[2] Kosenko's verdict and sentence were widely condemned as a political abuse of psychiatry, marking a return to the Soviet Union practice of sentencing dissidents to psychiatric hospitals, with one expert describing Kosenko's case as “the first such clear and obvious instance” of “punitive psychiatry” in Russia since Soviet times.
[2] As a child, he reportedly “loved to read, and always had his head in one history book or another.” “You could say he was a nerd,” his aunt told The New Yorker in 2013, calling him “a real humanist, without any aggression.” He “could have easily enrolled in the history program at Moscow State University,” according to his aunt, but instead went into the Russian Armed Forces, where he “was severely beaten by fellow cadets,”[1] reportedly as part of “a hazing ritual,”[5] and sustained a concussion.
[2] During this time, Kosenko, who has been described as “a very shy person, shunning any kind of violence,”[6] who has “a long mustache and droopy eyes,” led “a quiet, normal life, primarily staying inside the Moscow apartment he shared with his sister Ksenia (sometimes transliterated as Kseniya) and her adult son, where he listened to the radio and read books on Communist history.
In late 2011 and early 2012, when a large-scale opposition movement broke out into the open in Moscow, it gave Kosenko a chance to take part in something, to be among like-minded people and express his political ideas.” Ksenia told the New Yorker that he viewed this development, which “took him a while to digest,” as “great” and “inspiring.”[1] Kosenko was arrested at the Bolotnaya Square protest on May 6, 2012, released the next day, and fined five hundred rubles, which is approximately equivalent to fifteen or sixteen dollars.
“My son and I even laughed,” Ksenia later said, “at how he got off so cheaply.” A month later, on June 8, 2012, a “whole crowd” of men walked into the Kosenko flat “and announced that they had a search warrant.
Consequently, he “looked terrible.” After his lawyers informed independent journalists about this situation, there was “a small outcry” in the press, and Kosenko began receiving his medicine.
[8] Ksenia Kosenko later told Amnesty International: “When some people started to fight with a police officer, [Mikhail] just stood there, trying to shield himself.
When a decision was taken to open a criminal case into mass riots at Bolotnaya Square, they started to compare their photos with the video footage.
Yakov, Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper Novye Izvestiya, sent a letter to Olga Aleksandrovna Egorova, Chair of the Moscow City Court, asking that the court trying Kosenko “be allowed to make rulings strictly in accordance with the law, based on unconditional adherence to the code of criminal procedure, as well as the principles of humanity and fairness, giving priority to the human rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the Russian Federation.”[8] Kosenko took part in the hearing by video-link from Butyrka prison.
“Our people have become used to suffering,” he said, and criticized Russia's “Eastern model of society,” in which “a lack of freedom is exchanged for a comfortable life” and the people are subjected to the “eternal tenure of a single regime.” Joshua Yaffa of the New Yorker wrote: “If nothing else—as if it hadn’t been clear long before—these were not the words of an unstable, dangerously clouded mind.” Kosenko, whose sister's letters to him were returned by the censors, learned of his mother's death through the media and was not allowed to attend her funeral in September 2013.
“This is the first such clear and obvious instance in the post-Soviet period.”[4] The Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia issued a special statement about the case, stating that “On the basis of a conversation that lasted less than one hour, the specialists made the far more serious diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia instead of the diagnosis of sluggish neurosis-like schizophrenia that Kosenko was treated for over the course of 12 years.”[10] In the Russian periodical Snob, three Russian psychiatrists criticized Kosenko's sentence and rejected the prosecution's claim that he was dangerous.
“At the very least,” wrote Yaffa, “his case sends a signal about the Kremlin’s rapaciousness not just in prosecuting the Bolotnaya defendants but in its desire to clamp down on all those in the opposition or sympathetic to it.”[1] Noting that “Kosenko was certainly not one of the leading figures of last year’s protest,” Raluca Besliu of the International Policy Digest stated that “This means that no one is truly safe from the regime’s increasing ire.
Have Russians become so indifferent to Putin’s behavior that not even the revival of Soviet punitive psychiatric mechanisms can motivate a revolt against an increasing repressive regime?”[13] Amnesty reported on December 2, 2013, that Kosenko was “not receiving regularly the medication he needs.”[12] On March 25, 2014, the Moscow City Court upheld the verdict on appeal.