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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-fg-psychiatry30may30,1,7634774.story

 

Speak Out? Are You Crazy?

 

In a throwback to Soviet times, Russians who cross the

powerful are increasingly hustled into mental asylums,

rights activists say.

 

By Kim Murphy

Times Staff Writer

 

May 30, 2006

 

CHEBOKSARY, Russia — Albert Imendayev collected the

signatures he needed to run for the legislature last

fall in this city on the banks of the Volga River. He

met with supporters, prepared his campaign material.

He would have made the ballot had it not been for one

thing: He was hauled off to a mental asylum.

 

Only days before he was required to appear at the

local election commission to finalize his candidacy,

an investigator from the prosecutor's office met

Imendayev at the courthouse with three police

officers. They kept him locked up until a judge could

be found to sign the order committing him for a

psychiatric evaluation.

 

" The hearing took place, and I was taken straight off

to the asylum, " said the businessman and human rights

activist. By the time he was released nine days later,

the election filing deadline had passed and he was out

of the race.

 

Imendayev's act of insanity was filing a series of

legal complaints against local officials, police,

prosecutors and judges, alleging corruption, violation

of court procedures and cronyism — charges that are

far from rare in today's Russia. The prosecutor, a

frequent target of Imendayev's darts, called his

behavior " paranoia. "

 

Through much of the Cold War, the Soviet Union waged a

chilling psychiatric war against political dissidents.

Critics of the communist authorities found themselves

locked for months or years behind the barred windows

of state asylums, drugged into tranquillity and

prevented from talking to lawyers or family.

 

The end of the Soviet Union saw the adoption of laws

that raised legal protections for psychiatric patients

to international standards, granting potential mental

patients guarantees of legal representation and

commitment only on the orders of a court. But

Imendayev's trip behind hospital walls in September

was, human rights activists say, one of many signs

that punitive psychiatry has not disappeared.

 

" This has only just resurfaced in recent years, and

for a time we couldn't even believe it was happening.

But now it seems quite clear that such abuses are on

the rise, and that this is a trend, " said Yury

Savenko, president of the Independent Psychiatric

Assn., an advocacy group of professional psychiatrists

that has pushed for mental health reforms in Russia.

 

The ranks of the " insane " over the last three years

have included women divorcing powerful husbands,

people locked in business disputes and citizens, like

Imendayev, who have become a nuisance by filing

numerous legal challenges against local politicians

and judges or lodging appeals against government

agencies to uphold their rights.

 

Unlike during the Soviet era, when an all-powerful KGB

locked up those who challenged the foundations of the

regime, there appears to be no systematic federal

repression of dissidents through the mental health

system. Instead, citizens today fall victim to

regional authorities in localized disputes, or to

private antagonists who have the means, as so many in

Russia do, to bribe their way through the courts.

 

" People are being institutionalized in psychiatric

hospitals unlawfully, and on the most diverse

grounds, " the International Helsinki Federation for

Human Rights concluded in a 2004 study. " Not only did

punitive psychiatry exist during the Soviet period,

and not only does it exist today, unfortunately there

are no grounds to hope that it will disappear in the

foreseeable future. "

 

In another case here in Cheboksary, a four-term

opposition deputy in the regional parliament, Igor

Molyakov, spent six months in jail on libel charges in

2004. While incarcerated, he was ordered committed for

psychiatric hospitalization after a judge agreed with

government lawyers that Molyakov's repeated writings

about corruption among local authorities reflected an

outlook so " somber " that it might constitute a " mental

disorder. "

 

In St. Petersburg, Ivan Ivannikov, who lectured for 38

years at the State University of Economics and

Finance, found himself wrestled to the ground,

handcuffed and dragged to the city psychiatric

hospital in December 2003 after a protracted dispute

with a well-connected contractor over repairs to his

apartment. An influential state psychiatrist signed

the recommendation for commitment without ever having

met Ivannikov, deciding that his multiple legal

complaints against the contractor constituted an

" obsession " with " revenge. " He was released after 60

days.

 

In Moscow, Natalya Kuznetsova was fired from her job

at the federal audit chamber not long after charging

that $140 million had been siphoned out of the federal

budget in 2001 and 2002. A subsequent set of quarrels

with her supervisors led to her firing, and when she

filed suit seeking disability compensation, a state

psychologist reported she had a mental disability.

 

" When they finally fired me on the 25th of January,

2005, they threatened to call a psychiatric ambulance

for me, " said Kuznetsova, who successfully fought

against commitment. " This is all because of

flourishing corruption. These corrupt people are using

psychiatric persecution to destroy people. "

 

In some cases, people who families and friends insist

had no overt signs of mental illness have been

committed for more than a year, sometimes drugged with

sedatives and tied to their beds when they resisted,

and prevented from attending the often-perfunctory

court hearings that extended their hospitalization.

 

In many of these cases, patients were talked into

signing consent forms. The rate of involuntary

hospitalizations is so suspiciously low in at least 51

facilities across Russia that the Helsinki commission

concluded that coerced consent through " persuading "

and " falsification of signatures " was widespread.

