Kulazin: a documentary about punitive psychiatry

Punitive psychiatry is not a relic of the Soviet past, but routine everyday life in modern Russia and Belarus. In recent years alone, according to Russian human rights activists, about 70% of people in psychiatric hospitals ended up there by force. And if in the USSR psychiatry was a way of suppressing dissidents and dissidents, now compulsory treatment is used as a tool of economic and social repression: this is how security forces get rid of unwanted people, enterprising relatives get rid of aging property owners, petty officials get rid of annoying citizens. The goal of compulsory psychiatry is not just to break a person, but to leave him only a shell in which thoughts, mind and feelings are turned into ashes. Today absolutely anyone can end up in a psychiatric hospital, but only a few can get out. Samizdat presents its latest documentary film - “Kulazin”, dedicated to a real branch of hell that Dante himself would envy, and separately - the story of a modern Kazan orderly who visited a psychiatric hospital and is trying to change this institution.

There is barbed wire, behind a high concrete fence there are angular red brick buildings with bars on the windows. Only employees can enter the territory - relatives are allowed in by appointment, and then only in those departments where visits are allowed. Several vehicles had accumulated near the massive iron gates: two ambulances and a small paddy wagon with flashing lights—the kind used to transport prisoners.

The famous psychiatric clinical hospital No. 1 named after N. A. Alekseev, located in Moscow on Zagorodnoye Shosse, building 2; until 1994 it was called the Kashchenko Hospital and began its work back in 1894. It was also popularly known as Kanatchikova Dacha, after the name of the place where it was built. Since the 50s of the last century, the hospital has had a forensic psychiatric examination department. Joseph Brodsky was lying in “Kashchenko” in 1964, and Vysotsky dedicated a whole song to her. Already in Soviet times, not everyone could leave a psychiatric hospital - the first case of punitive psychiatry in the USSR occurred four years after the October Revolution, in 1921. The flywheel of psychiatric repression spun into full swing by the 60s of the 20th century. According to data published by the International Society for Human Rights in the White Book of Russia, during the existence of the USSR, about two million people became victims of the use of psychiatry for political purposes.

Psychiatrist Emmanuel Gushansky was inside the Soviet psychiatric system for more than half a century, was engaged in human rights activities within the framework of the Independent Psychiatric Association, and for many years was the chairman of the forensic psychiatric commission in Kashchenko. “Psychiatry is an area of ​​medicine that directly concerns political issues. In the Soviet Union it was very widely used as a form of punishment for dissidents,” he says.

“What was used for political purposes in Soviet times was called ‘sluggish schizophrenia,’” Stanislav Poltorak, a psychiatrist and senior researcher at the St. Petersburg Bekhterev Institute, told us for our study on schizophrenia. Poltorak explains that currently such a diagnosis does not exist: “Today, in the classification of diseases that is used in our country, there is no ‘sluggish schizophrenia’.” But then this diagnosis was given to the majority of dissidents who ended up in psychiatric hospitals.

Historians of medicine largely associate this phenomenon with the figure of Andrei Snezhnevsky, a Soviet psychiatrist who introduced the concept of sluggish schizophrenia, which is not recognized in world medicine. Snezhnevsky, who headed the Institute of Psychiatry of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences for twenty-five years, significantly expanded the criteria for schizophrenia and personally diagnosed “sluggish schizophrenia” to individual dissidents after examination, for example, human rights activist Vladimir Bukovsky.

Activities against the Communist Party made it possible to recognize a person as especially dangerous and send him for compulsory treatment, and conditions in special hospitals were worse and more difficult than in camps and prisons. Political affairs were handled exclusively by the Serbsky Institute: “They did not analyze the motives of a person’s behavior - they simply attributed illness to him and declared him insane,” says Gushansky.

Aminazine and haloperidol were mainly used against political prisoners in Soviet psychiatry. According to Gushansky, these drugs act directly on the brain and cause severe side effects - so treatment turned into chemical punishment of a person.

“They didn’t use correctors to relieve side effects, although the doctors had them. It is no secret that, in addition to the use of psychotropic substances, physical violence against prisoners was also widespread. In general, everything was done to suppress a person and leave only a shell of him. In Soviet times, people were afraid to talk about the problems in this system. Few people knew about this; any information was classified,” the doctor recalls.

