Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 21 – Both to
discredit and punish Aleksandr Gabyshev, the Sakha shaman who was marching toward
Moscow to exorcize Putin from the Kremlin, one of the first actions of the
Russian authorities was to forcibly confine him in a psychiatric hospital, an
action that calls attention to the revival of another inglorious Soviet
tradition by the Putin regime.
Alina Vitukhnovskaya, a Moscow publicist who herself
was incarcerated in such a facility not in Soviet times but in 1994, argues
that what is going on is both a return of a Soviet practice where the mad are
in control of the asylum and testimony of the degradation of the leadership and
of Rusisan society as a whole (newizv.ru/news/politics/21-09-2019/nazad-k-bezumiyu-vlast-vspomnila-o-karayuschey-psihiatrii).
The threat of
being confined in a psychiatric hospital “has never gone away,” she says, and
consequently, there is always the possibility that anyone who is inconvenient
as far as the powers that be are concerned can have “a diagnosis” hung on them
that will “follow them for their entire lives.”
What the powers that be have done to
the shaman is far from unique, Vitukhnovskaya continues. In the last year alone,
there have been at least three cases in which activists have been confined to
psychiatric prisons when the authorities can’t think of any better way to
discredit them and their cause.
Such actions do highlight the spread
of insanity in the Russian Federation but not among the activists. They show “the
hopeless psychic state of the powers themselves, including their leader” rather
than being an indication of mental problems in a shaman “who chose on his own
an original and accessible means of expressing social and political protest.”
But it is not just the rulers and
their siloviki defenders who, as a result of negative selection, have descended
into madness, she argues, it is Russian society as a whole which has been
sickened by the actions of the authorities to the point that most of its
members accept as somehow inevitable and even natural the confinement of
healthy people in mental hospitals.
What is happening in Russia today,
Vitukhnovskaya says, is “a counter-revolutionary revenge if we consider the
liberal revolution as a revolution.” Led by people like Dugin, Limonov and
Mamleyev and informed by the worst kind of conspiracy thinking, this revenge
has been visited on the shaman and may soon be visited on others if no one
stand up against it.
“We really see the fruits of the
counter-revolutionary activity of the schizophrenics,” she continues. A schizophrenic
clique has come to power in the country,” one that is prepared to declare that
black is white, evil is good, and the perfectly sane are mad in order to
maintain itself in office.
In Soviet times, the international
community stood up against Moscow’s misuse of psychiatry, but most people
assumed that “punitive psychiatry” had ended with the USSR. They were wrong.
Vitukhnovskaya recounts that she personally was a victim of such a crime in
1994, at a time when “democracy in the country practically ruled.”
It happened because the chekists
couldn’t make their case even in the courts they controlled and so they sent her
to the notorious Serbsky Institute. “Both
times,” she says, “the doctors were not only friendly and objective, they even
allowed themselves stinging jokes – ‘it would be better if they had sent your
judge here,’” they told her.
Twice, these doctors released her,
she continues, declaring after two months that “’Alina Vitukhnovskaya was absolutely
normal and did not require any treatment.” But “unfortunately, after such
relative progress, we have again returned to the wild Soviet times when chlorpromazine”
is used when the courts are not enough.
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