Psikhushka
Encyclopedia
In the Soviet Union
, systematic political abuse of psychiatry
took place. Soviet psychiatric hospitals were used by the authorities as prisons in order to isolate hundreds or thousands of political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally. This method was also employed against religious prisoners and most especially against well-educated former atheists who adopted a religion. In such cases their religious faith was determined to be a form of mental illness that needed to be cured. Formerly highly classified extant documents from “Special file” of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
published after the dissolution of the Soviet Union
demonstrate that the authorities of the country quite consciously used psychiatry as a tool to suppress dissent.
Following the fall of the Soviet Union, it was often reported that some opposition activists and journalists were detained in Russian psychiatric institutions in order to intimidate and isolate them from society. In modern Russia, human rights activists also face the threat of psychiatric diagnosis as a means of political repression.
In the book Punitive Medicine by Alexander Podrabinek, the term “punitive medicine”, which is identified with “punitive psychiatry," is defined as “a tool in the struggle against dissidents who cannot be punished by legal means.” Punitive psychiatry is neither a discrete subject not a psychiatric specialty but, rather, it is a disciplinary function arising within many applied sciences in totalitarian countries where members of a profession may feel themselves compelled to service the diktats of power. Psychiatric confinement of sane people is uniformly considered a particularly pernicious form of repression and Soviet punitive psychiatry was one of the key weapons of both illegal and legal repression.
Psychiatry possesses a inherent capacity for abuse that is greater than in other areas of medicine. The diagnosis of mental disease can give the state license to detain persons against their will and insist upon therapy both in the interest of the detainee and in the broader interests of society. In addition, receiving a psychiatric diagnosis can in itself be regarded as oppressive. In a monolithic state, psychiatry can be used to bypass standard legal procedures for establishing guilt or innocence and allow political incarceration without the ordinary odium attaching to such political trials. In the period from the 1960-s to 1986, the abuse of psychiatry for political purposes was reported to have been systematic in the Soviet Union and episodic in other Eastern European countries such as Romania
, Hungary
, Czechoslovakia
, and Yugoslavia
. Psychiatrists have been involved in human rights abuses in states across the world when the definitions of mental disease were expanded to include political disobedience. As scholars have long argued, governmental and medical institutions have at times coded threats to authority as mental disease during periods of political disturbance and instability. Nowadays, in many countries, political prisoners are still sometimes confined and abused in mental institutions.
In the Soviet Union dissident
s were often confined in the so-called psikhushka, or psychiatric wards. Psikhushka is the Russian
ironic diminutive for "mental hospital". One of the first psikhushkas was the Psychiatric Prison Hospital in the city of Kazan
. In 1939 it was transferred to the control of the NKVD
, the secret police and the precursor organization to the KGB
, under the order of Lavrentiy Beria
, who was the head of the NKVD. International human rights defenders
such as Walter Reich have long recorded the methods by which Soviet psychiatrists in Psikhushka hospitals diagnosed schizophrenia
in political dissenters.
As early as 1948, the Soviet secret service took an interest in this area of medicine. It was one of the superiors of the Soviet secret police, Andrey Vyshinsky
, who first ordered the use psychiatry as a tool of repression. A system of political abuse of psychiatry was developed at the end of Joseph Stalin
's regime. However, according to Alexander Etkind, punitive psychiatry was not simply an inheritance from the Stalinist era as the GULAG
(the acronym for Chief Administration for Corrective Labor Camps, the penitentiary system in the Stalin years) was an effective instrument of political repression and there was no compelling requirement to develop an alternative and expensive psychiatric substitute. The abuse of psychiatry was a natural product of the later Soviet era. From the mid-1970s to the 1990s, the structure of mental health service conformed to the double standard in society, that of two separate systems which peacefully co-existed despite conflicts between them:
The hundreds of hospitals in the provinces combined components of both systems.
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A precursor of later abuses in psychiatry in the Soviet Union was the so-called "Joint Session" of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences
and the Board of the All-Union Neurologic and Psychiatric Association in October 1951. Held in the name of Ivan Pavlov
it considered the status of several leading neuroscientists and psychiatrists of the time, including Grunya Sukhareva, Vasily Gilyarovsky, Raisa Golant, Aleksandr Shmaryan, and Mikhail Gurevich
, who were charged with practicing "anti-Pavlovian, anti-Marxist, idealistic [and] reactionary" science that was damaging to Soviet psychiatry. During the Joint Session these eminent psychiatrists, motivated by fear, had to publicly admit that their scientific positions were in error and they also had to promise to conform Pavlovian doctrines. However, these public declarations of obedience proved insufficient as in the closing speech of the congress, the lead author of the event's policy report, Andrei Snezhnevsky
stated that they “have not disarmed themselves and continue to remain in the old anti-Pavlovian positions”, thereby causing “grave damage to the Soviet scientific and practical psychiatry”. The vice president of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences accused them of "diligently fall[ing] down to the dirty source of American pseudo-science”. The congressional members who articulated these accusations, among them Irina Strelchuk, Vasily Banshchikov, Oleg Kerbikov, and Andrei Snezhnevsky
, were characterized by careerist ambition and fears for their own positions. Not surprisingly, many of them were advanced and appointed to leadership positions shortly after the session.
The Joint Session also had negative an impact on several leading Soviet academic neuroscientists, such as Pyotr Anokhin
, Aleksey Speransky, Lina Stern
, Ivan Beritashvili, and Leon Orbeli
. They were labeled as anti-Pavlovians, anti-materialists and reactionaries and subsequently they were dismissed from their positions. In addition to losing their laboratories some of these scientists were subjected to torture in prison. The Moscow, Leningrad, Ukrainian, Georgian, and Armenian schools of neuroscience and neurophysiology were damaged for a period due to this loss of personnel. The Joint Session ravaged productive research in neurosciences and psychiatry for years to come. It was pseudoscience that took over.
After the joint session of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences on June 28 — July 4, 1950 and during the session of the Presidium of the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Board of the All-Union Society of Neuropathologists and Psychiatrists on October 11–15, 1951, the leading role was given to Snezhnevky's school. The 1950 decision to give monopoly over psychiatry to the Pavlovian school of Snezhnevsky was one of the crucial factors in the rise of political psychiatry. The Soviet doctors, under the incentive of Sneznevsky, devised a "Pavlovian theory of schizophrenia" and increasingly applied this diagnostic category to political dissidents.
Psychiatric diagnoses such as the diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia" in political dissidents in the USSR were used for political purposes. It was the diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia" that was most prominently used in cases of dissidents. The leading critics implied that Snezhnevsky had designed the Soviet model of schizophrenia and this diagnosis to make political dissent into a mental disease. According Robert van Voren, the political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR arose from the conception that people who opposed the Soviet regime were mentally sick since there was no other logical rationale why one would oppose the sociopolitical system considered the best in the world. The diagnosis "sluggish schizophrenia," a longstanding concept further developed by the Moscow School of Psychiatry and particularly by its chief Andrei Snezhnevsky, furnished a very handy framework for explaining this behavior. The weight of scholarly opinion holds that the psychiatrists who played the primary role in the development of this diagnostic concept were following directives from the Communist Party
and the Soviet secret service, or KGB
, and were well aware of the political uses to which it would be put. Nevertheless, for many Soviet psychiatrists "sluggish schizophrenia" appeared to be a logical explanation to apply to the behavior of critics of the regime who, in their opposition, seemed willing to jeopardize their happiness, family, and career for a reformist conviction or ideal that was so apparently divergent from the prevailing social and political orthodoxy.
A. Snezhnevsky, the most prominent theorist of Soviet psychiatry and director of the Institute of Psychiatry of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, developed a novel classification of mental disorders
postulating an original set of diagnostic criteria. The Soviet model of schizophrenia is based on the hypothesis that a single fundamental characteristic, by which schizophrenia spectrum disorders are distinguished clinically, is their longitudinal course. The hypothesis implies that there are three main types of schizophrenia:
This systematization of schizophrenia types attributed to Snezhnevsky is still used in Russia and refers sluggish schizophrenia to the continuous type.
A carefully crafted description of sluggish schizophrenia established that psychotic symptoms were non-essential for the diagnosis, but symptoms of psychopathy, hypochondria, depersonalization or anxiety were central to it. Symptoms referred to as part of the "negative axis" included pessimism, poor social adaptation, and conflict with authorities, and were themselves sufficient for a formal diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia with scanty symptoms." According to Snezhnevsky, patients with sluggish schizophrenia could present as quasi sane yet manifest minimal but clinically relevant personality changes which could remain unnoticed to the untrained eye. Thereby patients with non-psychotic mental disorders, or even persons who were not mentally sick, could be easily labelled with the diagnosis of sluggish schizophrenia. Along with paranoia
, sluggish schizophrenia was the diagnosis most frequently used for the psychiatric incarceration of dissenters. As per the theories of Snezhnevsky and his colleagues, schizophrenia was much more prevalent than previously considered since the illness could be presented with comparatively slight symptoms and only progress afterwards. As a consequence, schizophrenia was diagnosed much more often in Moscow than in cities of other countries, as the World Health Organization Pilot Study on Schizophrenia reported in 1973. In particular, the scope was widened by sluggish schizophrenia because according to Snezhnevsky and his colleagues, patients with this diagnosis were capable of functioning almost normally in the social sense. Their symptoms could be like those of a neurosis or could assume a paranoid character. The patients with paranoid symptoms retained some insight into their condition but overestimated their own significance and could manifest grandiose ideas of reforming society. Thereby, sluggish schizophrenia could have such symptoms as "reform delusions," "perseverance," and "struggle for the truth." As Vladimir Stayzhkin reported, Snezhnevsky diagnosed a reformation delusion for every case when a patient "develops a new principle of human knowledge, drafts an academy of human happiness, and many other projects for the benefit of mankind."
In the 1960s and 1970s, theories, which contained ideas about reforming society and struggling for truth, and religious convictions were not referred to delusional paranoid disorders in practically all foreign classifications, but Soviet psychiatry, proceeding from ideological conceptions, referred critique of the political system and proposals to reform this system to the delusional construct. Diagnostic approaches of conception of sluggish schizophrenia and paranoiac states with delusion of reformism were used only in the Soviet Union and several Eastern European countries
.
Someone of those present at a lecture by Georgi Morozov on forensic psychiatry in the Serbsky Institute once asked him a rather provocative question: “Tell us, Georgi Vasilevich, what is actually the diagnosis of sluggish schizophrenia?” Since the question was asked with an ironical smile, in the debate, Morozov replied, smiling ironically as well, “You know, dear colleagues, this is a very peculiar disease: there are not delusional disorders, there are not hallucinations, but there is schizophrenia!”
American psychiatrist Alan A. Stone
stated that Western criticism of Soviet psychiatry aimed at Sneznevsky personally, because he was essentially responsible for the Soviet concept of schizophrenia with a "sluggish type" manifestation by "reformerism" including other symptoms. One can readily apply this diagnostic scheme to dissenters. Snezhnevsky was long attacked in the West as an exemplar of psychiatric abuse in the USSR. He was charged with cynically developing a system of diagnosis which could be bent for political purposes, and he himself diagnosed or was involved in a series of famous dissident cases, including those of the biologist Zhores Medvedev
, the mathematician Leonid Plyushch
, and Vladimir Bukovsky
whom Snezhnevsky diagnosed as schizophrenic on 5 July 1962. In 1980, the Special Committee on the Political Abuse of Psychiatry, established by the Royal College of Psychiatrists
in 1978, charged Snezhnevsky with involvement in the abuse and recommended that Snezhnevsky, who had been honoured as a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, be invited to attend the College's Court of Electors to answer criticisms because he was responsible for the compulsory detention of this celebrated dissident, Leonid Plyushch. Instead Snezhnevsky chose to resign his Fellowship.
, commenting on the nascency of the political abuse of psychiatry, wrote, Nikita Khrushchev
reckoned that it was impossible for people in a socialist society to have anti-socialist consciousness, and whenever manifestations of dissidence could not be justified as a provocation of world imperialism or a legacy of the past, they were merely the product of mental disease. In his speech published in the state newspaper Pravda
on 24 May 1959, Khrushchev said:
In May 1967, Yuri Andropov
became the KGB Chairman. On 3 July 1967, he made a proposal to establish for dealing with the political opposition the KGB’s Fifth Directorate (ideological counterintelligence). At the end of July, the directorate was established and entered in its files cases of all Soviet dissidents including Andrei Sakharov
and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In 1968, Andropov as the KGB Chairman issued his order “On the tasks of State security agencies in combating the ideological sabotage by the adversary”, calling for struggle against dissidents and their imperialist masters. He aimed to achieve “the destruction of dissent in all its forms” and insisted that the struggle for human rights had to be considered as a part of a wide-ranging imperialist plot to undermine the Soviet state’s foundation.
On 29 April 1969, Andropov submitted to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union an elaborated plan for creating a network of mental hospitals to defend the “Soviet Government and socialist order” from dissenters. The proposal by Andropov to use psychiatry for struggle against dissenters was implemented. On 15 May 1969, there was issued Decree No. 345–209 on "measures for preventing dangerous behavior (acts) on the part of mentally ill persons." This Decree ratified the practice of having undesirables hauled into detention by psychiatrists. Under this practice, the psychiatrists were told whom they should examine, and they might fetch this individual with the assistance of the police or entrap him to come to the hospital. The psychiatrists doubled as interrogators and as arresting officers. The doctors fabricated a diagnosis requiring internment, and no court judgment was required for confining the individual indefinitely.
Practically in all cases, dissidents were examined in the Serbsky Central Research Institute for Forensic Psychiatry which conducted forensic-psychiatric expert evaluation of persons brought to justice under political articles. Certified, the persons were sent for involuntary treatment
to special hospitals of the system of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) of the Russian Federation. In 1960s and 1970s, the trials of dissenters and their referral for “treatment” to special psychiatric hospitals of the system of MVD came out into the open before the world public, and information of “psychiatric terror,” which the leadership of the institute was flatly denying, began to appear. The majority of psychiatric repressions date from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.
According to dissident poet Naum Korzhavin
, the atmosphere at the Serbsky Institute in Moscow
altered almost overnight when a Daniil Lunts became chief of the Fourth Department otherwise known as the Political Department. Previously, psychiatric departments had been regarded as a 'refuge' against being dispatched to the Gulag
, but thenceforth that policy altered. The first reports of dissenters being hospitalized on non-medical grounds date from the early 1960s, not long after Georgi Morozov was appointed director of the Serbsky Institute. Both Morozov and Lunts were personally involved in numerous well-known cases and were notorious abusers of psychiatry for political purposes. Daniil Lunts was characterized by Viktor Nekipelov
as "no better than the criminal doctors who performed inhuman experiments on the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps."
, an anti-Semitic campaign propelled at Stalin's instructions which should have brought about a new terror wave in the Soviet Union and possibly the extermination of the remaining Jewish communes that had outlived the Second World War. Pisarev was committed to the Special Psychiatric Hospital in Leningrad
which along with an analogous hospital in Sychevka has started functioning since the Second World War. After his discharge, Pisarev began a campaign against political abuse of psychiatry, concentrating himself on the Serbsky Institute which he viewed to be the seat of the trouble. As a consequence of his efforts, the Central Committee of the Communist Party
constituted a committee which investigated the situation and came to the conclusion that the political abuse of psychiatry was actually taking place. The report, however, vanished in a desk drawer and never brought about any action taken.