HISTORY OF A FORMER FSIN EMPLOYEE,

who began working as an orderly in a psychiatric hospital and is now trying to stop this institution

The story of Denis Kirillov began in 2006, when, after serving in the construction troops, he got a job at the Federal Penitentiary Service. Denis worked for several years in zones and prisons in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region, where, according to him, he created a literary program for the re-education of prisoners. Kirillov wrote poetry and read his works at special “voluntary-compulsory” events - in this way he wanted to “turn over the worldview of the convicts, and instill humanism in the employees of the Federal Penitentiary Service.” Denis, having repeatedly encountered the harshness of the guards, collected incriminating evidence on his colleagues and told journalists about torture in the colony. After the leak, he began to receive threats, and at the end of 2009 he decided to return to his native Kazan. There, because of his publications, they refused to hire him even for the police.

Dismissal from the Federal Penitentiary Service and an entry in the work book scared off employers. For a long time, Denis was forced to work at the station - either as a loader, or as a cleaner, or as a janitor - 12-hour shifts for a meager salary.

A few years later, he finally managed to get a job as an orderly at the Kazan special-type psychiatric hospital with intensive supervision under the local administration of the Federal Penitentiary Service. There Denis again saw how reality works, and by making this information public, he again became an enemy for his employer.

“The destruction of a person’s personality,” says Kirillov, begins almost immediately in the Kazan special psychiatric hospital. New patients are told to strip naked, given a razor, and forced to shave their groin hair under the supervision of medical staff and FSIN officers. The guards beat especially violent ones already at this stage.

The hospital has a strict daily routine: wake up at 6 am, the ward duty officer, appointed by the administration, is in charge of cleaning. Doctors visit prisoners every day, and medication intake is strictly controlled. The walks take place in a cramped room 10 by 10 meters, where 60–70 people are taken at a time. “In case of illness, no one is provided with real medical care; at most, they will pull out a bad tooth,” says Denis.

The wards are cell-type: the metal doors are locked with a key, there are only bunks inside, and, unlike the pre-trial detention center, which is considered one of the worst places of detention, there are no sinks or toilets in the hospital ward. According to need, patients are taken out at a strictly defined time, often they are forced to endure, and those who cannot, urinate in bags that remain from the transfers.

“There was a case when such a package was thrown out of the window - and it fell next to the inspectors standing below; They immediately identified the ward and punished the patient. If someone cannot withstand all the humiliation and torture, tries to escape and somehow leaves the building, he will be captured and beaten,” says Denis.

He explains the inner workings of the hospital. Punitive functions are carried out by medical personnel: doctors, paramedics and nurses. They are responsible for harmful injections and pills. FSIN employees are brute physical force, they are engaged in torture and beatings. Control over patients in Kazan St. Petersburg is provided by two people - the chief physician and the head of the security department: “If an order is received from the investigative authorities to destroy someone, they pass this command to other hospital employees - and this person begins to be actively beaten and stabbed.” The orderly must maintain cleanliness and monitor neatness, but all the main work is done by the prisoners themselves: “Place the duck, feed the person who is lying on the “mating”, remove the urine - all this is done by another patient; the orderly is the direct controller.”

“Mating” is the most severe punishment; in this way they deal with guilty or unwanted patients. The person is beaten with batons, and then tied to a bed and additionally injected with powerful psychotropic drugs. It is impossible to move in this position, it is difficult to breathe. The prisoner is not given water and is rarely fed. Denis notes that, by law, a patient in a psychiatric hospital can be restricted in movement for a maximum of several hours if he poses a danger to other people, but in fact, a person can be kept in this position for weeks. Many prisoners simply die from torture. Kirillov encountered his first death after a month of working in the hospital.

“Over six months, there were 10 such cases. The corpses are taken to an unnamed cemetery in a special car. Sometimes the bodies are given to relatives, but no one understands the causes of death. If you look up the statistics of deaths, they are huge,” says Denis.

During his work, Denis more than once observed the effect of the drugs that are fed to prisoners - after such treatment, even the most violent prisoner turns into a frail old man. He stops moving, drool flows from his mouth, he moans, screams and eventually finally fades out. The drugs used are the same as in Soviet times: chlorpromazine and haloperidol.

“Yes, many people are there for crimes. The most terrible case I have seen is a murderer who strangled his mother with a telephone cord in a hotel. Many will say that the fact that they are bullied in the hospital is correct, but people say this because they themselves did not end up there,” notes Denis.

