Window on Eurasia

Soviet-Style ‘Punitive’ Psychiatry Reappears in Russia

 

Paul Goble

Vienna, August 29, 2006 – Russian prosecutors are reviving a discredited practice of the Soviet past -- the use of psychiatric expertise for political purposes – but now as part of a broader effort to find a justification for banning Islamic texts that officials view as incitements to terrorist violence.

Over the past two years, prosecutors have sought to ban the works of
one or another Islamic author. Typically, they have turned to experts on
Islamic thought, but the latter have not always provided the judgments
and hence the evidence prosecutors require for prosecutions.

Consequently, an increasing number of prosecutors are turning to
psychologists and especially psychiatrists who are prepared to testify
that this or that text will have a negative impact on the mental state
of those who read it – even though there is no basis in law or under
the Russian Constitution for bringing charges on this basis.

Last year, officials asked specialists at the Moscow Institute of
Psychology to study the physiological reactions of those shown for
extremely brief times passages from Muslim texts that the Russian
government hoped to ban. That effort attracted the attention of human
rights activists and ultimately proved less than completely successful.

Now, prosecutors in Tatarstan have tried a new, but related tack:
Having been able to get experts to describe as extremist the works of Said
Nursi, a Turkish Muslim activist, they have now advanced an argument
like those advanced by the notorious Serbsky Institute in Soviet times.

Specifically, K.F. Amirov, Tatarstan’s procurator general, made the
following declartion to a court:

“As a whole, the impact of the brochures is directed at the change of
the subjective reality of the personality, its system of values and
convictions, and its interrelationships in society. An attempt is being
made to realize a subconscious impact on the psyche of the reader and
on the mechanisms of faith, that is, the formation of values and beliefs
on an irrational basis. The combination of these well-defined tendencies
deprives the personality of the ability to critically assess the
changes which are taking place, lead to the destruction of the ability of the
expression of one’s own independent will, including the right to
freedom of choice in the area of belief.”

According to the journalist reporting Amirov’s words, his argument
“resembles not the document of a jurist charged with defending the
right of citizens to practice their own religion but instead a
proclamation of the chief of the Union of the Militant Godless Yemelyan
Yaroslavskiy!”
[http://www.islam.ru/pressclub/islamofobia/taprokuv/].

“The formation of conscious values and convictions on an irrational
basis,” Timur Ostapenko comments, “is an ineluctable and essential
element of any relation and the chief distinguishing quality of
religion from atheistic philosophy, something,” he continues, “known to any
specialist on religious life.

Consequently, he argues, the Tatarstan procurator is in fact “asking
the court to condemn not only the doctrine of S. Nursi and not only
Islam but in general any religion” because the charges being levied
against the works of S. Nursi could in fact be made against any
religious thinker and indeed religion as such.

All this recalls the Soviet approach, Ostapenko insists: “In Soviet
times, when any religion was declared ‘a survival of the past,’
Soviet atheist-psychiatrists described the very same mechanisms of the
impact of religion on the psyche of the personality and [by so doing]
thus declared the content of any religion invariably harmful.”

However willing Russian psychiatrists may be to testify otherwise, a
religion that did not have an irrational aspect would in fact cease to be a religion. But what is more important, Ostapenko says, is that such
statements violate the Constitutional and legal rights of citizens
“to have irrational convictionss, to seek to attract their children to
them, and with their agreement to instruct others in these convictions.”

Given that efforts to make such an end-run around the Constitution and
the laws bear “such an anti-religious character,” Ostapenko
continues, the question naturally arises: “Why is this necessary?”
And he concludes with what he must believe is his most powerful
argument.

“The entire country knows that the President of Russia is a
believer, that is, that he respect irrational convictions, assists the rebirth of
traditional religions, has done a lot to help the Russian Orthodox
Church an has broadened the ties of Russia with the Islamic world.”

Given all that, one must ask, Ostapenko says, just who is behind this
anti-Muslim and anti-religious effort? And one must inform all
believers in the Russian Federtion that the use of psychiatry in this way against
Muslims creates “a dangerous precedent,” one that is based “not
on law but on the subjective judgments of bureaucrats.”

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