The reappearance of Stalin’s ghost in modern Russia
Russia is haunted by the ghost of Joseph Stalin. Dozens of monuments to the Soviet leader dot the country; his angular face beams from billboards, bookshop displays and subway station walls; multi-episode shows depict him on national TV.
It seems a strange twist in Russia’s story to rehabilitate a highly repressive leader from the former USSR but it makes sense too. Under Stalin, Russia emerged from World War II victorious and with many countries under its control, which chimes with Vladimir Putin’s insatiable desire to restore Russia as a global superpower.
It’s not just Stalin’s image that haunts Russia today – it’s his tactics. The political abuse of psychiatry that was developed towards the end of Stalin’s rule, for example, is being used once again against the Kremlin’s critics. You can read a piece about this from Russian journalist Alexandra Domenech here. This week we were made aware of another tactic straight out of the Stalin playbook – using everyday people to denounce each other. A growing number of people are ratting on their friends, family, colleagues, or in the most recent case – their doctor. On Tuesday a Russian court sentenced a 68-year-old paediatrician, Nadezhda Buyanova, to five and a half years in jail for allegedly criticising the war (she denies these claims). The monitoring group OVD-Info (also former Index award winners) has recorded 21 such criminal prosecutions since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and a further 175 people have faced lower-level administrative cases for “discrediting” the Russian army because of people informing on them. The word “chilling” is overused in the human rights world, but this is really chilling.
So too is what’s happening to dissidents in the countries that Putin supports. In Venezuela under Moscow-allied President Nicolás Maduro there has been an intensification of attacks against the leading opposition figure Maria Corina Machado and those who support her since the July elections. Arbitrary detentions, torture, and sexual and gender-based violence by the country’s security forces are rife. One such target was 36-year-old opposition activist Jesus Martinez, who died yesterday in custody from a heart problem associated with complications from type II diabetes. Martinez was a member of the Vente Venezuela party run by Machado; Machado has denounced Maduro’s election to a third term as fraudulent. He was arrested without a search warrant and with no reason given, according to Machado. At yesterday’s Magnitsky Awards, which I was privileged to attend, Machado was given the award for outstanding opposition politician. Speaking from captivity, she dedicated her award to Martinez.
Russia’s other ally, Iran, continues its reign of terror too. This week a Kurdish political activist and women’s rights defender, Varisheh Moradi, was sentenced to death. Iran has not yet carried out the death sentence, so there is still a window of time to make noise and we know from our own campaign to free Toomaj Salehi that noise does work. That is if the noise comes internationally. Within Iran itself the regime has less interest and the enormous emotional strain caused by living under that level of repression was laid bare on Wednesday when former VOA Farsi journalist Kianoosh Sanjari jumped to his death after his demands to release four high-profile political prisoners (one being Toomaj Salehi) were not met.
We’re wrapping up with a final friend of Putin – Donald Trump – whose first term can be remembered by him using the very Soviet phrase “enemy of the people” to describe the press. News has just emerged of Trump sending legal letters to The New York Times and the Penguin Random House over their critical coverage of him. Can a leopard change its spots? It seems not.
His re-election last week made many question, with despair, what had happened to the hope that filled the air following the fall of the Soviet Union. This week’s news has done little to stop that despair. Perhaps then Stalin’s ghost doesn’t just haunt those in Russia – it haunts us all.
How Putin’s Russia is weaponising psychiatry against its critics
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.”
Democracy, but not as we know it
Hybrid regimes, illiberal democracies, democraship, democratura: these are all slightly terrifying new terms for governments drifting towards authoritarianism around the globe. We have been used to seeing the world through the binary geopolitics of the more-or-less democratic free world on one side, and the straightforward dictatorship on the other. But what is Hungary under Viktor Orbán? Or Narendra Modi’s India? And, as the world comes to terms with the reality of President Trump’s second term, will America itself become a hybrid regime dominated by tech oligarchs and America First loyalists?
At a recent conference in Warsaw held by the Eurozine, a network of cultural and political publications, Tomáš Hučko from the Bratislava-based magazine Kapitál Noviny, told the dispiriting story of his country’s slide towards populist authoritarianism. The Slovak National Party, led by ultranationalist Prime Minister Robert Fico, drove a coach and horses through media and cultural institutions, he explained, beginning with the Culture Ministry itself. Fico then changed the law to take direct control of public radio and TV. The heads of the Slovak Fund for the Promotion of the Arts, National Theatre, National Gallery and National Library were all fired and replaced with party loyalists. A “culture strike” was met with further attacks on activists and critics of the government. “There were constant attacks on the journalists by the Prime Minister including suing several writers,” said Hučko.