In 1961, Pyotr Grigorenko
started to openly criticize what he considered the excesses of the Khrushchev regime. He maintained that the special privileges of the political elite did not comply with the principles laid down by Lenin. Grigorenko formed a dissident group — The Group for the Struggle to Revive Leninism
. Soviet psychiatrists sitting as legally constituted commissions to inquire into his sanity diagnosed him at least three times — in April 1964, August 1969, and November 1969. When arrested, Grigorenko was sent to Moscow's Lubyanka prison, and from there for psychiatric examination to the Serbsky Institute where the first commission, which included Snezhnevsky and Lunts, diagnosed him as suffering from the mental disease in the form of a paranoid delusional development of his personality, accompanied by early signs of cerebral arteriosclerosis. Lunts, reporting later on this diagnosis, mentioned that the symptoms of paranoid development were "an overestimation of his own personality reaching messianic proportions" and "reformist ideas." Grigorenko was irresponsible for his actions and was thereby forcibly committed to a special psychiatric hospital. While there, the government deprived him of his pension despite the fact that, by law, a mentally sick military officer was entitled to a pension. After six months, Grigorenko was found to be in remission and was released for outpatient follow-up. He required that his pension be restored. Although he began to draw pension again, it was severely cut. He became much more active in his dissidence, stirred other people to protest some of the State's actions and received several warnings from the KGB. As Grigorenko had followers in Moscow, he was lured to Tashkent
, half a continent away. Again he was arrested and examined by psychiatric team. None of the manifestations or symptoms cited by the Lunts commission were found by the second commission held in Tashkent under the chairmanship of Fyodor Detengof. The diagnosis and evaluation made by the commission was that "Grigorenko's [criminal] activity had a purposeful character, it was related to concrete events and facts… It did not reveal any signs of illness or delusions." The psychiatrists reported that he was not mentally sick, but responsible for his actions. He had firm convictions which were shared by many of his colleagues and were not delusional. Having evaluated the records of his preceding hospitalization, they concluded that he had not been sick at that time either. The KGB brought Grigorenko back in Moscow and, three months later, arranged a second examination at the Serbsky Institute. Once again, these psychiatrists found that he had "a paranoid development of the personality" manifested by reformist ideas. The commission, which included Lunts and was chaired by Morozov, recommended that he be recommitted to a special psychiatric hospital for the socially dangerous. Eventually, after almost four years, he was transferred to a usual mental hospital.
In 1979 in New York, Grigorenko was examined by the team of psychologists and psychiatrists including Alan A. Stone
, the then President of American Psychiatric Association
. The team came to conclusion that they could find no evidence of mental disease in Grigorenko and his history consistent with mental disease in the past. In 1981, Pyotr Grigorenko told about his psychiatric examinations and hospitalizations in his memoirs V Podpolye Mozhno Vstretit Tolko Krys (In Underground One Can Meet Only Rats) translated into English under the title Memoirs in 1982. Only in 1992, the official post-mortem forensic psychiatric commission of experts met at Grigorenko’s homeland removed the stigma of mental patient from him and confirmed that the debilitating treatment he underwent in high security psychiatric hospitals for many years was groundless. The 1992 psychiatric examination of Grigorenko was described by the Nezavisimiy Psikhiatricheskiy Zhurnal
in its numbers 1–4 of 1992.
, Dnipropetrovsk
, and Leningrad
for 24 years because of belonging to a clandestine Marxist group (from 1954 to 1959), writing anti-Soviet prose (from 1962 to 1965), and possessing anti-Soviet literature (from 1968 to 1983). In the winter of 1987, he was discharged and pronounced sane. In 1988, Viktor Rafalsky published the first version of his memoirs Reportazh iz Niotkuda (Reportage from Nowhere) describing his confinement in Soviet psychiatric hospitals.
At the very end of 1963, the poet Joseph Brodsky
was committed for observation to the Kashchenko psychiatric clinic in Moscow where he stayed for several days. A few weeks later, his second hospitalization took place: on 13 February he was arrested in Leningrad and on 18 February the Dzerzhinsky District Court sent him for psychiatric examination to "Pryazhka," Psychiatric Hospital No. 2 where he spent about three weeks, from 18 February to 13 March. In the mental hospitals, Brodsky was given "tranquilizing" injections, wakened in the middle of the night, immersed into a cold bath, wrapped in a wet sheet, and put next to the heater so that the sheet would cut into his body when it dries. These two stints at psychiatric establishments formed the experience underlying Gorbunov and Gorchakov
written and called by Brodsky "an extremely serious work.". In 1972, when the authorities considered Brodsky for exile and sought an expert opinion on his mental health, they consulted Snezhnevsky who, without examining him personally, diagnosed him as schizophrenic and concluded that he was "not valuable person at all and may be let go."
, a writer born in 1906 in Kiev
. He based the book upon his own experiences in 1963–1964 when he was detained in the Moscow Kashchenko psychiatric hospital for political reasons.
The fictionalised documentary Ward No. 7 by Tarsis was a first literary work to deal with the Soviet authorities' abuse of psychiatry. In a parallel with the story Ward No. 6 by Anton Chekhov
, Tarsis implies that it is the doctors who are mad, whereas the patients are completely sane, although unsuited to a life of slavery. Individuals in ward No. 7 are not cured, but persistently maimed; the hospital is a jail and the doctors are gaolers and police spies. Most doctors know nothing about psychiatry, but make diagnoses arbitrarily and give all patients the same medication — an algogenic injection or the anti-psychotic drug aminazin known in English as Thorazine. Tarsis denounces Soviet psychiatry as pseudo-science and charlatanism and writes that, firstly, it has pretenses of curing the sickness of men's souls, but denies the existence of the soul; secondly, since there is no satisfactory definition of mental health, there can be no acceptable definition of mental disease in Soviet society.
In 1966, Tarsis was permitted to emigrate to the West, and was soon deprived of his Soviet citizenship. As the 1966 memorandum to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
reported, "KGB continues arrangements for further compromising Tarsis abroad as a mentally ill person."
. Evgeni Belov, a young Moscow interpreter contracted by a group of four British students, made friends with them. At first he was positive about Soviet system, but gradually became more critical and began to voice demand for more freedom. Calling for a free press and free trade unions, Belov began to write letters to the Party. As a consequence, his membership in the Party was suspended and he was summoned to appear before a committee. He declined, and instead sought justice higher up by writing protest letters to Leonid Brezhnev
himself. When British students returned from a short trip to Tokyo
, Belov had vanished. To their shock, it emerged that he had been committed to a mental hospital. A campaign to get him out yielded no results. A British newspaper published a letter in which Belov's father stated that his son was really sick, and the campaign came to a grinding halt. However, the public interest had been activated.
, a son of the famous Russian poet Sergei Esenin and born in 1924. In 1946, he was first committed to the Leningrad Special Psychiatric Hospital for writing poem considered anti-Soviet. During Khrushchev's reign, Esenin-Volpin was later hospitalized three times: in 1957, in 1959–1960 in the same the Leningrad Special Psychiatric Hospital and, finally, in 1962–1963. In 1968, Esenin-Volpin was again hospitalized, and for this once his case achieved the attention in the West. In February 1968, 99 Soviet mathematicians and scientists signed a protest letter to the Soviet officials demanding his release. After a wave of protests, he was discharged and permitted to immigrate to the USA where he obtained the position of professor of mathematics. In 2010, Alexander Magalif, who hospitalized Esenin-Volpin, recollected that he had seen a little mark made by a pencil in the corner of the referral to treatment of Esenin-Volpin: "not to discharge from the hospital without coordination with KGB."
was arrested due to his satirical anti-Stalinist works and outspoken protest at the human rights abuse in the USSR. Daniel was kept in a mental hospital of the Gulag where he was refused medical treatment in order to destroy his will.
was one of the seven persons who demonstrated on Red Square
in Moscow in 1968 against the intervention into Czechoslovakia
. He was committed for compulsory treatment to the Special Psychiatric Hospital in Leningrad
where he was confined for five years. During his confinement, a psychiatrist working in the establishment, Marina Voikhanskaya, fell in love with him and helped him as much as she could. After his discharge, they married and emigrated to the United Kingdom
. When they had divorced, Viktor moved to Paris
and Marina remained in the United Kingdom.
(self-published) human rights bulletin, the Chronicle of Current Events. Among the members of the Action Group were individuals who subsequently fell victim to psychiatric abuse themselves: the poetess Natalya Gorbanevskaya
who in 1968 demonstrated on Red Square
against bringing Soviet tanks into Czechoslovakia
; Vladimir Borisov who later was one of the founders of the independent labor movement in the Soviet Union; Vladimir Maltsev, a translator; and Leonid Plyushch
, a Ukrainian cyberneticist
who was committed to the Special Psychiatric Hospital of Dnepropetrovsk and was awfully tortured with neuroleptics.
created an underground student organization whose purpose was to overthrow the Soviet state. On 5 December 1969, she was arrested in the Palace of Congresses, where before the start of a performance of the opera October she was handing out and scattering leaflets written in verse form until she was approached by KGB men. She was later sentenced to indefinite detention in the prison psychiatric hospital in Kazan
. Her experience in this hospital was described in her largest collection of writings entitled Po Tu Storonu Otchayaniya (Beyond Despair). Novodvorskaya was also committed in mental hospital later, in 1978 as a member of the Free Interprofessional Association of Workers and in September 1990 as a person responsible "for insulting President"; at that time she was discharged after the 1991 putsch. In the early 1990s, psychiatrists of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia
and G. N. Sotsevich proved the absence of mental illness in Novodvorskaya.
After the Red Square demonstration
against the invasion into Czechoslovakia
, August 1968 saw the arrest of Natalya Gorbanevskaya
well known in the West due to her book Red Square at Noon describing the demonstration. A few days later, the Serbsky Institute found her non-accountable and made diagnosis of "deep psychopathy—the presence of mild, chronic schizophrenic process cannot be excluded." She was allowed to return to the care of her mother. In November 1969, a psychiatric commission again examined her, diagnosed "psychopathic personality with symptoms of hysteria and a tendency to decompensation", but considered that psychiatric hospitalization was not required. A month later, she was again arrested and sent to the Serbky Institute for psychiatric examination in April 1970. The investigating commission chaired by Morozov found her non-responsible and suffering from "chronic, mental illness in the form of schizophrenia." The commission found in her the presence of changes in the thinking processes and in the critical and emotional faculties characteristic of schizophrenia. It was concluded that Gorbanevskaya took part in the Red Square demonstration in a state of the mental disease.
, an internationally respected and prominent scientist, was forcibly taken from his apartment in Obninsk
and committed to a mental hospital where he was held, without legitimate medical justification, until 17 June 1970. The leadership was instantly faced with the action of strong collective protest initiated by top Soviet scientists including Igor Tamm
and Pyotr Kapitsa
. Medvedev's release was achieved only after intense pressure from intellectuals and scientists both within and outside of the USSR. He was largely hospitalized because of the publication abroad of his book of Trofim Lysenko
. In widely circulated books, Zhores Medvedev had criticized the "geneticist" Lysenko and had also expressed his straightforward disagreement with restrictions on communication with scientists abroad. He was removed from his position as head of a laboratory at the Institute of Medical Radiology and this removal was illegal, he said. The diagnosis in the case-notes was "incipient schizophrenia," the diagnosis made by the psychiatric commission was "psychopathic personality with paranoid tendencies." What happened to Medvedev was not a separate incident; rather, it was part, in Medvedev's words, of "the dangerous tendency of using psychiatry for political purposes, the exploitation of medicine in an alien role as a means of intimidation and punishment — a new and illegal way of isolating people for their views and convictions." This experience was reflected in Zhores Medvedev's and Roy Medvedev
's book A Question of Madness: Repression by Psychiatry in the Soviet Union published by Macmillan in London in 1971.
supported a protest of two political prisoners, V. Fainberg and V. Borisov, who announced a hunger strike
against "compulsory therapeutic treatment with medications injurious to mental activity" in a Leningrad psychiatric institution. In 1984, after publishing an article by Andrei Sakharov in the United States
urging a buildup of nuclear weapons in the West, Soviet officials declared him "a talented, but sick man." When sent into internal exile to Gorky "for his own peace of mind," he received the due medical attention: "Soviet medics are taking all necessary measures to restore his health."
, a well-known dissident poet, was arrested in 1973, sent to the Section 4 of the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry for psychiatric evaluation, which lasted from 15 January to 12 March 1974, was judged sane (which he was), tried, and sentenced to two years' imprisonment. In 1976, he published in samizdat
his book Institute of Fools: Notes on the Serbsky Institute based on his personal experience at Psychiatric Hospital of the Serbsky Institute and translated into English in 1980. In this account, he wrote compassionately, engagingly, and observantly of the doctors and other patients; most of the latters were ordinary criminals feigning insanity in order to be sent to a mental hospital, because hospital was a "cushy number" as against prison camps. According to the President of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia
Yuri Savenko
, Nekipelov's book is a highly dramatic humane document, a fair story about the nest of Soviet punitive psychiatry, a mirror that psychiatrists always need to look into. However according to Malcolm Lader, this book as an indictment of the Serbsky Institute hardly rises above tittle-tattle and gossip, and Nekipelov destroys his own credibility by presenting no real evidence but invariably putting the most sinister connotation on events. After publishing his book, he was sentenced to the maximum punishment for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" of seven years in a labor camp and then five years in internal exile.
, announced the formation in the Soviet Union of the Association of Free Trade Unions of Workers (AFTU) whose purposes were to meet obligations achieved by collective bargaining; to induce workers and other employees to join free trade union associations; to implement those decisions of the Association which concern the seeking of justice and the defense of rights; to educate Association members in the spirit of irreconcilability toward wastefulness, inefficiency, deception, bureaucracy, deficiencies, and a negligent attitude toward national wealth. These purposes show that AFTU was in all respects an organization whose right to exist is guaranteed by the international obligations of the Soviet Union. On 19 December 1977, Klebanov along with two other workers in Donetsk
was arrested by the Soviet militia and released nine days later, after international protests against his incarceration. Worker Gavriil Yankov was incarcerated in Moscow mental hospital for two weeks. On 1 February 1978, AFTU publicly announced the institution of its organizational Charter. Several days later, Klebanov was again detained by Soviet police and sent from Moscow to psychiatric prison hospital in Donetsk. Group member Nikolaev and workers Pelekh and Dvoretsky were also placed under psychiatric detention.
electrician Vladimir Borisov incarcerated in Soviet mental hospitals because of his human rights activism for a total of nine years in 1960s and 1970s. In November and December 1978, Soviet police searched the homes of SMOT activists, and SMOT members Vladimir Borisov, Valeriya Novodvorskaya, Albina Yakoreva, and Lev Volokhonsky were arrested and detained by Soviet authorities. Both Borisov and Novodvorskaya were held in mental hospitals.
According to Viktor Luneyev, actual struggle against dissent was manyfold larger than it was registered in sentences, and we do not know how many persons were kept under surveillance of secret services, held criminally liable, arrested, sent to psychiatric hospitals, expelled from their work, restricted in their rights everyway. No objective counting of repressed persons is possible without fundamental analysis of archival documents. The difficulty of this method is that the required data are very diverse and are not in one archive. They are in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, in the archive of the Goskomstat
of Russia, in the archives of the MVD of Russia, the FSB of Russia
, the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation, in the Russian Military and Historical Archive, in archives of constituent entities of the Russian Federation, in urban and regional archives, as well as in archives of the former Soviet Republics that now are independent countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States
and the Baltics.
smuggled to the West a file of 150 pages documenting the political abuse of psychiatry. The documents were photocopies of forensic reports on prominent Soviet dissidents. These documents were attended with a letter by Bukovsky requesting Western psychiatrists to explore the six cases documented in the file and tell whether these persons should be hospitalized or not. The documents were sent by Bukovsky to The Times
and, when translated by The Working Group on the Internment of Dissenters in Medical Hospitals, were examined by forty-four psychiatrists from the Department of Psychiatry, Sheffield University. The psychiatrists described the documents in British Journal of Psychiatry
of August 1971 and wrote a letter to The Times. In this letter published on 16 September 1971, they reported that four of the six dissidents manifested no signs or history of mental disease, and the other two had minor psychiatric problems many years ago, quite removed from the events related to their internment. The group of British psychiatrists concluded: "It seems to us that the diagnoses on the six people were made purely in consequence of actions in which they were exercising fundamental freedoms…" They recommended discussing the issue in the course of the forthcoming World Psychiatric Association
(WPA) World Congress in Mexico
in November 1971.
One of the key apologists of Soviet psychiatric abuse, Soviet psychiatrist Marat Vartanyan, was chosen as associate secretary of the Executive Committee. A day after the Mexico Congress Vartanyan announced publicly that the nature of Soviet system was such that this could not possibly happen. As Robert van Voren wrote, the Armenian Vartanyan was as slick as one could be, and had no problem lying in the twinkling of an eye. He was masterful in his dealings with the WPA and continued to represent the Soviet Union at symposiums and congresses of the WPA. Being in grain hospitable, flamboyant, full of humor and with a Western style, Vartanyan managed to fool one after another. In the end, no action was taken by the Congress. As Psychiatric News reported, it became apparent that the WPA leaders had no desire to take an action which would have alienated the USSR delegation and would quite probably make them "walk out" and sever communications for some time to come.
