Independence punished by psychiatry in Russia (3)

[The following is the final installment of Grigory Pasko's reporting on punitive psychiatry and interviews with journalist Andrei Novikov. See Part 1 and Part 2.]

“Psychiatry for the state is a supplementary element of the police system, convenient when it isn’t possible to prove somebody’s guilt, but when the person is just really getting in the way of the state.” – from I. Girich’s foreword to V. Nekipelov’s 2005 book «Institut durakov» [Institute of Fools]

“You can’t understand Russia with the mind…”

Some men were sitting next to me in the train back home from Yaroslavl, drinking beer. One was reading a book about chekists (you can’t even imagine how many of them are being published in contemporary Russia!), the other was talking incessantly: about railroads, about perestroika (which had “destroyed the USSR”), about how the toilet was perpetually closed…

I recalled a phrase from Anton Chekhov’s tale «Ward No. 6»: “‘Which one of us two is insane?’, he thought with aggravation. ‘Is it I, who an trying not to trouble the passengers in any way, or is it this egoist, who thinks he’s smarter and more interesting than everybody here, and therefore isn’t giving anybody any peace?’”

It goes without saying that I was still thinking about my meeting with the journalist Andrei Novikov, who had been locked up in a nut-house for his articles. And I couldn’t help myself – my mind kept returning to Chekhov’s renowned creation. Truth to tell, Russia has been compared for a long time already to Ward No. 6 – that is, to a madhouse. It is enough to recall Tyutchev’s famous aphorism: “You can’t understand Russia with the mind…”

And then there’s the adage about the two eternal troubles: fools and roads. And I also recall reading somewhere: “In a land of fools, the smart have always been regarded as nutcases”.

And there you have it, Russia and fools – sounds like an excellent topic for an entire politico-sociological research project. All the more so if you consider the existence of such a unique system as Soviet psychiatric establishments.

I actually often visited one of them in my day. Once upon a time, as a young lieutenant, I rented an apartment in Vladivostok. My landlady worked in the audit department of Primorsky Kray. After each audit of how state funds were being spent, she would fall into a depression, and would talk without prompting about the embezzlement of fantastic sums and kept on threatening to tell the truth about the bureaucrat-thieves. She never did manage to do this: one fine day, an ambulance came for her, and two burly orderlies drove my landlady off to the nut-house. There, they asked her about relatives. She, the fool, named me. And one fine day they came for me as well. They brought me to the office of the head doctor. A commission was sitting there. They started to interrogate me: had I been a relative a long time (!); how had citizeness G. behaved; how often had she had episodes, and so on.

Soon, of course, it emerged that I wasn’t any relative, but I still continued to carry parcels to my landlady for a long time thereafter. And for a long time I observed the life of a madhouse as an outsider. I saw the patients and the methods with which they were treated. The nut-house left an oppressive impression on me. It was back then, I recall, that I re-read «Ward No. 6» yet again. There’s a passage there: “Having inspected the hospital, Andrei Yefimich came to the co