 

State and regional mental health officials say

improper hospitalizations are rare, and most

psychiatrists say they follow the orders of the courts

in conducting their reviews.

 

" Of course I have heard of such cases. The world over,

there are dishonest people with bad consciences. But

there are also people who are mentally ill but who do

not appear so to non-specialists, " said Vladimir

Rothstein, a professor at a research center affiliated

with the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences and head

of the advocacy group Public Initiative on Psychiatry.

 

In 2004, doctors connected to the very institute that

perfected the tools under which Soviet-era dissidents

were hospitalized from the 1960s through the 1980s

sought to roll back some reforms in Russia's landmark

1992 law on mental health. Proponents of mental health

reform only narrowly beat back the effort by the

doctors from the Serbsky Institute for Social and

Forensic Psychiatry.

 

The proposed amendments included allowing doctors to

keep patients under involuntary hospitalization longer

without a court order and restricting the ability of

patient-rights groups and nongovernment psychiatrists

to advocate for clients in court or provide

independent expert testimony.

s of the Serbsky Institute declined to be

interviewed. The head of the state-run Chuvashia

Republican Psychiatric Hospital in Cheboksary,

however, said patients who accused officials of

psychiatric abuse often painted a remarkably different

picture than those who dealt with the cases.

 

" I've been the head doctor here for eight years, and I

have not heard of a single case of pressure being put

on doctors by law enforcement officials for a

diagnosis, " Alexander Kozlov said. " I can also assure

you with 100% confidence that in this hospital, not a

single dissident ever received treatment, and not a

single dissident was ever given a diagnosis of

schizophrenia or sent for compulsory treatment. "

 

Human rights leaders say the government psychiatric

apparatus has updated legal protections for patients

but has changed relatively little in its mind-set

since the Soviet era.

 

" It's important to note that the Serbsky Institute,

like the majority of penal institutions in our

country, was not obliterated after the collapse of the

Soviet Union. The sign outside the door was modified.

They even expressed some regrets that there had been

'isolated cases' when psychiatry had made some 'wrong

decisions.' But ultimately, very little was changed, "

said Alexander Podrabinek, who wrote a book on

psychiatric abuses in the Soviet era.

 

" Persecution that has to do with the intellect or the

mind or one's psychological health is perceived as

perhaps worse than physical punishment, or even

torture, because it's more frightening to lose your

mind than to lose your freedom, " he said.

 

 

 

 

Cheboksary, a city of 420,000 people about 400 miles

east of Moscow, is known as Russia's hops-growing

center, with a long tradition of beer-making. It is

the capital of the republic of Chuvashia, governed

since 1994 by former Russian Justice Minister Nikolai

Fyodorov, who controls all levers of power in the

republic, from the press to the police to the courts.

 

Members of Imendayev's organization, For Human Rights,

and other opposition activists have long accused

Fyodorov's allies of consolidating money and power

through manipulation of elections and the court

system. The case that landed Imendayev in the hospital

began last year, while he was running for office and

also acting as an advocate for a teacher who felt she

had been improperly fired.

 

The case had gone to court, and he thought it was

almost won. Then a police officer familiar with the

case " came up to us … and I recorded it on tape, "

Imendayev said. " The words were very crude. He

literally said to her: 'You idiot, what are you trying

to do battle with? The system? Everything here is

under control. Everything has been bought.' What he

meant was that people on the other side had given

money to the judge. "

 

Imendayev wrote a complaint to the prosecutor-general

of Russia, mentioning the tape. At the end of the next

court hearing, he was removed to the Chuvashia

Republican Psychiatric Hospital.

 

At least three other members of the local branch of

For Human Rights have been hospitalized in the last

few years, accused of having various forms of

schizophrenia, paranoia and other mental disabilities

requiring urgent diagnosis or treatment.

 

Fyodorov's administration dismisses the idea that

anyone has been recommended for psychiatric treatment

based on politics. " Our judicial branch of power is

independent, " said Boris Kuzmin, the president's

spokesman. " Moreover, our president has a background

in law. I think he would not tolerate any sort of

violations or pressure on the courts. "

 

Still, Fyodorov's own lawyers moved against Molyakov,

the opposition lawmaker arrested on suspicion of

libeling the president during his election campaign.

In November 2004, they sought to have him hospitalized

for psychiatric evaluation.

 

When federal Judge Oleg Zhukov overturned a lower

court's psychiatric referral order, the president's

lawyers appealed, arguing that Molyakov's

accomplishments as an author and philosophy professor

didn't mean he wasn't crazy.

 

" The court ought to know that even being a personal

genius doesn't rule out a mental disorder … (Van Gogh,

F.M. Dostoyevsky, N.V. Gogol, etc.), " the lawyers

asserted. " As has been established by scientists, the

risk of a mental disease in gifted people … is seven

to eight times higher. "

 

 

 

 

But of all the cases, the story of Sergei Zotov, a

convicted extortionist and

businessman-turned-political-gadfly, is unparalleled

in its alternate melodrama and hilarity, reading more

like " One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, " Russian-style,

than the sorry episode in regional politics that it

is.

