At first blush it would seem a typical case of Russian President
Vladimir Putin dipping into the Old Bolshevik’s Playbook
— just another example of Life imitating Marx. But in today’s
Russia, things are seldom what they seem.
Take the case of Larisa Arap. Ms. Arap, 49, is a journalist and,
for the past six weeks, an inmate of a psychiatric clinic in the
northwestern cities of Murmansk (the world’s largest city north of
the Arctic Circle) and Apatiti. On July 5, 2007, Ms. Arap appeared
for her annual physical, a requirement for renewing one’s driver’s
license. It was during the exam that Dr. Marina Rekish discovered
that her patient was the author of a newspaper story titled
“Madhouse” that alleged child abuse and other barbarisms at the
Murmansk Regional Psychiatric Hospital. Dr. Rekish immediately
telephoned police who arrived minutes later —dressed in combat
fatigues — and dragged the reporter to the hospital’s psychiatric
unit where she has remained under “doctors’ care” ever since.
Both opposition leader and former chess champ Garry Kasparov and
the chair of Russia’s Independent Psychiatric Association, Dr.
Vladimir Prokudin, charge that Ms. Arap’s confinement is
retribution for her investigative piece. The hospital’s chief
medical officer Yevgeny Yenin dismissed any link between Arap’s
piece and her confinement. He then violated his patient’s privacy
rights by revealing that Ms. Arap had been committed once before.
(Arap’s husband acknowledged that his wife had been in a psych unit
for two weeks in 2004 for stress. It was during this stay that she
witnessed the abuses detailed in her story.)
Soon after her arrest a Murmansk judge — acting on the
recommendation of local authorities — declared the reporter to be
“a danger to herself and others,” a view challenged by an account
Arap’s daughter gave to the Chicago Tribune. “One of the
doctors asked whether I thought it was normal to write such
things,” Taisiya Arap told the Trib. “[The doctor] said,
‘It’s not possible to write such things. It’s forbidden.’” Doctors
also told Taisiya Arap that her mother needed “long term treatment
and might never leave the clinic,” the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung reported.
WHEN NOT INVESTIGATING allegations of child abuse by medical
professionals, Arap is a member of Kasparov’s opposition United
Civil Front. Following Arap’s arrest, Kasparov told the
Independent that anyone can be forcibly detained “if you
attack the interests of the local Gazprom, the local military base,
or the local medical mafia. Attacking the interests of local
bureaucrats is a terrible risk, because they don’t stop at anything
to get their own back.”
Indeed, Ms. Arap’s detention recalls a time not so long ago when
all Soviet dissidents were regarded as being of unsound mind, since
“no sane person would declaim against Soviet government and
communism,” and paranoia was defined as the obsession with “the
struggle for truth and justice.” It was an effective and convenient
way of silencing dissidents for institutionalization not only
descredited their ideas, it broke them physically and mentally.
“Treatment” often involved electric shocks, narcotics, beatings,
isolation and torturous and unnecessary medical procedures like
spinal taps. Patients were frequently doped into submission for
years at a time. Whether this was more humane than summary
execution or exile to labor camps in Siberia or Kazakhstan is a
matter of debate.
One of those who served time both in a gulag and a mental
hospital, Vladimir Bukovsky, told the Tribune that “as far
as the current lot in power is concerned using psychiatry for
political purposes is a perfectly acceptable way of dealing with
opponents…you don’t have to hire a killer.” Such retro behavior
is only to be expected, the director of Moscow’s Center for
Journalism in Extreme Situations Oleg Panfilov told the
Independent. “When there are KGB officers in the
government, they restore what there was during the Soviet era:
propaganda, censorship, and repression.” (That an organization
called the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations is
necessary says all one needs to know about freedom of the press in
Russia.)
Sadly Ms. Arap’s case is not unique. The Tribune has
documented two similar episodes — one of lawyer Marina Trutko,
another of businessman Roman Lukin, both recently committed to
psychiatric hospitals for human rights activities.
These days it is no easy thing to completely isolate so-called
mental patients, and a few officials have been able to meet with
Ms. Arap, including Russia’s Human Rights Commissioner Vladimir
Lukin, and three members of the Independent Psychiatric
Association. The latter examined Arap and pronounced her to be of
sound mind, though suffering from the effects of her confinement,
maltreatment and her second hunger strike. The psychiatrists called
for her immediate release.
Is this a case of a local medical mafia unable to shake its
Soviet-era mindset and therefore taking the law into its own hands,
or a thuggish government reverting to Stalinist tactics to silence
and discredit the opposition? What do you want to bet it is, “All
of the Above”?
