When opposing the Kremlin equals madness.

last updated 8 January 2015

Russia

Editorial

The Soviet fad of locking up dissidents in insane asylums is back in vogue, said the Moscow weekly Profil. Three years ago, journalist Larisa Arap described abuses she’d witnessed in a psychiatric hospital near Murmansk. Medical staff, Arap claimed, would force children to “kiss their feet” and would zap them with electric shocks if they resisted. Some inmates weren’t ill at all: One woman had been declared insane merely so her family could get its hands on her house; another woman was committed after accusing a bureaucrat of abusing her daughter. Arap heard no feedback about her reports until this year, when she went for a routine medical checkup. Her doctor, recognizing her as a “troublemaker,” promptly committed her to the very institution she had criticized. Her colleagues and friends, who have lobbied for her release, say that doctors have threatened to “arrange things” for them, too. The Soviets may be gone, but their legacy of “punitive psychiatry” lives on.