topic: | Political violence |
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editor: | Andrew Getto |
In one of Russia’s northernmost cities, Murmansk, healthcare professionals took part in a campaign to prevent the sole opposition figure from running for office.
Murmansk was known as a big port city and industrial centre, and for being the destination of the Arctic convoys in World War II. Now it’s a hopeless place that has lost 40 percent of its population over the past 30 years.
A former local head of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s organisation, 31-year-old Violetta Grudina, is a one of the few troublemakers, poking at the corrupt authorities. She’s running for the city council under the motto “A voice against the city’s mafia.” In today’s Russia, rhetoric like this puts a big target on your back.
And Grudina did find an actual shooting target in her mailbox soon after announcing her campaign. In a few days, someone riddled the walls of her office with bullets. Other techniques of coercion included demolishing the interior, painting swastikas on the walls, and sending the woman’s neighbours flyers accusing her of being a child molester. That didn’t work, and the authorities came up with something more elaborate and timely.
In the middle of June, Grudina started to feel unwell. In a few days, a worn-out, maskless doctor arrived, swabbed her nose and didn’t even bother taking it with him. Then she received a text message saying her coronavirus test was positive and that she must stay home for two weeks. She self-quarantined and managed to overcome the disease, even though the police were constantly harassing her, banging on her door day and night under phony pretexts. Finally, she went out on the street to hand over her campaign flyers, and did so without getting a negative test first.
While that was arguably neither the brightest nor the most responsible move, no one had instructed Grudina on what to do after the quarantine. In an instant, the regional chief medical officer reported the candidate to the police, and a criminal case was launched against her. She was sentenced to mandatory hospitalisation, despite having a negative test. She spent two weeks in a room with ill people, fighting what she claims were falsified medical records and even starting a hunger strike when the hospital head refused to pass her registration documents to the election committee.
Just this week, she finally managed to file them herself, but it’s hardly the end of this uphill battle.
Grudina’s case is part of a country-wide campaign aiming to prevent any opposition candidate from running for office. The so-called “sanitary” Article 236 of the Penal code was used against other Navalny allies across Russia. The authorities pointed at outdoor opposition events, even though they themselves had sanctioned mass maskless gatherings for a total of hundreds of thousands of people this summer alone. In each case, there is a medical official, angry at violators of public health safety, most of whom just happen to be anti-Putin opposition figures.
This is hardly the first case in which doctors take part in state oppression. The most obvious parallel is the so-called punitive psychiatry, the Soviet practice of declaring dissidents mentally ill and locking them up in psychiatric wards, sometimes for years.
A more recent example is the head of a hospital in Omsk, Siberia, who was unlucky to get Alexei Navalny as the patient after he was nearly killed with a military-grade nerve agent. Alexandr Murakhovsky, visibly under pressure, fed the press nonsense about the state of Navalny for days, and after a while got promoted to the regional Minister of Health.
Healthcare in Russia is overwhelmingly government-run. And when you’re dependent on the Russian government, you often face the choice to do more than your direct responsibilities.
Take teachers, for instance. People of this caste are regarded as heroes for their extremely underpaid hard work (just $300-400 per month on average). Yet, it’s they who are directly responsible for the bulk of vote rigging, since many polls are located in schools.
A similar story goes on with healthcare workers. Many lower-grade medical professionals are strongly encouraged to vote for the ruling party or to visit a pro-government rally. Senior health officials often run for public office - some reluctantly, some eagerly, like Dr. Denis Protsenko, the head of the Kommunarka, the flagship Covid hospital in Moscow.
The moral of the story is that the ruling Russian regime ruins the reputation of anyone involved to a slightest degree. You were once a beloved geometry teacher, and now your former student sees you throwing a bunch of extra ballots in the box. You were once a respected emergency care worker, and now you concoct a diagnosis for your patient who simply wants to exercise her electoral rights.
Image: Clay Banks.