Old Habits Die Hard

On July 6, police officers in the northwestern city of Murmansk detained opposition journalist Larissa Arap, 48, and took her to the Murmansk Psychiatric Clinic where she was beaten, chained to a bed and repeatedly injected with drugs, according to local and international press reports. She has since been moved to a closed facility in the mining town of Apatity, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Arap – who is also a member of the opposition United Civic Front led by former world chess champion Garry Kasparov – was detained while collecting documents to renew her driver’s license, according to the journalist’s daughter Taisiya Arap, the Moscow radio station Ekho Moskvy reported. 

When she went to pick up a document confirming her mental health, a doctor recognized her name as the author of a news report about psychiatric abuses and then called the police to detain her and transport her to the Murmansk Psychiatric Clinic, Taisiya Arap said. “One of the doctors asked whether I thought it was normal to write such things,” Taisiya Arap reported. “She said: ‘It’s not possible to write such things. It’s forbidden.’”

Larissa Arap told Reuters in a July 31 telephone interview that she was being held in retaliation for writing an article for a local opposition newspaper in June exposing allegations of violent and sexual abuses against children at the Murmansk Psychiatric Clinic. “I feel unwell but am trying to hold out,” Arap told Reuters. “But my strength is dying away.” 

Yevgeny Zenin, the chief doctor of the Murmansk Psychiatric Clinic responded to Arap’s allegation of abuses by stating that “we are representatives of a state medical institution, they are libeling Russia,” Reuters reported.

Arap remained in detention at the Apatity Psychiatric Hospital at the time this article went to press in early August.  Yuri Savenko, president of NPAR, said “I call this not even punitive psychiatry but police psychiatry, when the main aim is to protect the state rather than to treat sick people.”