 

Zotov, 47, got in trouble with the law in the early

1990s, when he flirted with the kind of speculation

schemes that widely accompanied the collapse of

communism. In 1991, he was brought up on

organized-crime charges that originated with an

alleged attempt to sell a car at black-market prices

(and also involved Zotov's generous use of his skills

as a boxer).

 

He was convicted and sentenced to 6 1/2 years in

prison, where he spent much of the time reading the

law and filing appeals. Once he was released, Zotov

turned his newfound legal expertise against the

system, filing complaint after complaint demanding

criminal prosecution of various alleged instances of

corruption and election fraud within the political

establishment in Cheboksary.

 

Zotov would file a challenge to the slightest

infraction of court rules — judges who didn't wear

their robes on hot days, or a state flag hung in the

wrong direction. But he also filed complaints

challenging purported misdeeds on the part of local

authorities, including the alleged awarding of state

property to ministers and judges and evidence that

voters were paid and escorted to the polls by

pro-government candidates.

 

" I'm like a bone stuck in their throats, " Zotov, a

pudgy, balding man who wears rose-colored sunglasses

to cover up a bad eye, said cheerfully in a recent

interview.

 

The war was already well underway in November 2002

when he entered a Supreme Court hearing room presided

over by then-Chief Justice Pyotr Yurkin. Zotov, who

was running for the regional legislature, had accused

the judge of improperly taking title to a state-owned

apartment and other malfeasance.

 

As soon as Zotov stood to raise his endless procedural

motions, Yurkin ordered him ejected. What happened

next is like a Russian " Rashomon " : It depends on who

saw it.

 

What is clear is that a bailiff ended up on the floor

and a large table was broken as Zotov was hauled from

the courtroom. Zotov insists that the bailiff fell and

that the table broke when he tried to hang on to it as

he was being dragged away.

 

Some of the judges present testified that Zotov threw

the bailiff over his shoulder, karate-style, and

either kicked the table or landed on it hard with his

hindquarters.

 

Yurkin sent Zotov to the Chuvashia Republican

Psychiatric Hospital. He remained there and at other

facilities for seven months and repeatedly was given

psychiatric drugs, despite pleas by his family and

colleagues that he was sane and should be released.

Hearings to continue his hospitalization were held but

neither Zotov nor his lawyers appeared. Doctors said

he showed signs of hyperactivity, inflated

self-importance and " nonsensical ideas of reform. "

 

" It was awful there, " said his wife, Natalya

Semyonova. " I would go to the window, and Sergei was

gathering information and trying to communicate it to

us through the window about people who were being kept

there illegally, about people who'd had their

apartments taken away. There was one man who'd been

there 25 years. "

 

After his release in April 2004, Zotov tried to run

for the local legislature again. When he appeared on

television, slamming local authorities, the court

ordered him to undergo outpatient psychiatric

treatment, a prospect he feared so much he went into

hiding.

 

In February of last year, two dozen police officers

and firefighters arrived at Zotov's apartment to take

him back to the mental hospital. The order they were

executing referred to him as " a person who had

committed a socially dangerous act, " according to the

prosecutor's office. When Semyonova refused to answer

the door, two officers scaled a ladder to the family's

ninth-floor balcony, all to no avail — Zotov was not

at home.

 

Dmitry Ivanov, deputy spokesman for the police, said

law enforcement officers are no longer actively

looking for Zotov, but " if he does show up, we will

have to react. " He denied any campaign against the

human rights activist, and hinted that Zotov might

have tried to have himself hospitalized to seek

shelter from dangerous associates in the criminal

underworld.

 

Prosecutors, in a written response, said Zotov's case

" was handled in accordance with all legal procedures. "

They said psychiatrists at the Serbsky Institute had

examined Zotov and his courtroom outburst and

concluded that " when he committed his crime, he was

unable to acknowledge its actual nature and social

danger, he wasn't able to control his actions, and he

requires mandatory treatment in an inpatient

facility. "

 

The doctors at the Chuvashia hospital declined to

discuss Zotov's case in detail. But they implied that

Zotov's version of events was distorted.

 

" I think if the opponents of your main character were

to turn to you and told you about the ways in which

he'd offended or harmed them, you'd feel a sense of

sympathy for them as well, " said Lyudmila Karnilova,

deputy chief psychiatrist.

 

" As for the idea of a psychiatric hospital hunting

someone down and dragging them back here, this is

certainly not the case. Our main responsibility is to

treat patients who need our help, " added Kozlov, the

chief doctor.

 

Zotov, who rarely visits his own apartment, says he

fears for his sanity if he has to go back to the

hospital.

 

" People who fight for justice in our republic, it's

already a trend that they become subjected to

isolation in a psychiatric hospital, " said Semyonova,

his wife.

 

" This entire case, from the beginning, was based on

nothing more than personal antipathy toward my

husband. "

 

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times