The commission’s conclusions gave the judge all the ammunition he needed under Russian law to do the bidding of his political masters and acquit the colonel. Just as in Soviet times, what the experts report to the courts depends not on the facts but on who is presenting them. Among the cast of characters who provided the psychological and psychiatric grounds for exculpating Budanov was Professor Tamara Pechernikova, doctor of medical science (commission chairman), director of the Consultancy Section of the Serbsky Institute, a doctor with an international reputation, a psychiatric consultant of the highest standing, with fifty years of consultancy experience. This choice was far from random, I believe, because in Russia such appointments do not just happen. This is the way things were done in Soviet times. The worst of Communism is with us again; in Putin’s era the appalling practice of political-psychiatry-to-order has returned.
On August 25, 1968, a famous demonstration took place in Red Square, Moscow. Seven people entered the square and unfurled banners reading FOR OUR AND YOUR FREEDOM! and SHAME ON THE OCCUPIERS! One of the seven was Natalia Gorbanevskaya, a poet, journalist, and dissident who, on this occasion, was pushing a pram with her baby in it. In a country where nobody had protested for a long time, people were stepping forward who had it in them to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
The demonstration of the Seven lasted only a few minutes before they were seized by the plainclothes KGB agents who constantly patrolled Red Square. A court subsequently sentenced two of them to terms in labor camps, sent one to a psychiatric hospital, and three into exile. Gorbanevskaya was at first released, since she was breast-feeding her baby.
Some time later, she was rearrested for continuing civil-rights activism. It was then that Tamara Pechernikova made her mark. It was she who, at the behest of the KGB, interrogated Gorbanevskaya in the same Serbsky Institute where, three decades later, Budanov was examined.
Pechernikova produced the medical verdict on Gorbanevskaya the KGB required: “schizophrenia”—which is to say that anyone displaying a banner in Red Square, protesting Russian tanks in the streets of Prague, must have been insane. Pechernikova also supplied the KGB its diagnosis that Gorbanevskaya was a danger to society and should be subjected indefinitely to compulsory treatment in a specialized psychiatric hospital.
Natalia Gorbanevskaya, the founder and first editor of the underground Chronicle of Current Events, a samizdat bulletin of Soviet civil-rights activists, was to spend grim years of incarceration in the Kazan Specialized Mental Hospital. Imprisoned there from 1969 until 1972, she emigrated with an Israeli visa in 1975. She now lives in France.
The Gorbanevskaya case was among the first of the psychiatric repressions against dissidents in the Soviet Union. The 1970s, an era when the Communist regime fought a war of attrition against dissidents, was a heyday for Colonel Budanov’s would-be savior. To understand what is happening in Russia now, we need to be aware not only of the revival of political psychiatry, with diagnoses to order, but also of the way it functions.
In the files of almost all of Pechernikova’s cases, from Gorbanevskaya and well-known Soviet dissident Alexander Ginzburg to Budanov, we find the leitmotif of the search for social justice. Today these words are used in an entirely different context, however. In the Soviet era, Pechernikova regarded evidence of a search for social justice as a symptom of mental illness dangerous to society. Today she considers a brutal murder to be justified by the murderer’s search for social justice. The colonel was overwhelmed by feelings of guilt over the death of his comrades at the hands of a sniper. As a result—understandably, according to Pechernikova—he killed a woman.
Can it be mere chance that Pechernikova figured in the cases of Ginzburg, Gorbanevskaya, and Budanov?
For the past three decades, the KGB/FSB has known that Pechernikova could be relied upon. She bided her time in the shadows during the “late democratic” period of Mikhail Gorbachev and under Boris Yeltsin, but then a KGB officer with a twenty-year service record became president. In the wake of Putin’s rise to power, every nook and cranny in the power structure was filled by people who had been employed by the KGB.
Information from independent sources (not surprisingly, there is none from official ones) suggests that more than six thousand ex-KGB /FSB people followed Putin to power and now occupy the highest offices. These include the key ministries, in which they hold the most important positions: the president’s office (two deputy directors, the heads of the staffing and information departments); the Security Council (deputy secretary); the government administrative apparatus; the ministries of defense, foreign affairs, justice, the nuclear industry, taxes and revenues, internal affairs, press affairs, television, radio and mass media; the State Customs and Excise Committee; the Russian Agency for National Reserves; the Committee for Financial Recovery—and so on.
Like cancer, bad history tends to recur, and there is only one radical treatment: invasive therapy to destroy the deadly cells. We have not done this. We dragged ourselves out of the Soviet Union and into the New Russia still infected with our Soviet disease. To return to our central question: Is the resurrection of Professor Pechernikova in the Budanov case a coincidence? Well, is the return to power of the secret police a coincidence?
It is not. Back in 2000, people were saying, “What if Putin did start out in the KGB in the Soviet period? He’ll shape up once he is in office.”
By then it was already too late. Now we find ourselves surrounded by people trusted by Putin and Putin’s friends. Unfortunately, they trust only their own kind. The result is that the power structures of the New Russia are overrun with citizens from a particular tradition, brought up with a repressive mentality and with an understanding of how to resolve governmental problems that reflects this mentality.
Pechernikova both embodies that tradition and is a mechanism for perpetuating it. In the two decades she spent patriotically, as she would see it, defending the Soviet social and state system, she put in place a mechanism for controlling medical science, molding psychiatry to fit the needs of the state security apparatus. Now, more than a decade after the fall of the visible structures of the Soviet system, she has found herself and her special skills in as much demand as ever.
These are not abstractions of political theory. Pechernikova’s contribution to the Budanov case had life-and-death consequences for real people, just as it did in the 1970s and 1980s. Whether Budanov did or did not go free was a matter of fundamental importance, not least for the army, which, in Chechnya, has become an instrument of repression. The army was waiting for a precedent from the court in Rostov-on-Don. Could the military continue to behave like Budanov?
Pechernikova, who effectively said, “Go right ahead,” provided crucial ammunition to enable Judge Kostin also to say, in law, “Go right ahead.”
Their signals were certainly interpreted that way in Chechnya, where officers picked up exactly where Budanov had left off. We could cite enough examples to fill another book.
MORE THAN A year passed. The Budanov case files were augmented by three additional expert reports. Pechernikova’s conclusions were rejected as untenable. The Supreme Court sent the case back for a retrial, and a newly appointed military court in Rostov-on-Don commissioned new reports. The prosecutor, who had effectively defended the accused, was removed from the scene, and social justice began to emerge from behind the clouds.
And Pechernikova? Was she reprimanded? No chance—she was left in place.