Criminally nuts What’s it take in Russia today to be sent to psychiatrists by a judge?
For the past two centuries, thanks to writers like Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of the things Russia is best known for around the world is its rotten prison system. From the Katorga to the Gulag, criminals, freethinkers, and the very unlucky have wallowed in labor camps, huddling in the cold and swatting mosquitoes in the heat. Today, things aren’t as bad as they used to be, but Russia’s criminal justice system isn’t without many of the quirks that have made it such delicious fodder for classic literature over the years. For instance, what does it take in Russia today to land a person in court-ordered psychiatric care? Meduza reviews three high-profile criminal cases in recent months where judges sent defendants to psychiatrists.
The criminal atheist, Viktor Krasnov
Krasnov found out he was being investigated for hurting religious groups’ feelings on the Internet when police showed up at his doorstep in April 2015. They confiscated his computer and mobile phone. Later, immediately after interrogating him at a police station, without any warning, they dragged him off to a psychiatric clinic, where he was forced to spend a month being evaluated by doctors. A judge considered it a necessary measure to establish Krasnov’s sanity.
What had Krasnov done to convince a court that it needed to lock him up in a hospital?
On the online community “Overhead in Stavropol,” he trolled some Christians. Krasnov’s now infamous remark about God’s nonexistence reads as follows: “Ooh-la-la :-) Lotta you braindead preachy Orthodox types here! There’s no Gawd! :-)” Elsewhere on Vkontakte, charming man that he is, Krasnov also teased and insulted Jews.
The actionist artist, Petr Pavlensky
In early November 2015, Pavlensky set fire to a doorway at the main federal police building in Moscow. He described his act as a reaction to the case against the so-called “Crimean terrorists,” including Ukrainian director Oleg Sentsov, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for planning an attack in Crimea. “The Federal Security Service fabricated all these cases,” Pavlensky argues.
In late January 2016, a judge ordered Pavlensky to be transferred from his jail cell to the Serbsky psychiatric center, where, more than a year earlier, the artist had cut off his own earlobe, in a protest against Russia’s political abuse of psychiatry.
The murderous nanny, Gyulchekhra Bobokulova
Bobokulova is the woman from Uzbekistan working in Moscow as a nanny who beheaded the four-year-old girl entrusted to her care. She set fire to the girl’s home after killing her, and then paraded her head around at a downtown subway station, screaming that she was a terrorist, and threatening to blow herself up. Bobokulova insists that her crime had a religious dimension, saying that she committed the murder because “Allah commanded it.”
Bobokulova was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1999. More than a decade ago, her father says she started “hearing voices and acting aggressively.”
On March 10, ten days after being detained for murdering the child, Bobokulova was reportedly transferred to a prison psychiatric hospital.