I'm changing my house to a madhouse

It’s hard to suspect a man in green sweatpants as the owner of elite square meters in the center of Moscow. Now almost all of his belongings fit into a plastic bag. The main content is DVDs on which Yura Zalogin records his story.

In the frame is Zalogin, he sets up the camera and talks to it under the noise of the nearby railway track. The fact that he still remembers his house on Kitai-Gorod (a famous historical monument of Moscow at the prestigious address: Solyanka, building 1), how his mother became an alcoholic and one day his father went missing, and Yura himself ended up in a psychoneurological boarding school after his mother was deprived of parental rights. The officials decided: what else should they do with a boy diagnosed with epilepsy? No one even thought about keeping part of his living space for the minor. Since then, Zalogin has been tightly tied to the boarding school - this is his registration, passport and only place of residence. Breaking out into a “normal life” is his main dream.

“We talked with him and believe that incapacity was “attributed” to him unreasonably,” Lyubov Vinogradova, head of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia, tells Interlocutor.

According to Vinogradova, this happens all the time. It’s more convenient: you don’t have to figure out where Zalogin’s apartment went, the boarding school will receive more money for more patients, and the Moscow mayor’s office will get rid of the legal obligation to provide citizen Zalogin with housing.

...It starts to rain, Yura covers himself with a piece of cellophane, which replaces his home, and continues to remember how as a child he independently learned to play the piano, then how to cut a good haircut, and in the monastery to which he briefly joined, he quickly learned to cook and bake bread. He knows what pills to take to prevent epilepsy attacks, and he really hasn’t had them for two years. But all this is not taken into account by the boarding school commission, which stubbornly issues a conclusion: incompetent. Yura's answer to this is simple - once again he runs away from the boarding school in his pajamas and lives on the street for months, cooks food, builds huts, and even finds some kind of income. He says that the worst thing is on a construction site - the work is hard and they often don’t pay you, but the best thing is to sell flowers - business went so well that Yura was even able to buy himself winter clothes and a video camera, on which he began to record “an interview with himself.” Yura’s “problem stories” are interspersed with video recordings of his only friend, the shepherd dog Misha, whom Yura managed to train. Now Yura records on video all of Misha’s tricks at playgrounds and playgrounds, where two homeless creatures come when no one is there - early in the morning.

Watching how the pet cuts circles with obstacles, Yura talks about his vicious circle:
– I contacted all authorities, the answer was the same: return to your boarding school, where they will consider your question. And upon my return, only sedative injections or isolation room await me. The head doctor believes that my struggle is abnormal and needs to be treated.

After the last escape, Yura was put on the wanted list. If found, they will be returned to the dispensary by force.

Better to live healthy and rich

Solyanka, building 1 is a 10-minute walk from the Kremlin. From the former Yura windows the spire with the star is clearly visible. But to him he is like to space.
The house, once inhabited by ordinary Muscovites, now gives the impression of being empty. A certain investor, as they say, bought the entire house and is now slowly selling it off. “Don't come here anymore. You’re doing well in the boarding school, but some of the residents are completely missing,” his former neighbor Zina, whom he met under his windows, told Yura.

On the Internet, I easily found a long list of apartments from the 1st building in Solyanka for sale. I call the seller's phone number.
– Choose any floor, entrance, area – from 139 to 155 meters. Price – 7–8 million. Who is the seller? Private person - we do not disclose last names.
It is clear that the new owner of the communal apartments on Solyanka with their corresponding contingent got these square meters much cheaper. Yurina’s drinking mother was simply moved to an apartment in the southwest of Moscow. Yura himself received a bed in a mental hospital.



Realtors in white coats

– The pursuit of square meters has not weakened. It has taken new forms - people in white coats are now used instead of killers, say the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, whose president is a psychiatrist herself, but has left the profession. – A person can very easily be thrown into a mental hospital and deprived of his rights. We have already accumulated several dozen such cases.



The walls of some mental hospitals are stronger than prison locks. But even though it’s rare, human rights activists end up there. Recently, for example, they discovered a mentally competent girl, Katya Timochkina, with cerebral palsy, who was nevertheless kept in a mental hospital for 12 years, as well as a woman, the former owner of a 3-room Moscow apartment, who, after the death of her husband, turned to doctors for help to overcome depression, but ended up in a psychiatric hospital. She was saved by a friend who filed a lawsuit - the only authority that can overturn the verdict of psychiatrists and get the patient out of “imprisonment.”

“This “crazy woman” solves puzzles well, communicates well, and her only problem is that she is lonely and has a three-room apartment in the capital,” said a friend.

One of the many cases of the Independent Psychiatric Association is the case of Maria Alexandrovna (they asked not to indicate her last name), whose son is stubbornly trying to put her in the hospital. Independent psychiatrists do not find any mental abnormalities in her, except for the usual age characteristics of a 66-year-old person and being delayed by problems in the family.
“The relatives became literate and learned what to say. It’s worth declaring: a person is dangerous to himself and those around him - paramedics arrive immediately, and then prove that you did not run naked with a knife in your hands,” says Lyubov Vinogradova.

80-year-old blockade survivor Nina Ivanovna Panshina was barely defended by her neighbors, but her own son still promises to change his mother’s place of residence to a room in a special institution.


Medical history

Only a small part of housing and medical scams comes to light. A year ago, the director of Moscow psychoneurological dispensary No. 4, Valentina Mishina, and her deputy, Natalya Semykina, received 10 years in prison for fraud with patients’ apartments. The court unearthed only one case: a Muscovite was “healed” so that she signed documents to move from a prestigious apartment in the center of the capital to a town in the Vladimir region. Oddly enough, all cargo transportation in Moscow under the contract was paid for by her. When the drug intoxication wore off, the woman turned to the police.

A more famous case became famous thanks to the sonorous names of the main participants: large businessman Vladimir Savelyev sent his ex-wife for treatment to psychiatrists so as not to share property and children with her. Marianna Savelyeva would have easily joined the ranks of patients if she had not had good connections - through influential acquaintances she was able to convey a letter to Vladimir Putin, who gave the order to understand her complicated story. As a result, one of the psychiatrists received a sentence (by the way, it was he who “treated” the heroine of our publication – “Interlocutor” of March 11 – Prudkina, who also lost her apartment in the center of Moscow), the second escaped with the loss of his job. Yura Zalogin and dozens of others like him have no access to Putin...