Fellow panellist Mustafa Ünlü, from the Platform 24 (P24) media platform in Turkey spoke of a similar pattern in his country, where President Erdoğan’s government has withdrawn licences from independent broadcasters.
It is tempting to suggest that these illiberal democracies are a passing political trend. But the problem, according to several Eurozine delegates, was that such regimes have a tendency to hollow out the institutions and leave them with scars so deep that they are difficult to heal. Agnieszka Wiśniewska from Poland’s Krytyka Polityczna, a network of Polish intellectuals, sounded a note of extreme caution from her country’s eight years of rule under the Catholic-aligned ultra-right Law and Justice Party. Although the party was beaten by Donald Tusk’s centrist Civic Coalition in last year’s elections, the damage to democracy has been done. “There is the possibility of reversing the decline,” said Wiśniewska. “But the state media was turned into propaganda media.” In part, she blamed the complacency of politicians such as Tusk himself: “Liberals didn’t care enough,” she said.
Writing on contemporary hybrid regimes in New Eastern Europe, an English-language magazine which is part of the Eurozine network, the Italian political scientist Leonardo Morlino identifies a key moment in July 2014 when the Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán began using the expression “illiberal democracy”.
He later clarified what he meant by this: that Christian values and the Hungarian nation should take precedence over traditional liberal concern for individual rights. For Morlino, however, Hungary is not the only model of hybrid regime. He provides an exhaustive list of countries in Latin America (Bolivia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico and Paraguay) with “active, territorially widespread criminal organisations, high levels of corruption and the inadequate development of effective public institutions” where democracy is seriously weakened. Meanwhile, in Eastern and Central Europe he recognises that Russian influence has created the conditions for hybrid regimes in Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and even Ukraine.
The term “democratura” comes from the French “démocrature” and combines the concepts of democracy and dictatorship. In English this is sometimes translated as “Potemkin democracy”, which in turns comes from the phrase “Potemkin village”, meaning an impressive facade used to hide an undesirable reality. This is named after Catherine the Great’s lover Grigory Potemkin, who built fake show villages along the route taken by the Russian Empress as she travelled the country.
It is tempting to suggest Donald Trump is about to usher in an American Democratura, but none of these concepts map neatly onto the likely political context post-2025. The USA cannot be easily compared to the fragile democracies of the former Soviet Union, nor is it equivalent to the corrupt hybrid regimes of Latin America. It is true that Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon liked to talk about “illiberal democracy” but more as a provocation than a programme for government.
And yet, there is an anti-democratic tone to the language used by Trump’s supporters. In the BBC series on US conspiratorial ideology, The Coming Storm, reporter Gabriel Gatehouse noticed the increasing prevalence of the right-wing proposition that the USA is a “constitutional republic”, not a democracy. This line of thinking can be traced back to an American ultra-individualist thinker, Dan Smoot, whose influential 1966 broadcast on the subject can still be found on YouTube. Smoot was an FBI agent and fierce anti-Communist who believed a liberal elite was running America as he explained in his 1962 book, The Invisible Government, which “exposed” the allegedly socialist Council on Foreign Relations.
Such rhetoric is familiar from the recent election campaign, which saw Donald Trump attacking Kamala Harris as a secret socialist and pledging to take revenge on the “deep state”.
But there are worrying signs that Republicans under Trump will be working from an authoritarian playbook. As The Guardian and others reported this week, an attempt to pass legislation targeting American non-profits deemed to be supporting “terrorism” has just been narrowly blocked. Similar laws have already been passed in Modi’s India and Putin’s Russia.
Trump has consistently attacked critical media as purveyors of fake news. He has suggested that NBC News should be investigated for treason and that ABC News and CBS News should have their broadcast licences taken away. He has also said he would bring the independent regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, under direct Presidential Control. In one of his more bizarre statements, he said he wouldn’t mind an assassin shooting through the “fake news” while making an attempt on his life.
Whether a Trump administration emboldened by the scale of the Republican victory will seriously embark on a project to dismantle American democracy is yet to be seen. The signs that the President has authoritarian proclivities are clear and he has made his intentions towards the mainstream media explicit. Hybrid democracy may not quite be the correct terminology here. We may need a whole new lexicon to describe what is about to happen.