, mainly on the ground that he had, with anti-Soviet intention, circulated false reports that mentally healthy political dissenters were incarcerated in mental hospitals and were subjected to abuse there.
In 1974, Bukovsky and the incarcerated psychiatrist Semyon Gluzman
wrote A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissenters, in which they provided potential future victims of political psychiatry with instructions on how to behave during inquest in order to avoid being diagnosed as mentally sick. The Manual focuses on how "the Soviet use of psychiatry as a punitive means is based upon the deliberate interpretation of heterodoxy
(in one sense of the world) as a psychiatric problem." Semyon Gluzman, a first psychiatrist in the Soviet Union who openly opposed Soviet abuse of psychiatry against dissenters, was one of three authors of the document An In Absentia Psychiatric Opinion on the Case of P.G. Grigorenko otherwise known as An In Absentia Forensic-psychiatric Report on P.G. Grigorenko; this document started circulating in samizdat
form in 1971 and was based on the medical record of Grigorenko who spoke against the human rights abuses in the Soviet Union. Gluzman came to the conclusion that Grigorenko was mentally sane and had been taken to mental hospitals for political reasons. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Gluzman was forced to serve seven years in labor camps and three years in Siberian exile for refusing to diagnose Grigorenko as having the mental illness.
In December 1976, in his eleventh year of psychiatric hospitals and prison camps, Bukovsky was exchanged by the Soviet government for the imprisoned Chilean Communist leader Luis Corvalán
at Zürich
airport and, after a short stay in Holland, took up refuge in Great Britain
where later moved from London
to Cambridge
for his studies in biology. Voluntary and involuntary emigration allowed the authorities to rid themselves of many political active intellectuals including writers Valentin Turchin
, Georgi Vladimov
, Vladimir Voinovich
, Lev Kopelev
, Vladimir Maximov, Naum Korzhavin
, Vasily Aksyonov
and others.
The appeal made by Bukovsky in 1971 caused the formation of the first groups to campaign against the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union. In France
, a group of doctors constituted the "Committee against the Special Psychiatric Hospitals in the USSR," while in Great Britain
a "Working Commission on the Internment of Dissenters in Mental Hospitals" was created. Among its founding members were Peter Reddaway, a Sovietologist and lecturer at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Sidney Bloch, a South-African born psychiatrist. In September 1975, there was formed the "Campaign Against Psychiatric Abuse" (CAPA), an organization constituted as the British section of the Initiating Committee Against Abuses of Psychiatry for Political Purposes and composed of psychiatrists, other doctors, and laymen. In July 1976 in Trafalgar Square
, CAPA held a rally against the abuse of psychiatry in the USSR. In 1978, Royal College of Psychiatrists established the Special Committee on abuse of psychiatry. 20 December 1980 saw the formation in Paris
of the International Association on the Political Use of Psychiatry (IAPUP) whose first secretary was Gérard Bles of France.
agreed to host the WPA's sixth World Congress of Psychiatry during August 28 – September 3, 1977, in Honolulu. The request to discuss the Soviet issue during the World Congress of the World Psychiatric Association in Honolulu was made by Americans and the British and was supported by other societies.
On 10 September 1976, Chairman of the KGB Yuri Andropov
submitted to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
his report informing of "anti-Soviet campaign with nasty fabrications regarding the alleged use psychiatry in the USSR as an instrument in the political struggle with 'dissidents'." The report alleged that the campaign was a carefully planned anti-Soviet action in which a noticeable part was played by the British Royal College of Psychiatrists
under the influence of pro-Zionist elements and that the KGB was undertaking measures through operational channels to counter hostile attacks. In October 1976, the Ministry of Health
constituted a special working group to develop a plan of action for a counter campaign. The working group had among its members leading Soviet psychiatrists Andrei Snezhnevsky
, Georgi Morozov, Marat Vartanyan, and Eduard Babayan under the chairmanship of Deputy Minister of Health Dmitri Venediktov. The plans they worked out consisted in, inter alia, compiling documents with counterarguments for being spread before and during the World Congress; actively lobbying the media for explaining the human nature of Soviet medicine; actively lobbying inside the World Psychiatric Association for preventing the issue from being put on the agenda; lobbying the World Health Organization
for exerting pressure on the WPA not to allow this unacceptable anti-Soviet campaign; and establishing closer working relations with positively inclined colleagues in the West. In February 1977, representatives of the secret services of the USSR, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Poland
, Hungary
, Czechoslovakia
, Bulgaria
, and Cuba
met in Moscow to talk about a common approach to the issue of political abuse psychiatry and the upcoming World Congress in Honolulu. This meeting was mainly chaired by Major General Ivan Pavlovich Abramov, deputy head of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB (which dealt, inter alia, with dissenters), with the support of deputy head of the First Division of the Fifth Directorate Colonel Romanov who, according to the report, would travel with the Soviet delegation to Honolulu as "political advisor". The minutes of the meeting demonstrate that Western preparations for the Honolulu World Congress were under the Soviet concern in which the leading part was played by the KGB of the Soviet Union. Not long before the World Congress, a high-level conference was held in East Berlin
, and the Soviet psychiatric leaders met with colleagues from Czechoslovakia
, Poland
, the GDR, Hungary
, and Bulgaria
to coordinate their positions. Much to the vexation of Georgi Morozov, the Romanians did not come to this meeting, while both the Hungarians and the Poles openly criticized the Soviet stance.
However, all this activity of the Soviets cold not prevent the issue from dominating the Congress from the very outset. At the fist plenary session of the Congress, the introduction of the Declaration of Hawaii took place. This statement of ethical principles of psychiatry had been drafted by the Ethical Sub-Committee of the Executive Committee established in 1973 in response to the increasing number of protests against using psychiatry for non-medical reasons. One of the principles stated in the Declaration was that a psychiatrist must not take part in compulsory psychiatric treatment in the absence of mental disease, and the Declaration also included other clauses which could be considered as heaving a bearing on the political abuse psychiatry. The General Assembly accepted the Declaration of Hawaii without difficulty, and without opposition by the Delegation of the Soviets. However, the Declaration was later criticized by Hanfried Helmchen, who found its ethical guideline No 1 to be misleading and stated that when health, personal autonomy and growth—without referring to mental illness—are to be formulated as the direct aim of psychiatry, the menace of vast expansion of psychiatry will increase and that the renunciation of an illness concept appeared to be an essential source for the 'total psychiatrisation of everybody and everything' which was also deplored by Blomquist in his commentary. At the plenary session, an Ethics Committee was also established under the chairmanship of Costas Stephanis from Greece
; among of the members was Marat Vartanyan from the USSR.
The Soviet issue passed the General Assembly less easily. The Soviets did all possible to prove their point, and according to the report of the Soviet delegation, Marat Vartanyan had successfully prevented former Soviet political prisoner Leonid Plyushch from being registered as a delegate at the Congress and "anti-Soviet materials" from being spread in the main congress hall. In 1977 at the World Congress in Honolulu, Snezhnevsky again defended psychiatric practices used in his country. Two motions were put to the vote, a British one condemning the systematic political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR and an American one calling on the World Psychiatric Association to constitute a Review Committee to investigate the allegations of political abuse of psychiatry. The British resolution passed with 90 to 88 votes and only because the Poles did not come and the Russians, having been tardy in their dues payments, were not allowed to cast all votes allocated to them. This resolution was the climax of a lengthy campaign in the West to expose the Soviet practice of committing some of its political and other dissenters to mental hospitals. The allegations, confirmed by some Soviet psychiatrists who have fled or emigrated to the West, induced the World Psychiatric Association to condemn the USSR for the "systematic abuse of psychiatry for political purposes." Kremlin spokesmen ignored the action as a provocation "by a handful of antipsychiatric and antisocial elements" and began a propaganda campaign to contradict the accusations. The American resolution requesting to set up a Review Committee received a larger majority of votes, 121 votes against 66. Snezhnevsky returned to Moscow wounded, with members of his delegation putting the blame for their defeat on the "Zionists."
1978 saw a public statement made by Soviet psychiatrist Yuri Novikov, who was the head of a section of the Serbsky Institute for six years and first secretary of the Association of Soviet Psychiatrists until he left the Soviet Union in June 1977. In his statement, he said that political abuses of psychiatry took place in the Soviet Union and that it was not the scale of this that mattered, but the fact that it existed.
However, later, at the General Assembly during the World Congress in Vienna in 1983, the status and work of the Review Committee were discussed and it was resolved to allow the Committee to become statutory. The General Assembly resolved further to change the Committee scope towards complaints about not only political but any abuse of psychiatry. As it was emphasized, the WPA is not a human rights organization and the Review Committee should only examine complaints about specific acts of abuse carried out by specific psychiatrists against specific persons. The 1999 General Assembly modified the mandate of the Review Committee as follows: "The Review Committee shall review complaints and other issues and initiate investigations on the violations of the ethical guidelines for the practice of psychiatry as stated in the Declaration of Madrid and its additional guidelines in order to make recommendations to the Executive Committee as to any possible action."
In January 1977, Alexandr Podrabinek along with a 47 year-old self-educated worker Feliks Serebrov, a 30 year-old computer programmer Vyacheslav Bakhmin and Irina Kuplun established the Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes. The Commission was formally linked to the Moscow Helsinki Group
founded by Yuri Orlov
along with ten others including Elena Bonner and Anatoly Shcharansky in 1976 to monitor Soviet compliance with the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Accords
. The commission was composed of five open members and several anonymous ones, including a few psychiatrists who, at great danger to themselves, conducted their own independent examinations of cases of alleged psychiatric abuse. The leader of the commission was Alexandr Podrabinek
who published a book Punitive Medicine containing a "white list" of two hundred of prisoners of conscience in Soviet mental hospitals and a "black list" of over one hundred medical staff and doctors who took part in committing people to psychiatric facilities for political reasons.
The psychiatric consultants to the Commission were Alexander Voloshanovich and Anatoly Koryagin
. The task stated by the Commission was not primarily to diagnose persons or to declare people who sought help mentally ill or mentally healthy. However, in some instances individuals who came for help to the Commission were examined by a psychiatrist who provided help to the Commission and made a precise diagnosis of their mental condition. At first it was psychiatrist Alexander Voloshanovich from the Moscow suburb of Dolgoprudny
, who made these diagnoses. But when he had been compelled to emigrate on 7 February 1980, his work was continued by the Kharkov psychiatrist Anatoly Koryagin. Koryagin's contribution was to examine former and potential victims of political abuse of psychiatry by writing psychiatric diagnoses in which he deduced that the individual was not suffering from any mental disease. Those reports were employed as a means of defense: if the individual was picked up again and committed to mental hospital, the Commission had vindication that the hospitalization served non-medical purposes. Also some foreign psychiatrists including the Swedish psychiatrist Harald Blomberg and British psychiatrist Gery Low-Beer helped in examining former or potential victims of psychiatric abuse. The Commission used those reports in its work and publicly referred to them when it was essential.
The commission gathered as much information as possible of victims of psychiatric terror in the Soviet Union and published this information in their Information Bulletins. For the four years of its existence, the Commission published more than 1,500 pages of documentation including 22 Information Bulletins in which over 400 cases of the political abuse of psychiatry were documented in great detail. Summaries of the Information Bulletins were published in the key samizdat publication, the Chronicle of Current Events. The Information Bulletins were sent to the Soviet officials, with request to verify the data and notify the Commission if mistakes were found, and to the West, where human rights defenders used them in the course of their campaigns. The Information Bulletins were also used to provide the dissident movement with information about Western protests against the political abuse. Peter Reddaway said that after he had studied official documents in the Soviet archives, including minutes from meetings of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
, it became evident to him that Soviet officials at high levels paid close attention to foreign responses to these cases, and if someone was discharged, all dissidents felt the pressure had played a significant part and the more foreign pressure the better. Over fifty victims examined by psychiatrists of the Moscow Working Commission between 1977 and 1981 and the files smuggled to the West by Vladimir Bukovsky
in 1971 were the material which convinced most psychiatric associations that there was distinctly something wrong in the USSR.
The Soviet authorities responded aggressively. Members of the group were being threatened, followed, subjected to house searches and interrogations. In the end, the members of the Commission were subjected to various terms and types of punishments: Alexander Podrabinek was sentenced to 5 years' internal exile, Irina Grivnina to 5 years' internal exile, Vyacheslav Bakhmin to 3 years in a labor camp, Leonard Ternovsky to 3 years' labor camp, Anatoly Koryagin to 8 years' imprisonment and labor camp and 4 years' internal exile, Alexander Voloshanovich was sent to voluntary exile.
In the autumn of 1978, the British Royal College of Psychiatrists
carried a resolution in which it reiterated its concern over the abuse of psychiatry for the suppression of dissent in the USSR and applauded the Soviet citizens, who had taken an open stance against such abuse, by expressing its admiration and support especially for Semyon Gluzman, Alexander Podrabinek, Alexander Voloshanovich, and Vladimir Moskalkov.
, the American Psychiatric Association
sent out to all member societies of the World Psychiatric Association a memorandum announcing their intention to organize a forum for discussing the issue of Soviet psychiatric abuse prior to the General Assembly in Vienna. On 18 January 1983, the Ambassador of the Soviet Union to the German Democratic Republic
(GDR), Gorald Gorinovich, delivered a message from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany
in which it said that the abnormal situation which had developed within the World Psychiatric Association put in effect its whole activity in question and that for this reason, All-Union Society took the decision to withdraw from the WPA. On 22 January 1983, the British Medical Journal
published a letter by Allan Wynn, the chairman of the Working Group on the Internment of Dissenters in Mental Hospitals, reporting that in consequence of the continued abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union the American, British, French, Danish, Norwegian, Swiss, and Australasian member societies of the World Psychiatric Association
with the support indicated by many of its other members proposed resolutions for the expulsion or suspension of membership of the Soviet Society of Neurologists and Psychiatrists, which would be considered at the World Congress of the World Psychiatric Association in Vienna
in July 1983. On 31 January 1983, the All-Union Society officially resigned from the World Psychiatric Association under threat of expulsion. In their letter of resignation, the Soviets complained about a "slanderous campaign, blatantly political in nature… directed against Soviet psychiatry in the spirit of the 'cold war
' against the Soviet Union" and, being especially angry about the memorandum of the American Psychiatric Association of August 1982, charged the WPA leadership with complicity by not having spoken out against this mailing.
According reports on hearing before the Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Organizations of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe
on 20 September 1983, the national associations justly held the opinion that 10 years of mild public protests, quiet diplomacy, and private conversations with Soviet official psychiatrists had produced no significant change in the level of Soviet abuses, and that this approach had, thereby, failed. In January 1983, the number of member associations of the World Psychiatry Association, voting for the suspension or expulsion of the Soviet Union, rose to nine. Inasmuch as these associations would have half the votes in the WPA governing body, the Soviets was now, in January, almost sure to be voted out in July.
