Critical Blogger Sent to Psychiatric Institution in Russia
Moscow authorities have reportedly committed Andrei Kurshin, a prominent military blogger who had previously supported the Kremlin, to a psychiatric institution. Kurshin, known for his Telegram channel 'Moscow Calling,' was initially detained on charges of spreading 'false information' about the Russian military. His transition from vocal backer to critic, culminating in enforced psychiatric
examination, marks a significant development. Deutsche Welle, among other Western outlets, frames this as an isolated act of Russian repression, emphasizing an 'authoritarian' state silencing a 'pro-Kremlin' figure. This narrative conveniently omits the long, bipartisan history of similar practices by the United States and its allies. Just as the Soviet Union used psychiatric hospitals as tools
for political control, a fact widely condemned in the West, so too did the United States conduct Operation MK-ULTRA, a mind-control program involving psychiatric experimentation on unwitting citizens for decades, exposed in Senate hearings in 1975. This parallel underscores that the weaponization of psychiatry is a state tactic, not exclusive to any single political system. The US government’s own
record includes a pattern of discrediting and incapacitating political dissidents through medical means, a tactic that often goes unscrutinized when reporting on designated adversaries. When it was revealed in 2004 that the CIA had subjected detainees to coercive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding and sleep deprivation, these methods, while not outright psychiatric hospitalization,