are completely bewildering.”

How bewildered might Stephen Spender be 35 years later. No one talks about “the politics of the unpolitical” anymore. But those of us who were there in 1989 still remember the sense of surprise that everyone who thought they could predict the future was wrong and that feeling, for a short while, that everything was possible.

Awards 2024 journalism shortlist Nasim Soltanbeygi

4 Nov 2024

NASIM SOLTANBEYGI Journalism Award | Nominee | Freedom of Expression Awards Nasim is a woman human rights defender and journalist working on women’s rights issues in Iran. As a journalist for over 15 years, Nasim has focused on politics, women’s rights and social...

The 2024 Freedom of Expression Awards

4 Nov 2024

THE 2024 FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION AWARDS ABOUT THE AWARDS Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Awards celebrate those who have had significant impact fighting censorship anywhere in the world. There are four categories: Arts, Campaigning, Journalism and the...
SUPPORT INDEX'S WORK