Doctors diagnosed a hip fracture in St. Petersburg poet and musician Vyacheslav Malakhov, who was removed from the train by police in July and forcibly placed in a psychiatric hospital. This is reported by the organization helping him «Team Against Torture».
Malakhov told human rights activists that on the evening of July 14 he boarded a train from St. Petersburg to Moscow and, at one of the first stops after departure, asked the conductors to get off. When they refused and the train started moving, Malakhov pulled the stopcock.
Half an hour later, two police officers approached the train, who took Malakhov away with them and delivered him to the police department of the city of Tosno, 40 km from St. Petersburg. According to the St. Petersburg resident, the police threatened to beat him on the way, kept him in a cell for a day without food and took him to court, where he was fined 500 and 2,000 rubles under the article on petty hooliganism (20.1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses).
After that Malakhov was taken to a psychiatric hospital in the village of Ulyanovka, Leningrad Region, under the pretext of a medical examination for injuries and demanded to sign a permit for hospitalization.
The Petersburger refused and then four men tied him to the bed, and one of the policemen pressed his foot on his chest. According to Malakhov, he lay like this for several days, and the nurses gave him unknown injections. Then he was untied and subsequently given pills, which they refused to name, threatening to tie him up again.
Malakhov successfully passed the psychological tests prescribed by the management of the institution, and one of the specialists who conducted them informed human rights activists about his whereabouts. On August 7, after a conversation with the head physician, he was released. In the case history, the hospital staff explained the forced hospitalization by the fact that the St. Petersburg resident “came in, actively hallucinating in an excited state.”
As Malakhov recalled, for more than three weeks in a psychiatric hospital he was only allowed to wash twice. His hand wound, which had been caused by the use of force during his hospitalization, was treated only after it had developed an abscess. After the release of Malakhov, doctors examined him, who recorded a broken rib and infected wounds on his legs.
The lawyers of the «Team Against Torture» demanded that the regional department of the Investigative Committee investigate the forced hospitalization of a Petersburger and the use of force by orderlies against him.
Malakhov was one of the authors of the public «Pre-revolutionary Adviser» in «VKontakte». Since the summer of 2011, memes in pre-revolutionary spelling have been published there, and later also parody poems and covers of modern songs stylized as pre-revolutionary language. Now there are 68 thousand subscribers. The public is now available, but the page of Malakhov himself was blocked in Russia at the request of the Prosecutor General's Office in 2023. Usually such decisions are made because of critical posts about the war in Ukraine.