According the statement made by the chairman of the APA Committee on International Abuse of Psychiatry and Psychiatrists Harold Vysotsky at the hearing, the Committee on behalf of certain persons had written hundreds of letters to the USSR, including those to authorities of the Soviet Government, to patients themselves, the families of patients, the psychiatrists who were treating these patients, but only indirectly heard from the families of patients and had never received a response from the authorities. In the statement, he mentioned that 20 cases were referred over to the World Psychiatric Association for further investigation by their committee to review alleged abuses of psychiatry for political purposes and a number of these cases were sent to the All Union Society of Neuropathologists and Psychiatrists of the USSR for clarification and response, but when months and months went by and the World Psychiatric Association had received no response from Soviet colleagues, the American Psychiatric Association
and a number of other psychiatric associations across the world carried a resolution which stated:
where heated discussion and a close vote on the resolutions were anticipated. The General Assembly of the World Psychiatric Association in Vienna was likely one of the most tense and disorganized meetings in its existence. Some delegates, especially those from Israel
, Mexico
, Egypt
, Cuba
, and the GDR angrily appealed to the WPA Executive Committee not to accept the resignation of the Soviets, whereas others voiced the view that it was a fact of life one had to live with, an opinion supported by the WPA President Pierre Pichot. The debate was preceded by a discussion of various resolutions which had been submitted, but the state of affairs was so perplexing that some delegates did not even know which resolution they were asked to vote upon. Finally a resolution drafted by the British delegate Kenneth Rawnsley, who served as the fourth president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists
from 1981 to 1984, was carried by 174 votes to 18, with 27 abstentions. The resolution was strikingly conciliatory in tone:
period diminished the human rights movement because many of their decades-long concerns such as suppression of free expression, imprisonment of dissidents, and psychiatric abuse were not longer the main problems facing Soviet society. 1986 saw the discharge of nineteen political prisoners from mental hospitals. In 1987, sixty-four political prisoners were discharged from mental hospitals. In early 1988, Chief Psychiatrist Aleksandr Churkin stated in an interview with Corriere della Sera
issued on 5 April 1988 that 5,5 million Soviet citizens were on the psychiatric register and that within two years 30 percent would be removed from this list. However, a year later the journal Ogoniok published a figure of 10,2 million provided by the state statistics committee. In 1990, Zhurnal Nevropatologii i Psikhiatrii Imeni S S Korsakova published almost the same figure of 10 million people registered at psychoneurological dispensaries and 335,200 hospital beds used in the Soviet Union by 1987. At a press conference held in Moscow on 27 October 1989, Gennady Milyokhin claimed that of the three hundred patients named by international human rights organizations, "practically all had left hospital."
and glasnost
. Over the objection of the psychiatric establishment, the Soviet government permitted a delegation of psychiatrists from the USA, representing the United States government, to carry out extensive interviews of suspected victims of abuse. They traveled to the Soviet Union on 25 February 1989. The group consisted of about 25 people among whom were Bill Farrand of the State Department; Loren Roth as head of the psychiatric team; psychiatrists of the National Institute of Mental Health
, including Scientific Director of the US Delegation Darrel A. Regier, Harold Visotsky from Chicago
as head of the hospital visit team, and four émigré Soviet psychiatrists living in the United States. There also were State Department interpreters, two attorneys, Ellen Mercer of the American Psychiatric Association
and Peter Reddaway.
The delegation was able systematically to interview and assess present and past involuntarily admitted mental patients chosen by the visiting team, as well as to talk over procedures and methods of treatment with some of the patients, their friends, relatives and, sometimes, their treating psychiatrists. Whereas the delegation originally sought interviews with 48 persons, it eventually saw 15 hospitalized and 12 discharged patients. About half of the hospitalized patients were released in the two months between the submission of the initial list of names to the Soviets authorities and the departure from the Soviet Union of the US delegation. The delegation came to the conclusion that nine of the 15 hospitalized patients had disorders which would be classified in the United States as serious psychoses, diagnoses corresponding broadly with those used by the Soviet psychiatrists. One of the hospitalized patients had been diagnosed as having schizophrenia
although the US team saw no evidence of mental disorder. Among the 12 discharged patients examined, the US delegation found that nine had no evidence of any current or past mental disorder; the remaining three had comparatively slight symptoms which would not usually warrant involuntary commitment in Western countries. According to medical record, all these patients had diagnoses of psychopathology
or schizophrenia.
When returned home after a visit of more than two weeks, the delegation wrote its report which was pretty damaging to the Soviet authorities. The delegation established not only that there had taken place systematic political abuse of psychiatry but also that the abuse had not come to an end, that victims of the abuse still remained in mental hospitals, and that the Soviet authorities and particularly the Soviet Society of Psychiatrists and Neuropathologists still denied that psychiatry had been employed as a method of repression. The report was published in Schizophrenia Bulletin
, Supplement to Vol. 15, No. 4, 1989. As far as Robert van Voren could establish, the report was never published in the USSR. Only after twenty years, in 2009, the report was traslated into Russian, and its Russian version was published not in Russia but in Netherlands
, on the website of the Global Initiative on Psychiatry
.
, there was substantial dispute about the possible readmittance of the All-Union Society to the WPA. The Eighth World Congress of the World Psychiatric Association was held between 12 and 19 October 1989 in Athens
. The Congress was reminiscent of the previous World Congress in 1983 in Vienna
, and the one before that in 1977 in Honolulu. The issue of the Soviet political abuse of psychiatry raised its ugly head, and dominated the WPA proceedings.
On 16 October, the Soviet delegation convened a press conference. The panel was uniformly evasive and defensive. After a detailed and lengthy account by Karpov of Soviet psychiatric reforms in which he emphasized the specialities of the new mental health legislation and in particular the legal safeguards for patients, other panellists worked out on what they considered as positive aspects of the new developments. However then, abruptly, this sense of optimism was disrupted by the bluntest of questions posed by Anatoly Koryagin
: Had political psychiatric abuse occurred or not? Alexander Tiganov, who played a prominent part in the press conference, answered hesitatingly that "such cases" could have taken place during the period of stagnation "but there was a need to distinguish between psychiatric, legal and political aspects." Koryagin persevered with his challenge and countered that these answers failed to clarify whether an acknowledgment was being made that Soviet psychiatry had been misused for political reasons.
Koryagin stated that readmission would offer carte blanche to the KGB to continue its repressive practices, that there would be further abuse of psychiatry, and that the plight of prisoners would be hopeless. He proposed four conditions for readmission:
Several national associations, including the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Australasian College, the Swiss Psychiatric Association, and the West German Psychiatric Association insisted that the Soviet Society should not be admitted until specific conditions had been satisfied; these included the release of all dissidents unjustifiably detained in psychiatric hospitals, and the dissociation by the authorities from the past abuse and their obligation to prevent its repetition.
The Soviet delegation to the 1989 World Congress of the WPA in Athens eventually agreed to admit that the systematic abuse of psychiatry for political purposes had indeed taken place in their country. At the Congress, the Soviet Society's International Secretary Pyotr Morozov on behalf of his delegation made a statement containing the following five points, which are quoted in full:
Felice Lieh Mak, just chosen as President-Elect, proposed a resolution which included the statement read by Morozov, and then adding that within one year the Review Committee should visit the Soviet Union and that if evidence of continued political abuse of psychiatry were to be found, a special meeting of the General Assembly should be convoked to give consideration to suspension of membership of the Soviets. In the end, 291 votes were cast for the resolution, 45 against, with 19 abstentions. The Soviets were readmitted to the WPA under conditions and on the ground of having made a public confession of the existence of previous psychiatric abuse and having given a commitment to review any present or subsequent cases and to sustain and introduce reforms to the psychiatric system and new mental health legislation.
Deeply shocked, Anatoly Koryagin, who had considered the statement by the Soviets as completely hypocritical and insincere and had not thought that the Soviets would be permitted to return, officially renounced his Honorary Membership of the WPA by submitting on 8 November 1989 to the WPA General Secretary a short letter:
The Soviet delegates returned to Moscow jubilantly. In an interview with a Soviet television crew, Marat Vartanyan replied to the question whether any conditions had been set to a Soviet return:
The next day, the government newspaper Izvestiya carried a report on 19 October which did not mention any of the conditions while asserting that the All Union Society had been granted full membership. The dissemination of disinformation on the part of the Soviets had distinctly not yet come to an end. Only on 27 October 1989, Meditsinskaya Gazeta reported the conditions set by the WPA General Assembly.
(IPA) was created as an association publicly opposing itself to official Soviet psychiatry and its offspring, the All-Union Society of Neuropathologists and Psychiatrists, which was completely under the control of the Soviet government and implemented its political principles. From the very beginning the IPA and its President Yuri Savenko
had to take on human rights functions in addition to educational ones: first, it was necessary to uncover the ideological basis on which the Soviet psychiatry carried out its punitive activities; second, it was necessary to develop legal norms which would forever prevent such abuses; third, it was necessary to show that it is not society that needs to be protected from the mentally ill, but the ill need to be protected from society as a whole, not only from the authorities; fourth, it was necessary to overcome rigidity and inhumane nature of modern domestic psychiatry detached from its old roots and, at the same time, artificially isolated from Western humanistic trends.
In a letter sent in 1991 to Aleksandr Tiganov, the new chairman of the All Union Society (or, the now called themselves, the Federation of Societies of Psychiatrists and Narcologists of the Commonwealth of Independent States
), the WPA General Secretary Juan José Lopez Ibor wrote that the All Union Society made in the General Assembly a Statement that included five items, several of which was not yet fulfilled, and that thereby, the Executive Committee unanimously agreed that it would not recommend continuing membership of the society in June 1993. Less than two months after the visit of the team to the Soviet Union, a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev
was carried out. The coup failed and was followed by the dissolution of the USSR. As a consequence, the All Union Society remained without a country to represent. The USSR Federation of Psychiatrists and Narcologists officially resigned from the World Psychiatric Association in October 1992.
. At a meeting held by the Health Committee of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in the autumn of 1991, the Law was approved, particularly in the speeches by the four members of the WPA commission, but this event was followed by the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In 1992, a new commission was created under the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation and used a new concept of developing the Law; a quarter of the commission members were the representatives of the IPA. The Law has been put in force since 1 January 1993. Adoption of the Law On Psychiatric Care and Guarantees of Citizens’ Rights during Its Provision is regarded as an epoch-making event in the history of domestic psychiatry, as establishing the legal basis for psychiatric care, and, first of all, mediating all involuntary measures through judicial procedure. That is a main post-Soviet achievement of Russian psychiatry and the foundation for a basically new attitude to the mentally ill as persons reserving all their civil and political rights and freedoms. In 1993, when the IPA printed the Law in 50 thousand copies for general reader, quite a number of heads of the Moscow psychoneurologic dispensaries refused to circulate the Law. Over time, these difficulties were overcome. It became obligatory to know the Law to pass the certification exam.
However, article 38, which was once included in the Law as a guarantee of keeping the whole Law for patients of psychiatric hospitals, is still not working, and, as a result, the service independent of health authorities to defend rights of patients in psychiatric hospitals is still not created. According to a report of the European Committee against Torture, the Law does not reflect patient's right to obtain a court decision of involuntary hospitalization. In a hospital courtroom, its judge announces the decision, but the patient does not obtain any motivated decision. There are sometimes cases where the patient is not informed by the court at all and hears about the court decision from his or her treating doctor or head of the unit.
published the article Compulsion in psychiatry: blessing or curse? by the Russian psychiatrist Anatoly Koryagin
. It contains analysis of the abuse of psychiatry and eight arguments by which the existence of a system of political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR cаn easily be demonstrated. As Koryagin wrote, in a dictatorial State with a totalitarian regime, such as the USSR, the laws have at all times served not the purpose of self-regulation of the life of society but have been one of the major levers by which to manipulate the behavior of subjects. Every Soviet citizen has constantly been straight considered state property and been regarded not as the aim, but as a means to achieve the rulers' objectives. From the perspective of state pragmatism, a mentally sick person was regarded as a burden to society, using up the state's material means without recompense and not producing anything, and even potentially capable of inflicting harm. Therefore, the Soviet State never considered it reasonable to pass special legislative acts protecting the material and legal part of the patients' life. It was only instructions of the legal and medical departments that stipulated certain rules of handling the mentally sick and imposing different sanctions on them. A person with a mental disorder was automatically divested of all rights and depended entirely on the psychiatrists' will. Practically anybody could undergo psychiatric examination on the most senseless grounds and the issued diagnosis turned him into a person without rights. It was this lack of legal rights and guarantees that advantaged a system of repressive psychiatry in the country.
According to O.V. Lapshin, Russia until 1993 did not have any specific legislation in the field of mental health except uncoordinated instructions and articles of laws in criminal and administrative law, orders of the USSR Ministry of Health. In the Soviet Union, any psychiatric patient could be hospitalized by request of his headman, relatives or instructions of a district psychiatrist. In this case, patient’s consent or dissent mattered nothing. The duration of treatment in a psychiatric hospital also depended entirely on the psychiatrist. All that made the abuse of psychiatry possible to suppress those, who disagreed with the political regime, and that created the vicious practice of ignoring the rights of the mentally ill.
According to Yuri Savenko
, the president of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia
(the IPA), punitive psychiatry arises on the basis of the interference of three main factors:
Their interaction system is principally sociological: the presence of the Penal Code article on slandering the state system inevitably results in sending a certain percentage of citizens to forensic psychiatric examination. Thus, it is not psychiatry itself that is punitive, but the totalitarian state uses psychiatry for punitive purposes with ease.
According to Larry Gostin, the root cause of the problem was the State itself. The definition of danger was radically extended by the Soviet criminal system to cover 'political' as well as customary physical types of 'danger'.
According to Semyon Gluzman
, abuse of psychiatry to suppress dissent is based on condition of psychiatry in a totalitarian state. Psychiatric paradigm of a totalitarian state is culpable for its expansion into spheres which are not initially those of psychiatric competence.
Richard Bonnie, a professor of law and medicine at the University of Virginia School of Law
, mentioned the deformed nature of the Soviet psychiatric profession as one of the explanations for why it was so easily bent toward the repressive objectives of the state, and pointed out the importance of a civil society and, in particular, independent professional organizations separate and apart from the state as one of the most substantial lessons from the period.
According to Moscow psychiatrist Alexander Danilin
, the so-called "nosological" approach in the Moscow psychiatric school established by A.V. Snezhnevsky boiles down to the ability to make an only diagnosis, schizophrenia; psychiatry is not science but such a system of opinions and people by the thousands are falling victims to these opinions—millions of lives were crippled by virtue of the concept "sluggish schizophrenia" introduced some time once by Andrei Vladimirovich Snezhnevsky, academician, whom Danilin called a political offender.
St Petersburg academic psychiatrist Yuri Nuller
notes that the concept of Snezhnevsky's school allows, for example, to consider schizoid psychopathy or schizoidism as the early, sluggishly progressing stages of an inevitable progredient process rather than the personality characteristics of an individual, which may not develop along the path of schizophrenic process at all. That results in the extreme expansion of diagnosing sluggish schizophrenia and the harm it has done. Nuller adds that within the scope of the sluggish schizophrenia concept, any deviation from the norm evaluated by a doctor can be regarded as schizophrenia, with all the ensuing consequences for an examinee. That creates ample opportunity for voluntary and involuntary abuses of psychiatry. However, neither A.V. Snezhnevsky nor his followers, according to Nuller, found civil and scientific courage to review their concept that clearly reached a deadlock.
In 1977, British psychiatrist David Cooper
asked Michel Foucault
the same question which Claude Bourdet
had formerly asked Viktor Fainberg
during a press conference given by Fainberg and Plyushch
: when the USSR has the whole penitentiary and police apparatus, which could take charge of anybody, and which is perfect in itself, why do they use psychiatry? Foucault answered it was not a question of a distortion of the use of psychiatry but that was its fundamental project.
American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz
argued that the spectacle of the Western psychiatrists loudly condemning Soviet colleagues for their abuse of professional standards was largely an exercise in hypocrisy. According to Szasz, the problem, from which psychiatric abuse stems, is psychiatric power that is just as prevalent in democratic societies as it was in the USSR. He stated that psychiatric abuse, such as people usually associated with practices in the former USSR, was connected not with the misuse of psychiatric diagnoses, but with the political power built-in to the social role of the psychiatrist in democratic and totalitarian societies alike. In an article published in 1994 by Szasz on the Journal of medical ethics (open for debate) he stated "(...) The classification by slave owners and slave traders of certain individuals as Negroes was scientific, in the sense that whites were rarely classified as blacks. But that did not prevent the 'abuse' of such racial classification, because (what we call) its abuse was, in fact, its use. (...)"
According to Robert van Voren, although for several years, especially after the implosion of the USSR and during the first years of Boris Yeltsin
's rule, the positions of the Soviet psychiatric leaders were in jeopardy, now one can firmly conclude that they succeeded in riding out the storm and retaining their powerful positions. In addition, they also succeeded in avoiding an inflow of modern concepts of delivering mental health care and a fundamental change in the structure of psychiatric services in Russia. On the whole, in Russia, the impact of mental health reformers has been the least. Even the reform efforts made in such places as St. Petersburg, Tomsk
, and Kaliningrad
have faltered or were encapsulated as centrist policies under Vladimir Putin
brought them back under control.
