Asylums used as ‘tools of repression’
By Adrian Blomfield
Last Updated: 3:10am BST 13/08/2007
It was a meeting that seemed to symbolise how Russia was coming to terms with its troubled past.
Inside the fortress-like walls of the Serbsky Institute for Social and Forensic Psychiatry in central Moscow, the two people studied each other with mutual suspicion.
One was the dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who spent much of the 1960s and 1970s in psychiatric units for criticising the authorities.
The other was Tatyana Dmitriyeva, Serbsky’s director. She had little reason to like Mr Bukovsky, whose books had revealed how the institute had become a tool of official repression.
But it was now 1992, and the system had collapsed. In the spirit of a new era, she held out her hand to Mr Bukovsky and acknowledged the role the institute had played in denying him his freedom.
Fifteen years later, however, and things have changed. After President Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, Mrs Dmitriyeva recanted.
The Serbsky Institute, she said, had done nothing wrong, while the practice of “punitive psychiatry” had been grossly exaggerated.
Since then, positions have hardened still further. “Patient” Bukovsky, according to one Serbsky official, was undoubtedly “psychopathic”.
“After his arrest he wrote hundreds of letters of complaint,” said the official. “Not every person would do that. It was another manifestation of his condition.”
For Mr Bukovsky, who now lives in London and hopes to run for president next March, the hardening of attitudes at the institute is a sign that the era of “punitive psychiatry” is on the verge of a comeback.
“Everything is possible in Russia,” he said. “We live in a twilight zone. We are hearing exactly the same lies we did in the 1960s and 1970s.”
ping!
“Modern” Russia in action...
We are hearing exactly the same lies we did in the 1960s and 1970s.”
Yep, same here and from the same people too.