In russia political dissenters are targeted with psychiatric detention

In russia political dissenters are targeted with psychiatric detention

The practice carries echoes of a method of control used widely in the Soviet Union and known as ‘punitive psychiatry’; rights group Memorial has identified 48 people it says are currently undergoing treatment in politically motivated cases; the most common charges are related to war criticism.

Dozens of Russians are being subjected to compulsory psychiatric treatment because of their political views, according to lawyers and human rights groups — a trend they say has gathered pace since the start of the war in Ukraine.

The practice carries echoes of a method of control used widely in the Soviet Union and known as “punitive psychiatry”, even if the current scale falls far short of that seen from the late 1960s until the early 1980s.

Yekaterina Fatyanova, 37, was interned on April 28 last year at the KKPND No.1 psychiatric hospital in Krasnoyarsk after being accused of discrediting the Russian armed forces by publishing an article in a small opposition newspaper she ran in her spare time. She was not the author of the piece, which argued the war in Ukraine was driven by imperialist motives. While in hospital she was subjected to painful, degrading and unnecessary procedures including a gynaecological examination, she wrote in letters of complaint to authorities.

‘Moral suppression’

Ms. Fatyanova was discharged from the hospital on May 27 after doctors determined that she had no mental disorders or diseases.

“I believe that the real purpose of placing me there was moral suppression and isolation from society, possibly as a punishment for my active civic position,” she said.

Robert van Voren, a Dutch professor and human rights campaigner who has spent decades studying what he describes as the political abuse of psychiatry in Russia, said he had documented around 23 such cases a year since 2022, when the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, up from an annual average of around 5 between 2015 and 2021.

Russia’s Justice Ministry, human rights commissioner and the Kremlin did not reply to requests for comment about the alleged use of psychiatry for political purposes.

The Kremlin says it does not discuss individual cases that pass through the criminal justice system, as these are a matter for the courts.

In the Soviet era, thousands of dissenters were hospitalised for political reasons, based on the premise that only someone mentally ill would oppose the Communist state. Among the best-known cases were those of dissident Vladimir Bukovsky and Nobel prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky. While far below that scale, the current trend is nonetheless “disturbing,” Mr. van Voren said.

In many other parts of the world, the use of compulsory psychiatric treatment has been in decline and generally confined to violent criminal cases, said Dainius Pūras, a Lithuanian psychiatrist who served as the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to health.

Mr. Pūras said an erosion of democratic reforms in Russia had a “detrimental impact on Russian psychiatry,” cautioning that Russia’s use of state-appointed psychiatrists in court cases likely leads to decisions that serve the interests of national authorities. In Russia, compulsory treatment “is now again used for political purposes, like it was in the time of the Soviet Union,” he said.

Russian rights group Memorial has identified 48 people it says are currently undergoing such treatment in politically motivated cases. Of those, 46 are psychiatric inpatients and two are receiving out-patient treatment while in prison.

The most common charges against them related to criticism of the war. Thirteen of the people had been prosecuted under censorship laws passed shortly after Russia’s invasion, the rights group said.

According to Memorial, the youngest person subjected to compulsory psychiatric treatment for war protests turned 20 in hospital last week. He was investigated as a teenager in 2023 for seeking permission to organise an anti-war rally, and a court ordered his hospitalisation in February last year.

Anastasia Pilipenko, a lawyer who has represented people placed under compulsory psychiatric treatment, said she did not consider “risky behaviour in the form of public anti-war statements to be a sign of mental disorder.”

Dozens arrested

Hospitalisations represent a small fraction of overall arrests and jailings for political crimes, including speaking out against the war. Over 20,000 people have been arrested for expressing an anti-war position since the full-scale invasion began, according to Russian rights group OVD-Info. Some 1,155 people have been criminally charged.

For those admitted as psychiatric patients, additional trauma stems from the open-ended nature of their detention and the fact that their sanity is being called into question, Mr. van Voren said. “It challenges the value of what you think because it is dubbed mental illness. And that has a very debilitating effect.”

Memorial said the person hospitalised the longest in a politically motivated case is Albert Gurdjian, interned since 2017 after allegedly posting online that justice officials were an organised crime group and that it would be good to “blast the yacht” of a businessman close to President Vladimir Putin.

Ms. Fatyanova, the Krasnoyarsk journalist, said that she was taken to the KKPND No.1 hospital and that she was pressured to sign admission forms authorising treatment and procedures without her informed.

She said she had been fired from a previous job at a transport company in December 2023 after the FSB started investigating her, she said in her complaints.

She added that patients were sometimes denied daily walks, given mouldy bread.

The Health Ministry wrote back, dismissing Ms. Fatyanova’s complaints. However, the regional health inspectorate said in a letter dated October 1 that it had warned the hospital to obtain informed consent from patients.