At his press conference in 2008, Semyon Gluzman
said that the surplus in Ukraine
of hospitals for inpatient treatment of the mentally ill was a relic of the totalitarian communist regime and that Ukraine did not have epidemic of schizophrenia but somehow Ukraine had about 90 large psychiatric hospitals including the Pavlov Hospital where beds only in its children's unit were more than in the whole of Great Britain
.
In 1994, there was organized a conference concerned with the theme of political abuse of psychiatry and attended by representatives from different former Soviet Republics — from Russia, Belarus
, the Baltics, the Caucasus, and some of the Central Asian Republics. Dainius Puras made a report on the situation within the Lithuanian Psychiatric Association, where discussion had been held but no resolution had been passed. Yuri Nuller
talked over how in Russia the wind direction was gradually changing and the systematic political abuse of psychiatry was again being denied and degraded as an issue of "hyperdiagnosis" or "scientific disagreement." It was particularly noteworthy that Tatyana Dmitrieva, the Director of the Serbsky Institute, was an active adherent of this view. This was not so queer, because she was a close friend of the key architects of "political psychiatry."
In the early 1990s, Tatyana Dmitrieva, the Director of the Serbsky Center, brought the required words of repentance for political abuse of psychiatry which had had unprecedented dimensions in the Soviet Union for discrediting, intimidation and suppression of the human rights movement carried out primarily in this institution. Her words were widely broadcasted abroad but were limitedly published in the St. Petersburg newspaper Chas Pik within the country. However, in her 2001 book Aliyans Prava i Milosediya (The Alliance of Law and Mercy), Dmitrieva wrote that there were no abuses in psychiatry and if there were those, they were no more than in the vaunted Western countries. Moreover, the mentioned book by Dmitrieva administers to the old and new national intellectuals the rebuke that professor Vladimir Serbsky
and others were wrong not to cooperate with the police department because otherwise there would have been neither revolution nor bloodshed and that the current intellectuals are wrong to oppose the authorities.
While speaking of the Serbsky Center, Yuri Savenko alleges that “practically nothing has changed. They have no shame at the institute about their role with the Communists. They are the same people, and they do not want to apologize for all their actions in the past.” Attorney Karen Nersisyan agrees: “Serbsky is not an organ of medicine. It’s an organ of power.”
In 2004, Savenko stated that the passed law on state expert activity and introduction of profession of forensic expert psychiatrist actually destroyed adversary-based examinations and that the Serbsky Center turned into a complete monopolist of forensic examination, which it had never been under Soviet rule. Formerly, a court could include any psychiatrist in a commission of experts, but now the court only chooses an expert institution. An expert has the right to participate only in commissions, in which he is included by the head of his expert institution, and can receive the certificate of qualification as an expert only after having worked in a state expert institution for three years.
According to Savenko, the Serbsky Center has long labored to legalize its monopolistic position of the Main expert institution of the country. It turned out to be a considerable drop in the level of its expert reports. Such a drop was inevitable and foreseeable in the context of the Serbsky Center efforts to eliminate adversary character of the expert reports of the parties and then to maximally degrade the role of a professional as a reviewer and critic of a presented expert report.
On 28 May 2009, Yuri Savenko wrote to the President of the Russian Federation
Dmitry Medvedev
an open letter
, in which Savenko asked Medvedev to submit to the State Duma
a draft law prepared by the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia to address a sharp drop in the level of forensic psychiatric examinations, which Savenko attributed to a lack of competition within the sector and its increasing nationalization.
On 15 June 2009, the working group chaired by the Director of the Serbsky Center Tatyana Dmitrieva sent the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation
a joint application whose purport was to declare appealing against the forensic expert reports of state expert institutions illegal and prohibit courts from receiving lawsuits filed to appeal against the reports. The reason put forward for the proposal was that appeals against expert reports are allegedly filed “without regard for the scope of case” and that one must appeal against an expert report “only together with a sentence.” In other words, according to Yuri Savenko, all professional errors and omissions are presented as untouchable by virtue of the fact that they were infiltrated into the sentence. That is cynicism of administrative resources, cynicism of power, he says.
The draft of the application to the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation was considered in the paper “Current legal issues relevant to forensic-psychiatric expert evaluation” by Elena Shchukina and Sergei Shishkov focusing on the inadmissibility of appealing against an expert report without regard for the scope of evaluated case. While talking about appealing against “reports”, the authors of the paper, according to lawyer Dmitry Bartenev, mistakenly identify reports with actions of experts (or an expert institution) and justify the impossibility of “parallel” examination and evaluation of actions of experts without regard for the scope of evaluated case. Such a point of view taken by the authors appears clearly erroneous because abuse by experts of rights and legitimate interests of citizens including trial participants, of course, may be a subject for a separate appeal.
In 2010, when the outpatient forensic-psychiatric examination of Yulia Privedyonnaya, a member of a youth organization, was carried out in the Sebsky Center, its experts asked her the question “What do you think of Putin?” that Savenko called an inappropriate, unseemly, indelicate, and police one.
his book Institute of Fools: Notes on the Serbsky Institute documenting his personal experience at Psychiatric Hospital of the Serbsky Institute. In 1980, the book was translated and published in English. Only in 2005, the book was published in Russia. In 1977, British playwright Tom Stoppard
wrote the play Every Good Boy Deserves Favour that criticized the Soviet practice of treating political dissidence as a form of mental illness. The play is dedicated to Viktor Fainberg
and Vladimir Bukovsky
, two Soviet dissidents expelled to the West. In 1978, the book To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter by Vladimir Bukovsky, describing dissident movement, their struggle or freedom, practices of dealing with dissenters, and dozen years spent by Bukovsky in Soviet labor camps, prisons and psychiatric hospitals, was published and later translated into English. In 1979, Leonid Plyushch published his book History's Carnival: A Dissident's Autobiography in which he described how he and other dissidents were committed to psychiatric hospitals. At the same year, the book was translated into English. In 1981, Pyotr Grigorenko published his memoirs V Podpolye Mozhno Vstretit Tolko Krys (In Underground One Can Meet Only Rats) that included story of his psychiatric examinations and hospitalizations. In 1982, the book was translated into English under the title Memoirs. In 1983, Yevgeniy Nikolaev’s book Predavshie Gippokrata (The betrayal of Hippocrates), when translated from Russian into German under the title Gehirnwäsche in Moskau, was first published in München and told about psychiatric detention of its author for political reasons. In 1984, the book under its original title was first published in Russian that the book had originally been written in. In the 1983 novel Firefox Down
by Craig Thomas
, captured American pilot Mitchell Gant is imprisoned in a KGB psychiatric clinic "associated with the Serbsky Institute", where he is drugged and interrogated to force him to reveal the location of the Firefox aircraft, which he has stolen and flown out of Russia. In 1987, Robert van Voren published his book Koryagin: A man Struggling for Human Dignity telling about psychiatrist Anatoly Koryagin who resisted political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union. In 1988, Reportazh iz Niotkuda (Reportage from Nowhere) by Viktor Rafalsky was published. In the publication, he described his confinement in Soviet psychiatric hospitals. In 1993, Valeria Novodvorskaya published her collection of writings Po Tu Storonu Otchayaniya (Beyond Despair) in which her experience in the prison psychiatric hospital in Kazan
was described. In 1996, Vladimir Bukovsky published his book Judgement in Moscow containing an account of developing the punitive psychiatry based on documents that were being submitted to and considered by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
. The book was translated into English in 1999. In 2001, Nikolay Kupriyanov published his book GULAG-2-SN which has the foreword by Anatoly Sobchak
, covers repressive psychiatry in Soviet Army
, and tells about humiliations Kupriyanov underwent in the psychiatric departments of the Northern Fleet hospital and the Kirov Military Medical Academy. In 2002, St. Petersburg forensic psychiatrist Vladimir Pshizov published his book Sindrom Zamknutogo Prostranstva (Syndrome of Closed Space) describing hospitalization of Viktor Fainberg. 2003 saw the book Moyа Sudba i Borba protiv Psikhiatrov (My Destiny and Struggle against Psychiatrists) by Anatoly Serov who worked as a lead design engineer before he was committed to a psychiatric hospital. In 2010, Alexander Shatravka published his book Pobeg iz Raya (The Escape from Paradise) in which he described how he and his companions were caught after they illegally crossed the border between Finland
and the Soviet Union to escape from the latter country and, as a result, were confined to Soviet psychiatric hospitals and prisons. In his book, he also described methods of brutal treatment of prisoners in the institutions.
The use of psychiatry for political purposes in the USSR was discussed in two television documentaries: They Chose Freedom
produced by Vladimir V. Kara-Murza
in 2005 and Prison Psychiatry produced by Anatoly Yaroshevsky of NTV in the same year.
, Bezumnaya Psikhiatriya (Mad Psychiatry) by Anatoly Prokopenko, Judgement in Moscow by Vladimir Bukovsky, Sovietskaya Psikhiatriya—Zabluzhdeniya i Umysel (Soviet Psychiatry: Fallacies and Intent) by Ada Korotenko and Natalia Alikina, and Kaznimye Sumashestviem (The Executed by Madness).
According to the Commentary on the Russian Federation Law on Psychiatric Care, persons, who were subjected to repressions in form of commitment for compulsory treatment to psychiatric medical institutions and were rehabilitated in accordance with the established procedure, receive indemnity payment; thereby the Russian Federation acknowledged the facts of the use of psychiatry for political purposes and the responsibility of the state to the victims of “political psychiatry.”
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
, systematic political abuse of psychiatry
Political abuse of psychiatry
Political abuse of psychiatry is the purported misuse of psychiatric diagnosis, detention and treatment for the purposes of obstructing the fundamental human rights of certain groups and individuals in a society...
took place. Soviet psychiatric hospitals were used by the authorities as prisons in order to isolate hundreds or thousands of political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally. This method was also employed against religious prisoners and most especially against well-educated former atheists who adopted a religion. In such cases their religious faith was determined to be a form of mental illness that needed to be cured. Formerly highly classified extant documents from “Special file” of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , abbreviated in Russian as ЦК, "Tse-ka", earlier was also called as the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party ...
published after the dissolution of the Soviet Union
Dissolution of the Soviet Union
The dissolution of the Soviet Union was the disintegration of the federal political structures and central government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , resulting in the independence of all fifteen republics of the Soviet Union between March 11, 1990 and December 25, 1991...
demonstrate that the authorities of the country quite consciously used psychiatry as a tool to suppress dissent.
Following the fall of the Soviet Union, it was often reported that some opposition activists and journalists were detained in Russian psychiatric institutions in order to intimidate and isolate them from society. In modern Russia, human rights activists also face the threat of psychiatric diagnosis as a means of political repression.
Background
Political abuse of psychiatry is the misuse of psychiatric diagnosis, detention and treatment for the purposes of obstructing the fundamental human rights of certain groups and individuals in a society. It entails the certification and committal of citizens to psychiatric facilities based upon a political rather than a mental health rationale. Many authors, including psychiatrists, also use the terms "Soviet political psychiatry" or "punitive psychiatry" to refer to this phenomenon.In the book Punitive Medicine by Alexander Podrabinek, the term “punitive medicine”, which is identified with “punitive psychiatry," is defined as “a tool in the struggle against dissidents who cannot be punished by legal means.” Punitive psychiatry is neither a discrete subject not a psychiatric specialty but, rather, it is a disciplinary function arising within many applied sciences in totalitarian countries where members of a profession may feel themselves compelled to service the diktats of power. Psychiatric confinement of sane people is uniformly considered a particularly pernicious form of repression and Soviet punitive psychiatry was one of the key weapons of both illegal and legal repression.
Psychiatry possesses a inherent capacity for abuse that is greater than in other areas of medicine. The diagnosis of mental disease can give the state license to detain persons against their will and insist upon therapy both in the interest of the detainee and in the broader interests of society. In addition, receiving a psychiatric diagnosis can in itself be regarded as oppressive. In a monolithic state, psychiatry can be used to bypass standard legal procedures for establishing guilt or innocence and allow political incarceration without the ordinary odium attaching to such political trials. In the period from the 1960-s to 1986, the abuse of psychiatry for political purposes was reported to have been systematic in the Soviet Union and episodic in other Eastern European countries such as Romania
Communist Romania
Communist Romania was the period in Romanian history when that country was a Soviet-aligned communist state in the Eastern Bloc, with the dominant role of Romanian Communist Party enshrined in its successive constitutions...
, Hungary
People's Republic of Hungary
The People's Republic of Hungary or Hungarian People's Republic was the official state name of Hungary from 1949 to 1989 during its Communist period under the guidance of the Soviet Union. The state remained in existence until 1989 when opposition forces consolidated in forcing the regime to...
, Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic was the official name of Czechoslovakia from 1960 until end of 1989 , a Soviet satellite state of the Eastern Bloc....
, and Yugoslavia
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was the Yugoslav state that existed from the abolition of the Yugoslav monarchy until it was dissolved in 1992 amid the Yugoslav Wars. It was a socialist state and a federation made up of six socialist republics: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia,...
. Psychiatrists have been involved in human rights abuses in states across the world when the definitions of mental disease were expanded to include political disobedience. As scholars have long argued, governmental and medical institutions have at times coded threats to authority as mental disease during periods of political disturbance and instability. Nowadays, in many countries, political prisoners are still sometimes confined and abused in mental institutions.
In the Soviet Union dissident
Dissident
A dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....
s were often confined in the so-called psikhushka, or psychiatric wards. Psikhushka is the Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
ironic diminutive for "mental hospital". One of the first psikhushkas was the Psychiatric Prison Hospital in the city of Kazan
Kazan
Kazan is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Tatarstan, Russia. With a population of 1,143,546 , it is the eighth most populous city in Russia. Kazan lies at the confluence of the Volga and Kazanka Rivers in European Russia. In April 2009, the Russian Patent Office granted Kazan the...
. In 1939 it was transferred to the control of the NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
, the secret police and the precursor organization to the KGB
KGB
The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...
, under the order of Lavrentiy Beria
Lavrentiy Beria
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian Soviet politician and state security administrator, chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus under Joseph Stalin during World War II, and Deputy Premier in the postwar years ....
, who was the head of the NKVD. International human rights defenders
Human Rights Defenders
Human rights defender is a term used to describe people who, individually or with others, act to promote or protect human rights. Human rights defenders are those men and women who act peacefully for the promotion and protection of those rights....
such as Walter Reich have long recorded the methods by which Soviet psychiatrists in Psikhushka hospitals diagnosed schizophrenia
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by a disintegration of thought processes and of emotional responsiveness. It most commonly manifests itself as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking, and it is accompanied by significant social...
in political dissenters.
As early as 1948, the Soviet secret service took an interest in this area of medicine. It was one of the superiors of the Soviet secret police, Andrey Vyshinsky
Andrey Vyshinsky
Andrey Januaryevich Vyshinsky – 22 November 1954) was a Soviet politician, jurist and diplomat.He is known as a state prosecutor of Joseph Stalin's Moscow trials and in the Nuremberg trials. He was the Soviet Foreign Minister from 1949 to 1953, after having served as Deputy Foreign...
, who first ordered the use psychiatry as a tool of repression. A system of political abuse of psychiatry was developed at the end of Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
's regime. However, according to Alexander Etkind, punitive psychiatry was not simply an inheritance from the Stalinist era as the GULAG
Gulag
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...
(the acronym for Chief Administration for Corrective Labor Camps, the penitentiary system in the Stalin years) was an effective instrument of political repression and there was no compelling requirement to develop an alternative and expensive psychiatric substitute. The abuse of psychiatry was a natural product of the later Soviet era. From the mid-1970s to the 1990s, the structure of mental health service conformed to the double standard in society, that of two separate systems which peacefully co-existed despite conflicts between them:
- the first system was punitive psychiatry that straight served the institute of power and was led by the Moscow Institute for Forensic Psychiatry named after Vladimir SerbskyVladimir SerbskyVladimir Petrovich Serbsky was one of the founders of the forensic psychiatry in Russia. An author of The Forensic Psychopathology, Serbskiy thought delinquency to have no congenital diatheses, considering it to be caused by social reasons....
