Russian pro-government blogger Ilya Remeslwho sharply criticized President Vladimir Putin at the beginning of the week, hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital in St. Petersburgthe Deutsche Welle station reported on Thursday.
Remeslo is a former member of the Public Chamber of Russia and a lawyer who has long supported the country’s leadership and criticized the opposition. In the past, he also participated in allegations against the poor opposition leader Alexey Navalny and his associates.
However, at the beginning of this week – March 17 and 18 – Remeslo unexpectedly published a series of posts on social networks in which he sharply criticized the Kremlin. He called the war in Ukraine a “dead end” and called for the prosecution of Putin as an “illegitimate president”. His statements caused a significant response in pro-Russian circles and among pro-war so-called With bloggers.
Some of their representatives strongly condemned these statements, while there were also speculations that Remesla’s account was attacked by hackers. But he denied it. Journalist Alexandr Pliushchev, who interviewed Remesl on March 18, said that possible hospitalization could be “an effective way of solving the (emerging) crisis” for the Russian authorities. At the same time, however, he added that the blogger seemed sane during the conversation with him and did not talk nonsense.
During the era of the Soviet Union, there was a systematic practice of “abuse of psychiatry for political purposes”when there were dissidents – critics of the regime, activists, believers or people trying to emigrate – often labeled as mentally ill and forcibly placed in psychiatric hospitals. The Soviet regime assumed that opposition to the “socialist system” was itself a sign of mental disorder. In these so-called in special hospitals, the conditions were similar to prisons, and patients had to undergo forced treatment, including the use of strong drugs.
