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Still insanity for Russians to challenge state power

Recent cases show punitive psychiatry is far from over, writes Kim Murphy

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Recent cases show punitive psychiatry is far from over, writes Kim Murphy

Albert Imendayev collected the signatures he needed to run for the legislature last fall in the Russian city of Cheboksary, 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 Association, 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 some cases, people whose 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.

Among 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 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 incidences of corruption and election fraud within the political establishment in Cheboksary.

Zotov would file challenges 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.

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, among 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.

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."

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 his wife. "This entire case, from the beginning, was based on nothing more than personal antipathy toward my husband."

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