; - the second system was composed of elite, psychotherapeutically oriented clinics and was led by the Leningrad Psychoneurological Institute named after Vladimir BekhterevVladimir BekhterevVladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev was a Russian Neurologist and the Father of Objective Psychology. He is best known for noting the role of the hippocampus in memory, his study of reflexes, and Bekhterev’s Disease...
.
The hundreds of hospitals in the provinces combined components of both systems.
Joint Session
USSR Academy of Medical Sciences
The USSR Academy of Medical Sciences is the highest scientific and medical organization founded in the Soviet Union in 1944.Its successor is the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences founded in 1992....
and the Board of the All-Union Neurologic and Psychiatric Association in October 1951. Held in the name of Ivan Pavlov
Ivan Pavlov
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was a famous Russian physiologist. Although he made significant contributions to psychology, he was not in fact a psychologist himself but was a mathematician and actually had strong distaste for the field....
it considered the status of several leading neuroscientists and psychiatrists of the time, including Grunya Sukhareva, Vasily Gilyarovsky, Raisa Golant, Aleksandr Shmaryan, and Mikhail Gurevich
Mikhail Gurevich (psychiatrist)
Mikhail Osipovich Gurevich was a Russian and Soviet psychiatrist, one of leaders of Russian psychoneurology, honoured worker of science of the RSFSR, and a full member of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences.- Biography :Gurvich was born on 18 September 1878 in the village of Sosnytsia, Chernigov...
, who were charged with practicing "anti-Pavlovian, anti-Marxist, idealistic [and] reactionary" science that was damaging to Soviet psychiatry. During the Joint Session these eminent psychiatrists, motivated by fear, had to publicly admit that their scientific positions were in error and they also had to promise to conform Pavlovian doctrines. However, these public declarations of obedience proved insufficient as in the closing speech of the congress, the lead author of the event's policy report, Andrei Snezhnevsky
Andrei Snezhnevsky
Andrei Vladimirovich Snezhnevsky was a Soviet psychiatrist notorious for expanding the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, a step that allowed for arbitrary labeling of political dissidents as having sluggishly progressing schizophrenia...
stated that they “have not disarmed themselves and continue to remain in the old anti-Pavlovian positions”, thereby causing “grave damage to the Soviet scientific and practical psychiatry”. The vice president of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences accused them of "diligently fall[ing] down to the dirty source of American pseudo-science”. The congressional members who articulated these accusations, among them Irina Strelchuk, Vasily Banshchikov, Oleg Kerbikov, and Andrei Snezhnevsky
Andrei Snezhnevsky
Andrei Vladimirovich Snezhnevsky was a Soviet psychiatrist notorious for expanding the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, a step that allowed for arbitrary labeling of political dissidents as having sluggishly progressing schizophrenia...
, were characterized by careerist ambition and fears for their own positions. Not surprisingly, many of them were advanced and appointed to leadership positions shortly after the session.
The Joint Session also had negative an impact on several leading Soviet academic neuroscientists, such as Pyotr Anokhin
Pyotr Anokhin
Pyotr Kuzmich Anokhin was a Russian biologist and physiologist who made important contributions to cybernetics and functional systems. His pioneering concept on feedback were published in 1935.- Overview :...
, Aleksey Speransky, Lina Stern
Lina Stern
Lina Solomonovna Stern was a notable Soviet biochemist, physiologist and humanist whose medical discoveries saved thousands of lives at the fronts of World War II...
, Ivan Beritashvili, and Leon Orbeli
Leon Orbeli
Levon Orbeli was an Armenian physiologist active in the Russian SFSR. He was a member of the Academies of Science of USSR and Armenian SSR...
. They were labeled as anti-Pavlovians, anti-materialists and reactionaries and subsequently they were dismissed from their positions. In addition to losing their laboratories some of these scientists were subjected to torture in prison. The Moscow, Leningrad, Ukrainian, Georgian, and Armenian schools of neuroscience and neurophysiology were damaged for a period due to this loss of personnel. The Joint Session ravaged productive research in neurosciences and psychiatry for years to come. It was pseudoscience that took over.
After the joint session of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences on June 28 — July 4, 1950 and during the session of the Presidium of the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Board of the All-Union Society of Neuropathologists and Psychiatrists on October 11–15, 1951, the leading role was given to Snezhnevky's school. The 1950 decision to give monopoly over psychiatry to the Pavlovian school of Snezhnevsky was one of the crucial factors in the rise of political psychiatry. The Soviet doctors, under the incentive of Sneznevsky, devised a "Pavlovian theory of schizophrenia" and increasingly applied this diagnostic category to political dissidents.
Sluggish schizophrenia
"The incarceration of free thinking healthy people in madhouses is spiritual murder, it is a variation of the gas chamber, even more cruel; the torture of the people being killed is more malicious and more prolonged. Like the gas chambers, these crimes will never be forgotten and those involved in them will be condemned for all time during their life and after their death." (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)
Psychiatric diagnoses such as the diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia" in political dissidents in the USSR were used for political purposes. It was the diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia" that was most prominently used in cases of dissidents. The leading critics implied that Snezhnevsky had designed the Soviet model of schizophrenia and this diagnosis to make political dissent into a mental disease. According Robert van Voren, the political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR arose from the conception that people who opposed the Soviet regime were mentally sick since there was no other logical rationale why one would oppose the sociopolitical system considered the best in the world. The diagnosis "sluggish schizophrenia," a longstanding concept further developed by the Moscow School of Psychiatry and particularly by its chief Andrei Snezhnevsky, furnished a very handy framework for explaining this behavior. The weight of scholarly opinion holds that the psychiatrists who played the primary role in the development of this diagnostic concept were following directives from the Communist Party
Communist party
A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...
and the Soviet secret service, or KGB
KGB
The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...
, and were well aware of the political uses to which it would be put. Nevertheless, for many Soviet psychiatrists "sluggish schizophrenia" appeared to be a logical explanation to apply to the behavior of critics of the regime who, in their opposition, seemed willing to jeopardize their happiness, family, and career for a reformist conviction or ideal that was so apparently divergent from the prevailing social and political orthodoxy.
A. Snezhnevsky, the most prominent theorist of Soviet psychiatry and director of the Institute of Psychiatry of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, developed a novel classification of mental disorders
Classification of mental disorders
The classification of mental disorders, also known as psychiatric nosology or taxonomy, is a key aspect of psychiatry and other mental health professions and an important issue for consumers and providers of mental health services...
postulating an original set of diagnostic criteria. The Soviet model of schizophrenia is based on the hypothesis that a single fundamental characteristic, by which schizophrenia spectrum disorders are distinguished clinically, is their longitudinal course. The hypothesis implies that there are three main types of schizophrenia:
- the continuous type that is defined as unremitting, proceeding with either a rapid (“malignant”) or a slow (“sluggish”) progression and has a poor prognosis in both instances;
- the periodic, or recurrent type that is characterized by an acute attack followed by full remission with minimal progression, if any;
- the mixed, or shift-like, type (“schubweise” — in German “schub” means phase or attack), a mixture of continuous and periodic types that occurs periodically and is characterized by only partial remission.
This systematization of schizophrenia types attributed to Snezhnevsky is still used in Russia and refers sluggish schizophrenia to the continuous type.
A carefully crafted description of sluggish schizophrenia established that psychotic symptoms were non-essential for the diagnosis, but symptoms of psychopathy, hypochondria, depersonalization or anxiety were central to it. Symptoms referred to as part of the "negative axis" included pessimism, poor social adaptation, and conflict with authorities, and were themselves sufficient for a formal diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia with scanty symptoms." According to Snezhnevsky, patients with sluggish schizophrenia could present as quasi sane yet manifest minimal but clinically relevant personality changes which could remain unnoticed to the untrained eye. Thereby patients with non-psychotic mental disorders, or even persons who were not mentally sick, could be easily labelled with the diagnosis of sluggish schizophrenia. Along with paranoia
Paranoia
Paranoia [] is a thought process believed to be heavily influenced by anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion. Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs, or beliefs of conspiracy concerning a perceived threat towards oneself...
, sluggish schizophrenia was the diagnosis most frequently used for the psychiatric incarceration of dissenters. As per the theories of Snezhnevsky and his colleagues, schizophrenia was much more prevalent than previously considered since the illness could be presented with comparatively slight symptoms and only progress afterwards. As a consequence, schizophrenia was diagnosed much more often in Moscow than in cities of other countries, as the World Health Organization Pilot Study on Schizophrenia reported in 1973. In particular, the scope was widened by sluggish schizophrenia because according to Snezhnevsky and his colleagues, patients with this diagnosis were capable of functioning almost normally in the social sense. Their symptoms could be like those of a neurosis or could assume a paranoid character. The patients with paranoid symptoms retained some insight into their condition but overestimated their own significance and could manifest grandiose ideas of reforming society. Thereby, sluggish schizophrenia could have such symptoms as "reform delusions," "perseverance," and "struggle for the truth." As Vladimir Stayzhkin reported, Snezhnevsky diagnosed a reformation delusion for every case when a patient "develops a new principle of human knowledge, drafts an academy of human happiness, and many other projects for the benefit of mankind."
In the 1960s and 1970s, theories, which contained ideas about reforming society and struggling for truth, and religious convictions were not referred to delusional paranoid disorders in practically all foreign classifications, but Soviet psychiatry, proceeding from ideological conceptions, referred critique of the political system and proposals to reform this system to the delusional construct. Diagnostic approaches of conception of sluggish schizophrenia and paranoiac states with delusion of reformism were used only in the Soviet Union and several Eastern European countries
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
.
Someone of those present at a lecture by Georgi Morozov on forensic psychiatry in the Serbsky Institute once asked him a rather provocative question: “Tell us, Georgi Vasilevich, what is actually the diagnosis of sluggish schizophrenia?” Since the question was asked with an ironical smile, in the debate, Morozov replied, smiling ironically as well, “You know, dear colleagues, this is a very peculiar disease: there are not delusional disorders, there are not hallucinations, but there is schizophrenia!”
American psychiatrist Alan A. Stone
Alan A. Stone
Alan A. Stone is a professor of law and psychiatry at Harvard University. Stone also maintains an interest in cinema, and serves as the film critic for the Boston Review....
stated that Western criticism of Soviet psychiatry aimed at Sneznevsky personally, because he was essentially responsible for the Soviet concept of schizophrenia with a "sluggish type" manifestation by "reformerism" including other symptoms. One can readily apply this diagnostic scheme to dissenters. Snezhnevsky was long attacked in the West as an exemplar of psychiatric abuse in the USSR. He was charged with cynically developing a system of diagnosis which could be bent for political purposes, and he himself diagnosed or was involved in a series of famous dissident cases, including those of the biologist Zhores Medvedev
Zhores Medvedev
Zhores Aleksandrovich Medvedev is a Russian biologist, historian and dissident. His twin brother is the historian Roy Medvedev.-Biography:Zhores Medvedev and his twin brother Roy Medvedev were born on 14 November 1925 in Tbilisi, Georgia, USSR....
, the mathematician Leonid Plyushch
Leonid Plyushch
Leonid Plyushch is a mathematician and Soviet dissident.- Early life and career :Leonid Plyushch was born into a Ukrainian working-class family in 1939 in Naryn, Kirghizia. His father worked as railway foreman, and was killed at the front 1941...
, and Vladimir Bukovsky
Vladimir Bukovsky
Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky is a leading member of the dissident movement of the 1960s and 1970s, writer, neurophysiologist, and political activist....
whom Snezhnevsky diagnosed as schizophrenic on 5 July 1962. In 1980, the Special Committee on the Political Abuse of Psychiatry, established by the Royal College of Psychiatrists
Royal College of Psychiatrists
The Royal College of Psychiatrists is the main professional organisation of psychiatrists in the United Kingdom responsible for representing psychiatrists, psychiatric research and providing public information about mental health problems...
in 1978, charged Snezhnevsky with involvement in the abuse and recommended that Snezhnevsky, who had been honoured as a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, be invited to attend the College's Court of Electors to answer criticisms because he was responsible for the compulsory detention of this celebrated dissident, Leonid Plyushch. Instead Snezhnevsky chose to resign his Fellowship.
Mass abuse onset
The campaign to declare political opponents mentally sick and to commit dissenters to mental hospitals began in the late 1950s and early 1960s. As Vladimir BukovskyVladimir Bukovsky
Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky is a leading member of the dissident movement of the 1960s and 1970s, writer, neurophysiologist, and political activist....
, commenting on the nascency of the political abuse of psychiatry, wrote, Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...
reckoned that it was impossible for people in a socialist society to have anti-socialist consciousness, and whenever manifestations of dissidence could not be justified as a provocation of world imperialism or a legacy of the past, they were merely the product of mental disease. In his speech published in the state newspaper Pravda
Pravda
Pravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....
on 24 May 1959, Khrushchev said:
Yuri Andropov
Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov was a Soviet politician and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 12 November 1982 until his death fifteen months later.-Early life:...
became the KGB Chairman. On 3 July 1967, he made a proposal to establish for dealing with the political opposition the KGB’s Fifth Directorate (ideological counterintelligence). At the end of July, the directorate was established and entered in its files cases of all Soviet dissidents including Andrei Sakharov
Andrei Sakharov
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was a Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist. He earned renown as the designer of the Soviet Union's Third Idea, a codename for Soviet development of thermonuclear weapons. Sakharov was an advocate of civil liberties and civil reforms in the...
and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In 1968, Andropov as the KGB Chairman issued his order “On the tasks of State security agencies in combating the ideological sabotage by the adversary”, calling for struggle against dissidents and their imperialist masters. He aimed to achieve “the destruction of dissent in all its forms” and insisted that the struggle for human rights had to be considered as a part of a wide-ranging imperialist plot to undermine the Soviet state’s foundation.
On 29 April 1969, Andropov submitted to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union an elaborated plan for creating a network of mental hospitals to defend the “Soviet Government and socialist order” from dissenters. The proposal by Andropov to use psychiatry for struggle against dissenters was implemented. On 15 May 1969, there was issued Decree No. 345–209 on "measures for preventing dangerous behavior (acts) on the part of mentally ill persons." This Decree ratified the practice of having undesirables hauled into detention by psychiatrists. Under this practice, the psychiatrists were told whom they should examine, and they might fetch this individual with the assistance of the police or entrap him to come to the hospital. The psychiatrists doubled as interrogators and as arresting officers. The doctors fabricated a diagnosis requiring internment, and no court judgment was required for confining the individual indefinitely.
Practically in all cases, dissidents were examined in the Serbsky Central Research Institute for Forensic Psychiatry which conducted forensic-psychiatric expert evaluation of persons brought to justice under political articles. Certified, the persons were sent for involuntary treatment
Involuntary treatment
Involuntary treatment refers to medical treatment undertaken without a person's consent. In almost all circumstances, involuntary treatment refers to psychiatric treatment administered despite an individual's objections...
to special hospitals of the system of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) of the Russian Federation. In 1960s and 1970s, the trials of dissenters and their referral for “treatment” to special psychiatric hospitals of the system of MVD came out into the open before the world public, and information of “psychiatric terror,” which the leadership of the institute was flatly denying, began to appear. The majority of psychiatric repressions date from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.
According to dissident poet Naum Korzhavin
Naum Korzhavin
Nahum Moiseyevich Korzhavin is a Russian poet of Jewish descent, a dissident and emigrant living in Boston.Korzhavin was given the Big Book National Award-2006 for his contribution into literature...
, the atmosphere at the Serbsky Institute in Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
altered almost overnight when a Daniil Lunts became chief of the Fourth Department otherwise known as the Political Department. Previously, psychiatric departments had been regarded as a 'refuge' against being dispatched to the Gulag
Gulag
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...
, but thenceforth that policy altered. The first reports of dissenters being hospitalized on non-medical grounds date from the early 1960s, not long after Georgi Morozov was appointed director of the Serbsky Institute. Both Morozov and Lunts were personally involved in numerous well-known cases and were notorious abusers of psychiatry for political purposes. Daniil Lunts was characterized by Viktor Nekipelov
Viktor Nekipelov
Viktor Aleksandrovich Nekipelov was a Russian poet, writer, Soviet dissident, member of the Moscow Helsinki Group.Pharmacist by occupation, in 1968, he participated in protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia....
as "no better than the criminal doctors who performed inhuman experiments on the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps."