Those whose cases were fabricated also go through punitive psychiatry: those disliked by the authorities or security forces, political prisoners and lonely old people - they are deliberately put in a mental hospital in order to take away their property. The media have repeatedly written about social repression. So, in February 2021, relatives of a pensioner from Moscow forcibly placed the woman in a mental hospital in order to get an apartment on Arbat.

Denis Kirillov talks about similar cases: “The police, in collusion with the criminal world, where black realtors work for them, rob, kidnap and kill lonely grandparents, whose apartments are sold and the money is divided among themselves.”

The main difference between a special mental hospital and a prison is an “endless bed”: any person who ends up in a mental hospital can stay there for many years. Whether to release the patient or not is decided by the medical commission, which consists of the hospital administration and meets every six months. Denis says that the only way to speed up his release is to bribe the head physician and employees of the Federal Penitentiary Service, but there are often cases when the administration “cheats” the relatives of a prisoner.

For the six months that Denis worked in a Kazan hospital, he, according to him, tried to make life easier for prisoners, but faced pressure from medical staff and guards: “The doctors told me that I was nobody, that I should obey only them. When I tried to let patients out to the toilet, FSIN officers immediately ran into me. People are treated worse than animals - they have no rights there.”

Eternal Return

Shortly before his dismissal from the Kazan hospital, Denis Kirillov published several articles in various newspapers and told what was happening to prisoners within the walls of the hospital.

“The publication was on Wednesday. When I went to work on Thursday, they had already started to intimidate me. The FSIN employees said that I would never leave here again and that I would become a patient of this hospital, they insulted and beat me. As far as I know, the order to press me was personally from the head of the Federal Penitentiary Service for the Republic of Tatarstan,” recalls Denis.

Shortly before publication, Denis wrote a letter of resignation - he felt that it was dangerous to remain working at the hospital: “They would have restrained me there, knowing that I was a lonely person and it was unlikely that anyone would look for me. Therefore, there were two options: either leave or become a patient of this hospital yourself.” After leaving, the Kazan police immediately became interested in him. Several times he was taken to the department, beaten, threatened with rape and planted with drugs. Despite the threats, Denis continued to fight against arbitrariness and appealed to the Commissioner for Human Rights of Tatarstan, Saria Saburskaya, with a complaint about the cruel treatment of patients in a special mental hospital. Denis found former prisoners who had been tortured, but after talking with the police they refused to give their testimony.

Subsequently, Kirillov was summoned for questioning by the investigative committee and threatened to open a criminal case for giving false testimony and extremism. The media have repeatedly written that people are being tortured in the Kazan hospital, and former patients sent complaints to the ECHR about inhuman treatment and torture conditions in the hospital. Despite this, employees of the Federal Penitentiary Service for the Republic of Tatarstan threatened to sue Denis, but never made any demands.

To stop the pressure, Denis created a public outcry around his story. He continued to publish in the media, gave interviews and reached out to bloggers: “I said: if something happens to me and I am arrested, ring all the bells and contact foreign media. I, as a former justice officer, also wrote appeals to the FSB, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Prosecutor General's Office, the Investigative Committee and personally to Vladimir Kolokoltsev [Minister of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation]. I wrote that if the persecution continues, I will turn to foreign countries for help.”

In 2018, the pressure stopped; the criminal cases that they tried to bring against him were closed due to lack of evidence. After being discharged from the psychiatric hospital, Denis gave several performances where he read out his poems on sensitive social topics. Now he continues to draw attention to the problem of torture and abuse in places of detention - he regularly writes posts on social networks, shoots videos and puts up leaflets about kidnappings in Kazan.

WHO WORKED ON THE FILM:

General producer: Egor Mostovshchikov
Director: Alina Nasibullina
Producer: Olga Dyachkova
Correspondent: Alexey Shumkin
Editing director: Vasily Mostovshchikov
Script: Egor Mostovshchikov, Alexey Shumkin

Art director: Alena Belyakova
Illustrations: Elena Gordeeva
Animation: Vasily Mostovshchikov
Second cameraman: Nikolaos Eleftheriadis
Quadcopter operator: Jan Hanecki
Sound engineers: Polina Demina, Artem Pavlenko
Mixing: Vasily Mostovshchikov
Color correction: Ivan Dorogavtsev

In episodic roles:

Doctors on the street: Alla Mazur, Konstantin Shtannevich
Orderlies: Vadim Zaitsev, Mikhail Konovalov, Vitaly Katushenko
IPA patients: Alexander Makarchikov, Maria Denkova