Sergei Pisarev
Cases of political abuse of psychiatry have been known since the 1940s and 1950s, including the case of Sergei Pisarev, a party official who was arrested after criticizing the work of the Soviet secret police in the context of the so-called Doctors' PlotDoctors' plot
The Doctors' plot was the most dramatic anti-Jewish episode in the Soviet Union during Joseph Stalin's regime, involving the "unmasking" of a group of prominent Moscow doctors, predominantly Jews, as conspiratorial assassins of Soviet leaders...
, an anti-Semitic campaign propelled at Stalin's instructions which should have brought about a new terror wave in the Soviet Union and possibly the extermination of the remaining Jewish communes that had outlived the Second World War. Pisarev was committed to the Special Psychiatric Hospital in Leningrad
Leningrad
Leningrad is the former name of Saint Petersburg, Russia.Leningrad may also refer to:- Places :* Leningrad Oblast, a federal subject of Russia, around Saint Petersburg* Leningrad, Tajikistan, capital of Muminobod district in Khatlon Province...
which along with an analogous hospital in Sychevka has started functioning since the Second World War. After his discharge, Pisarev began a campaign against political abuse of psychiatry, concentrating himself on the Serbsky Institute which he viewed to be the seat of the trouble. As a consequence of his efforts, the Central Committee of the Communist Party
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , abbreviated in Russian as ЦК, "Tse-ka", earlier was also called as the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party ...
constituted a committee which investigated the situation and came to the conclusion that the political abuse of psychiatry was actually taking place. The report, however, vanished in a desk drawer and never brought about any action taken.
Pyotr Grigorenko
Pyotr Grigorenko
Petro Grigorenko or Petro Hryhorovych Hryhorenko or Pyotr Grigoryevich Grigorenko was a high-ranked Soviet Army commander of Ukrainian descent, later a prominent Soviet human rights activist, dissident and writer.-Early life:Petro Grigorenko was born in a village of rural Zaporizhzhia Oblast,...
started to openly criticize what he considered the excesses of the Khrushchev regime. He maintained that the special privileges of the political elite did not comply with the principles laid down by Lenin. Grigorenko formed a dissident group — The Group for the Struggle to Revive Leninism
Leninism
In Marxist philosophy, Leninism is the body of political theory for the democratic organisation of a revolutionary vanguard party, and the achievement of a direct-democracy dictatorship of the proletariat, as political prelude to the establishment of socialism...
. Soviet psychiatrists sitting as legally constituted commissions to inquire into his sanity diagnosed him at least three times — in April 1964, August 1969, and November 1969. When arrested, Grigorenko was sent to Moscow's Lubyanka prison, and from there for psychiatric examination to the Serbsky Institute where the first commission, which included Snezhnevsky and Lunts, diagnosed him as suffering from the mental disease in the form of a paranoid delusional development of his personality, accompanied by early signs of cerebral arteriosclerosis. Lunts, reporting later on this diagnosis, mentioned that the symptoms of paranoid development were "an overestimation of his own personality reaching messianic proportions" and "reformist ideas." Grigorenko was irresponsible for his actions and was thereby forcibly committed to a special psychiatric hospital. While there, the government deprived him of his pension despite the fact that, by law, a mentally sick military officer was entitled to a pension. After six months, Grigorenko was found to be in remission and was released for outpatient follow-up. He required that his pension be restored. Although he began to draw pension again, it was severely cut. He became much more active in his dissidence, stirred other people to protest some of the State's actions and received several warnings from the KGB. As Grigorenko had followers in Moscow, he was lured to Tashkent
Tashkent
Tashkent is the capital of Uzbekistan and of the Tashkent Province. The officially registered population of the city in 2008 was about 2.2 million. Unofficial sources estimate the actual population may be as much as 4.45 million.-Early Islamic History:...
, half a continent away. Again he was arrested and examined by psychiatric team. None of the manifestations or symptoms cited by the Lunts commission were found by the second commission held in Tashkent under the chairmanship of Fyodor Detengof. The diagnosis and evaluation made by the commission was that "Grigorenko's [criminal] activity had a purposeful character, it was related to concrete events and facts… It did not reveal any signs of illness or delusions." The psychiatrists reported that he was not mentally sick, but responsible for his actions. He had firm convictions which were shared by many of his colleagues and were not delusional. Having evaluated the records of his preceding hospitalization, they concluded that he had not been sick at that time either. The KGB brought Grigorenko back in Moscow and, three months later, arranged a second examination at the Serbsky Institute. Once again, these psychiatrists found that he had "a paranoid development of the personality" manifested by reformist ideas. The commission, which included Lunts and was chaired by Morozov, recommended that he be recommitted to a special psychiatric hospital for the socially dangerous. Eventually, after almost four years, he was transferred to a usual mental hospital.
In 1979 in New York, Grigorenko was examined by the team of psychologists and psychiatrists including Alan A. Stone
Alan A. Stone
Alan A. Stone is a professor of law and psychiatry at Harvard University. Stone also maintains an interest in cinema, and serves as the film critic for the Boston Review....
, the then President of American Psychiatric Association
American Psychiatric Association
The American Psychiatric Association is the main professional organization of psychiatrists and trainee psychiatrists in the United States, and the most influential worldwide. Its some 38,000 members are mainly American but some are international...
. The team came to conclusion that they could find no evidence of mental disease in Grigorenko and his history consistent with mental disease in the past. In 1981, Pyotr Grigorenko told about his psychiatric examinations and hospitalizations in his memoirs V Podpolye Mozhno Vstretit Tolko Krys (In Underground One Can Meet Only Rats) translated into English under the title Memoirs in 1982. Only in 1992, the official post-mortem forensic psychiatric commission of experts met at Grigorenko’s homeland removed the stigma of mental patient from him and confirmed that the debilitating treatment he underwent in high security psychiatric hospitals for many years was groundless. The 1992 psychiatric examination of Grigorenko was described by the Nezavisimiy Psikhiatricheskiy Zhurnal
Nezavisimiy Psikhiatricheskiy Zhurnal
Nezavisimiy Psikhiatricheskiy Zhurnal is a Russian peer-reviewed scientific journal which covers clinical practice, issues of modern psychiatry, and results of studies by Russian and foreign psychiatrists...
in its numbers 1–4 of 1992.
Viktor Rafalsky
Viktor Rafalsky, a political prisoner, dissident and author of unpublished plays, novels, and short stories, was committed to Soviet psychiatric prisons in LvivLviv
Lviv is a city in western Ukraine. The city is regarded as one of the main cultural centres of today's Ukraine and historically has also been a major Polish and Jewish cultural center, as Poles and Jews were the two main ethnicities of the city until the outbreak of World War II and the following...
, Dnipropetrovsk
Dnipropetrovsk
Dnipropetrovsk or Dnepropetrovsk formerly Yekaterinoslav is Ukraine's third largest city with one million inhabitants. It is located southeast of Ukraine's capital Kiev on the Dnieper River, in the south-central region of the country...
, and Leningrad
Leningrad
Leningrad is the former name of Saint Petersburg, Russia.Leningrad may also refer to:- Places :* Leningrad Oblast, a federal subject of Russia, around Saint Petersburg* Leningrad, Tajikistan, capital of Muminobod district in Khatlon Province...
for 24 years because of belonging to a clandestine Marxist group (from 1954 to 1959), writing anti-Soviet prose (from 1962 to 1965), and possessing anti-Soviet literature (from 1968 to 1983). In the winter of 1987, he was discharged and pronounced sane. In 1988, Viktor Rafalsky published the first version of his memoirs Reportazh iz Niotkuda (Reportage from Nowhere) describing his confinement in Soviet psychiatric hospitals.
Joseph Brodsky
Joseph Brodsky
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky , was a Russian poet and essayist.In 1964, 23-year-old Brodsky was arrested and charged with the crime of "social parasitism" He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and settled in America with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters...
was committed for observation to the Kashchenko psychiatric clinic in Moscow where he stayed for several days. A few weeks later, his second hospitalization took place: on 13 February he was arrested in Leningrad and on 18 February the Dzerzhinsky District Court sent him for psychiatric examination to "Pryazhka," Psychiatric Hospital No. 2 where he spent about three weeks, from 18 February to 13 March. In the mental hospitals, Brodsky was given "tranquilizing" injections, wakened in the middle of the night, immersed into a cold bath, wrapped in a wet sheet, and put next to the heater so that the sheet would cut into his body when it dries. These two stints at psychiatric establishments formed the experience underlying Gorbunov and Gorchakov
Gorbunov and Gorchakov
Gorbunov and Gorchakov is a poem by Russian and English poet, essayist, dramatist Joseph Brodsky.- Table of Contents :In the poem, fourteen cantos are named in a such way that the table of contents looks as a sonnet-like poem:# Gorbunov and Gorchakov...
written and called by Brodsky "an extremely serious work.". In 1972, when the authorities considered Brodsky for exile and sought an expert opinion on his mental health, they consulted Snezhnevsky who, without examining him personally, diagnosed him as schizophrenic and concluded that he was "not valuable person at all and may be let go."
Valery Tarsis
In 1965 in the West, strong public awareness that Soviet psychiatry could be subject to political abuse arose with publication of the book Ward 7 by Valery TarsisValery Tarsis
Valery Yakovlevich Tarsis a Russian novelist who was highly critical of the communist regime.-Biography:Valery was born in Kiev, went to school there and then to Rostov-on-Don University....
, a writer born in 1906 in Kiev
Kiev
Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....
. He based the book upon his own experiences in 1963–1964 when he was detained in the Moscow Kashchenko psychiatric hospital for political reasons.
The fictionalised documentary Ward No. 7 by Tarsis was a first literary work to deal with the Soviet authorities' abuse of psychiatry. In a parallel with the story Ward No. 6 by Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...
, Tarsis implies that it is the doctors who are mad, whereas the patients are completely sane, although unsuited to a life of slavery. Individuals in ward No. 7 are not cured, but persistently maimed; the hospital is a jail and the doctors are gaolers and police spies. Most doctors know nothing about psychiatry, but make diagnoses arbitrarily and give all patients the same medication — an algogenic injection or the anti-psychotic drug aminazin known in English as Thorazine. Tarsis denounces Soviet psychiatry as pseudo-science and charlatanism and writes that, firstly, it has pretenses of curing the sickness of men's souls, but denies the existence of the soul; secondly, since there is no satisfactory definition of mental health, there can be no acceptable definition of mental disease in Soviet society.
In 1966, Tarsis was permitted to emigrate to the West, and was soon deprived of his Soviet citizenship. As the 1966 memorandum to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Politburo , known as the Presidium from 1952 to 1966, functioned as the central policymaking and governing body of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.-Duties and responsibilities:The...
reported, "KGB continues arrangements for further compromising Tarsis abroad as a mentally ill person."
Evgeni Belov
Shortly after publishing Ward 7, a second case of political abuse of psychiatry gave rise to attention in Great BritainGreat Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
. Evgeni Belov, a young Moscow interpreter contracted by a group of four British students, made friends with them. At first he was positive about Soviet system, but gradually became more critical and began to voice demand for more freedom. Calling for a free press and free trade unions, Belov began to write letters to the Party. As a consequence, his membership in the Party was suspended and he was summoned to appear before a committee. He declined, and instead sought justice higher up by writing protest letters to Leonid Brezhnev
Leonid Brezhnev
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev – 10 November 1982) was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , presiding over the country from 1964 until his death in 1982. His eighteen-year term as General Secretary was second only to that of Joseph Stalin in...
himself. When British students returned from a short trip to Tokyo
Tokyo
, ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family...
, Belov had vanished. To their shock, it emerged that he had been committed to a mental hospital. A campaign to get him out yielded no results. A British newspaper published a letter in which Belov's father stated that his son was really sick, and the campaign came to a grinding halt. However, the public interest had been activated.
Alexander Esenin-Volpin
Awareness in the West was also raised by the case of Alexander Esenin-VolpinAlexander Esenin-Volpin
Alexander Sergeyevich Esenin-Volpin is a prominent Russian-American poet and mathematician.Born on May 12, 1924 in the former Soviet Union, he was a notable dissident, political prisoner, poet, and mathematician...
, a son of the famous Russian poet Sergei Esenin and born in 1924. In 1946, he was first committed to the Leningrad Special Psychiatric Hospital for writing poem considered anti-Soviet. During Khrushchev's reign, Esenin-Volpin was later hospitalized three times: in 1957, in 1959–1960 in the same the Leningrad Special Psychiatric Hospital and, finally, in 1962–1963. In 1968, Esenin-Volpin was again hospitalized, and for this once his case achieved the attention in the West. In February 1968, 99 Soviet mathematicians and scientists signed a protest letter to the Soviet officials demanding his release. After a wave of protests, he was discharged and permitted to immigrate to the USA where he obtained the position of professor of mathematics. In 2010, Alexander Magalif, who hospitalized Esenin-Volpin, recollected that he had seen a little mark made by a pencil in the corner of the referral to treatment of Esenin-Volpin: "not to discharge from the hospital without coordination with KGB."
Yuli Daniel
In 1965, the writer Yuli DanielYuli Daniel
Yuli Markovich Daniel was a Soviet dissident writer, poet, translator and political prisoner.He frequently wrote under the pseudonyms Nikolay Arzhak and Yu. Petrov .-Early life and World War II:...
was arrested due to his satirical anti-Stalinist works and outspoken protest at the human rights abuse in the USSR. Daniel was kept in a mental hospital of the Gulag where he was refused medical treatment in order to destroy his will.
Viktor Fainberg
Viktor FainbergViktor Fainberg
Viktor Isaakovich Fainberg is a philologist, prominent figure of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, participant of the 1968 Red Square demonstration, and fighter against punitive psychiatry....
was one of the seven persons who demonstrated on Red Square
Red Square
Red Square is a city square in Moscow, Russia. The square separates the Kremlin, the former royal citadel and currently the official residence of the President of Russia, from a historic merchant quarter known as Kitai-gorod...
in Moscow in 1968 against the intervention into Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
. He was committed for compulsory treatment to the Special Psychiatric Hospital in Leningrad
Leningrad
Leningrad is the former name of Saint Petersburg, Russia.Leningrad may also refer to:- Places :* Leningrad Oblast, a federal subject of Russia, around Saint Petersburg* Leningrad, Tajikistan, capital of Muminobod district in Khatlon Province...
where he was confined for five years. During his confinement, a psychiatrist working in the establishment, Marina Voikhanskaya, fell in love with him and helped him as much as she could. After his discharge, they married and emigrated to the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
. When they had divorced, Viktor moved to Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
and Marina remained in the United Kingdom.
AGDHR members
In 1968, the human rights movement in the USSR focused directly on Soviet political psychiatry, organizing public protests and writing international bodies. In 1969, a group of about 14 activists including Sergei Kovalyov, a future Russian human rights ombudsman, constituted the Action Group for the Defence of Human Rights in the USSR. The group composed a first samizdatSamizdat
Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader...
(self-published) human rights bulletin, the Chronicle of Current Events. Among the members of the Action Group were individuals who subsequently fell victim to psychiatric abuse themselves: the poetess Natalya Gorbanevskaya
Natalya Gorbanevskaya
Natalya Yevgenyevna Gorbanevskaya is a Russian poet, translator of Polish literature and civil rights activist. She is also a citizen of Poland.- Life :Gorbanevskaya graduated from Leningrad University in 1964 and became a technical editor and translator...
who in 1968 demonstrated on Red Square
Red Square
Red Square is a city square in Moscow, Russia. The square separates the Kremlin, the former royal citadel and currently the official residence of the President of Russia, from a historic merchant quarter known as Kitai-gorod...
against bringing Soviet tanks into Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
; Vladimir Borisov who later was one of the founders of the independent labor movement in the Soviet Union; Vladimir Maltsev, a translator; and Leonid Plyushch
Leonid Plyushch
Leonid Plyushch is a mathematician and Soviet dissident.- Early life and career :Leonid Plyushch was born into a Ukrainian working-class family in 1939 in Naryn, Kirghizia. His father worked as railway foreman, and was killed at the front 1941...
, a Ukrainian cyberneticist
Cyberneticist
A cyberneticist or a cybernetician is a person who practices cybernetics.Heinz von Foerster once told Stuart Umpleby that Norbert Wiener preferred the term "cybernetician" rather than "cyberneticist", perhaps because Wiener was a mathematician rather than a physicist.On the other hand, Nicolas...
who was committed to the Special Psychiatric Hospital of Dnepropetrovsk and was awfully tortured with neuroleptics.
Valeria Novodvorskaya
In 1968, Valeria NovodvorskayaValeria Novodvorskaya
Valeriya Ilyinichna Novodvorskaya is a liberal Russian politician, Soviet dissident, the founder and the chairwoman of the "Democratic Union" party, and a member of the editorial board of The New Times...
created an underground student organization whose purpose was to overthrow the Soviet state. On 5 December 1969, she was arrested in the Palace of Congresses, where before the start of a performance of the opera October she was handing out and scattering leaflets written in verse form until she was approached by KGB men. She was later sentenced to indefinite detention in the prison psychiatric hospital in Kazan
Kazan
Kazan is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Tatarstan, Russia. With a population of 1,143,546 , it is the eighth most populous city in Russia. Kazan lies at the confluence of the Volga and Kazanka Rivers in European Russia. In April 2009, the Russian Patent Office granted Kazan the...
. Her experience in this hospital was described in her largest collection of writings entitled Po Tu Storonu Otchayaniya (Beyond Despair). Novodvorskaya was also committed in mental hospital later, in 1978 as a member of the Free Interprofessional Association of Workers and in September 1990 as a person responsible "for insulting President"; at that time she was discharged after the 1991 putsch. In the early 1990s, psychiatrists of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia
Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia
The Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia is a non-state professional human rights organization.- History :The IPA was established in Moscow in March 1989 and became the first psychiatric association in the USSR which was not controlled by the State...
and G. N. Sotsevich proved the absence of mental illness in Novodvorskaya.
Natalya Gorbanevskaya
1968 Red Square demonstration
The 1968 Red Square demonstration took place on August 25, 1968 at Red Square, Moscow, Soviet Union, to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, that occurred during the night of 20–21 August 1968, crushing the so-called Prague spring, a set of...
against the invasion into Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
, August 1968 saw the arrest of Natalya Gorbanevskaya
Natalya Gorbanevskaya
Natalya Yevgenyevna Gorbanevskaya is a Russian poet, translator of Polish literature and civil rights activist. She is also a citizen of Poland.- Life :Gorbanevskaya graduated from Leningrad University in 1964 and became a technical editor and translator...
well known in the West due to her book Red Square at Noon describing the demonstration. A few days later, the Serbsky Institute found her non-accountable and made diagnosis of "deep psychopathy—the presence of mild, chronic schizophrenic process cannot be excluded." She was allowed to return to the care of her mother. In November 1969, a psychiatric commission again examined her, diagnosed "psychopathic personality with symptoms of hysteria and a tendency to decompensation", but considered that psychiatric hospitalization was not required. A month later, she was again arrested and sent to the Serbky Institute for psychiatric examination in April 1970. The investigating commission chaired by Morozov found her non-responsible and suffering from "chronic, mental illness in the form of schizophrenia." The commission found in her the presence of changes in the thinking processes and in the critical and emotional faculties characteristic of schizophrenia. It was concluded that Gorbanevskaya took part in the Red Square demonstration in a state of the mental disease.
Zhores Medvedev
On 29 May 1970, Zhores MedvedevZhores Medvedev
Zhores Aleksandrovich Medvedev is a Russian biologist, historian and dissident. His twin brother is the historian Roy Medvedev.-Biography:Zhores Medvedev and his twin brother Roy Medvedev were born on 14 November 1925 in Tbilisi, Georgia, USSR....
, an internationally respected and prominent scientist, was forcibly taken from his apartment in Obninsk
Obninsk
Obninsk is a city in Kaluga Oblast, Russia, located southwest of Moscow. Population: Obninsk is one of the major Russian science cities. The first nuclear power plant in the world for the large-scale production of electricity opened here on June 27, 1954, and it also doubled as a training...
and committed to a mental hospital where he was held, without legitimate medical justification, until 17 June 1970. The leadership was instantly faced with the action of strong collective protest initiated by top Soviet scientists including Igor Tamm
Igor Tamm
Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm was a Soviet physicist and Nobel laureate who received most prestigious Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and Ilya Frank, for the discovery of Cherenkov radiation, made in 1934.-Biography:Tamm was born in Vladivostok, Russian Empire , in a...
and Pyotr Kapitsa
Pyotr Kapitsa
Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa was a prominent Soviet/Russian physicist and Nobel laureate.-Biography:Kapitsa was born in the city of Kronstadt and graduated from the Petrograd Polytechnical Institute in 1918. He worked for over ten years with Ernest Rutherford in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge...
. Medvedev's release was achieved only after intense pressure from intellectuals and scientists both within and outside of the USSR. He was largely hospitalized because of the publication abroad of his book of Trofim Lysenko
Trofim Lysenko
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a Soviet agronomist of Ukrainian origin, who was director of Soviet biology under Joseph Stalin. Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of the hybridization theories of Russian horticulturist Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, and adopted them into a powerful...
. In widely circulated books, Zhores Medvedev had criticized the "geneticist" Lysenko and had also expressed his straightforward disagreement with restrictions on communication with scientists abroad. He was removed from his position as head of a laboratory at the Institute of Medical Radiology and this removal was illegal, he said. The diagnosis in the case-notes was "incipient schizophrenia," the diagnosis made by the psychiatric commission was "psychopathic personality with paranoid tendencies." What happened to Medvedev was not a separate incident; rather, it was part, in Medvedev's words, of "the dangerous tendency of using psychiatry for political purposes, the exploitation of medicine in an alien role as a means of intimidation and punishment — a new and illegal way of isolating people for their views and convictions." This experience was reflected in Zhores Medvedev's and Roy Medvedev
Roy Medvedev
Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev |Georgia]]) is a Russian historian renowned as the author of the dissident history of Stalinism, Let History Judge , first published in English in 1972...
's book A Question of Madness: Repression by Psychiatry in the Soviet Union published by Macmillan in London in 1971.
Andrei Sakharov
In 1971, renowned Soviet physicist Andrei SakharovAndrei Sakharov
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was a Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist. He earned renown as the designer of the Soviet Union's Third Idea, a codename for Soviet development of thermonuclear weapons. Sakharov was an advocate of civil liberties and civil reforms in the...
supported a protest of two political prisoners, V. Fainberg and V. Borisov, who announced a hunger strike
Hunger strike
A hunger strike is a method of non-violent resistance or pressure in which participants fast as an act of political protest, or to provoke feelings of guilt in others, usually with the objective to achieve a specific goal, such as a policy change. Most hunger strikers will take liquids but not...
against "compulsory therapeutic treatment with medications injurious to mental activity" in a Leningrad psychiatric institution. In 1984, after publishing an article by Andrei Sakharov in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
urging a buildup of nuclear weapons in the West, Soviet officials declared him "a talented, but sick man." When sent into internal exile to Gorky "for his own peace of mind," he received the due medical attention: "Soviet medics are taking all necessary measures to restore his health."
Viktor Nekipelov
Viktor NekipelovViktor Nekipelov
Viktor Aleksandrovich Nekipelov was a Russian poet, writer, Soviet dissident, member of the Moscow Helsinki Group.Pharmacist by occupation, in 1968, he participated in protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia....
, a well-known dissident poet, was arrested in 1973, sent to the Section 4 of the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry for psychiatric evaluation, which lasted from 15 January to 12 March 1974, was judged sane (which he was), tried, and sentenced to two years' imprisonment. In 1976, he published in samizdat
Samizdat
Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader...
his book Institute of Fools: Notes on the Serbsky Institute based on his personal experience at Psychiatric Hospital of the Serbsky Institute and translated into English in 1980. In this account, he wrote compassionately, engagingly, and observantly of the doctors and other patients; most of the latters were ordinary criminals feigning insanity in order to be sent to a mental hospital, because hospital was a "cushy number" as against prison camps. According to the President of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia
Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia
The Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia is a non-state professional human rights organization.- History :The IPA was established in Moscow in March 1989 and became the first psychiatric association in the USSR which was not controlled by the State...
Yuri Savenko
Yuri Savenko
Yuri Sergeevich Savenko is a Russian psychiatrist, the president since 1989 of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia. He is also a member of the Council of Experts under the Ombudsman for Human Rights in the Russian Federation. He holds M.D. and Ph.D...
, Nekipelov's book is a highly dramatic humane document, a fair story about the nest of Soviet punitive psychiatry, a mirror that psychiatrists always need to look into. However according to Malcolm Lader, this book as an indictment of the Serbsky Institute hardly rises above tittle-tattle and gossip, and Nekipelov destroys his own credibility by presenting no real evidence but invariably putting the most sinister connotation on events. After publishing his book, he was sentenced to the maximum punishment for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" of seven years in a labor camp and then five years in internal exile.
AFTU members
In November 1977, a group of unemployed and workers led by Vladimir Klebanov, a former coalminer from the Donbas region of the UkraineUkraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
, announced the formation in the Soviet Union of the Association of Free Trade Unions of Workers (AFTU) whose purposes were to meet obligations achieved by collective bargaining; to induce workers and other employees to join free trade union associations; to implement those decisions of the Association which concern the seeking of justice and the defense of rights; to educate Association members in the spirit of irreconcilability toward wastefulness, inefficiency, deception, bureaucracy, deficiencies, and a negligent attitude toward national wealth. These purposes show that AFTU was in all respects an organization whose right to exist is guaranteed by the international obligations of the Soviet Union. On 19 December 1977, Klebanov along with two other workers in Donetsk
Donetsk
Donetsk , is a large city in eastern Ukraine on the Kalmius river. Administratively, it is a center of Donetsk Oblast, while historically, it is the unofficial capital and largest city of the economic and cultural Donets Basin region...
was arrested by the Soviet militia and released nine days later, after international protests against his incarceration. Worker Gavriil Yankov was incarcerated in Moscow mental hospital for two weeks. On 1 February 1978, AFTU publicly announced the institution of its organizational Charter. Several days later, Klebanov was again detained by Soviet police and sent from Moscow to psychiatric prison hospital in Donetsk. Group member Nikolaev and workers Pelekh and Dvoretsky were also placed under psychiatric detention.
SMOT members
By October 1978 it was apparent that arrests and repressions had resulted in the dissolution of AFTU. But the cause of trade union rights was to be invigorated by a new group, the Free Interprofessional Association of Workers known by its Russian acronym, SMOT, whose first press conference was held in Moscow on 28 October 1978. The objectives of SMOT were to defend its members in cases of violation of their rights in different spheres of their daily activities: political, domestic, religious, spiritual, cultural, social, and economic; to look into the legal basis of the workers' complaints; to ensure that these complains were brought to the notice of relevant organizations; to facilitate a quick solution to complaints of workers; and in cases of negative results, to publicize them widely before international and Soviet public. The leadership of SMOT was headed by a native of LeningradLeningrad
Leningrad is the former name of Saint Petersburg, Russia.Leningrad may also refer to:- Places :* Leningrad Oblast, a federal subject of Russia, around Saint Petersburg* Leningrad, Tajikistan, capital of Muminobod district in Khatlon Province...
electrician Vladimir Borisov incarcerated in Soviet mental hospitals because of his human rights activism for a total of nine years in 1960s and 1970s. In November and December 1978, Soviet police searched the homes of SMOT activists, and SMOT members Vladimir Borisov, Valeriya Novodvorskaya, Albina Yakoreva, and Lev Volokhonsky were arrested and detained by Soviet authorities. Both Borisov and Novodvorskaya were held in mental hospitals.
Figures
At least 365 sane people were treated for "politically defined madness" in the Soviet Union, and there were surely hundreds more. On basis of the available data and materials accumulated in the archives of the International Association on the Political Use of Psychiatry, one can confidently conclude that thousands of dissenters were hospitalized for political reasons. From 1994 to 1995, an investigative commission of Moscow psychiatrists explored the records of five prison psychiatric hospitals in Russia and discovered about two thousand cases of political abuse of psychiatry in these hospitals alone. In 2005, Anatoly Prokopenko, referring to the Document Fund of the Central Committee of CPSU and the prison records of the three hospitals — Sychyovskaya, Leningrad and Chernyakhovsk hospitals — to which human rights activists managed to get in 1991, drew the conclusion that psychiatry had punished about twenty thousand people for purely political reasons. But this is only a little part, Prokopenko said, and the data on how many people in total had been in all of sixteen prison hospitals and in one and a half thousand open type psychiatric hospitals are inaccessible to us because the secret parts of the achieves of the prison psychiatric hospitals and hospitals overall are inaccessible. The figure of fifteen or twenty thousand political prisoners in psychiatric hospitals of the MVD of the USSR was presented in the book Bezumnaya Psikhiatriya (Mad Psychiatry) published by Prokopenko in 1997.According to Viktor Luneyev, actual struggle against dissent was manyfold larger than it was registered in sentences, and we do not know how many persons were kept under surveillance of secret services, held criminally liable, arrested, sent to psychiatric hospitals, expelled from their work, restricted in their rights everyway. No objective counting of repressed persons is possible without fundamental analysis of archival documents. The difficulty of this method is that the required data are very diverse and are not in one archive. They are in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, in the archive of the Goskomstat
Goskomstat
Goskomstat was the centralised agency dealing with statistics in the Soviet Union. Goskomstat was created in 1987 to replace the Central Statistical Administration. While maintaining the same basic functions in the collection, analysis, and publicationand distribution of state statistics,...
of Russia, in the archives of the MVD of Russia, the FSB of Russia
FSB (Russia)
The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation is the main domestic security agency of the Russian Federation and the main successor agency of the Soviet Committee of State Security . Its main responsibilities are counter-intelligence, internal and border security, counter-terrorism, and...
, the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation, in the Russian Military and Historical Archive, in archives of constituent entities of the Russian Federation, in urban and regional archives, as well as in archives of the former Soviet Republics that now are independent countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States
Commonwealth of Independent States
The Commonwealth of Independent States is a regional organization whose participating countries are former Soviet Republics, formed during the breakup of the Soviet Union....
and the Baltics.
Soviet psychiatric abuse exposed
In 1971, Vladimir BukovskyVladimir Bukovsky
Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky is a leading member of the dissident movement of the 1960s and 1970s, writer, neurophysiologist, and political activist....
smuggled to the West a file of 150 pages documenting the political abuse of psychiatry. The documents were photocopies of forensic reports on prominent Soviet dissidents. These documents were attended with a letter by Bukovsky requesting Western psychiatrists to explore the six cases documented in the file and tell whether these persons should be hospitalized or not. The documents were sent by Bukovsky to The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
and, when translated by The Working Group on the Internment of Dissenters in Medical Hospitals, were examined by forty-four psychiatrists from the Department of Psychiatry, Sheffield University. The psychiatrists described the documents in British Journal of Psychiatry
British Journal of Psychiatry
The British Journal of Psychiatry is a peer-reviewed medical journal published monthly by the Royal College of Psychiatrists containing original research, systematic reviews, commentaries on contentious articles, short reports, a comprehensive book review section, and a correspondence column...
of August 1971 and wrote a letter to The Times. In this letter published on 16 September 1971, they reported that four of the six dissidents manifested no signs or history of mental disease, and the other two had minor psychiatric problems many years ago, quite removed from the events related to their internment. The group of British psychiatrists concluded: "It seems to us that the diagnoses on the six people were made purely in consequence of actions in which they were exercising fundamental freedoms…" They recommended discussing the issue in the course of the forthcoming World Psychiatric Association
World Psychiatric Association
The World Psychiatric Association is an international umbrella organisation of psychiatric societies.-Objectives and goals:Originally created to produce world psychiatric congresses, it has evolved to hold regional meetings, to promote professional education and to set ethical, scientific and...
(WPA) World Congress in Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
in November 1971.
Congress in Mexico City
The Congress in Mexico City was held on November 28 — December 4, 1971. The statement of the forty-four British psychiatrists was circulated to the 7000 delegates in English, Spanish, and French. There were statements from the Soviet Human Rights Committee describing the part played by Snezhnevsky, a head of the Soviet delegation, in the Medvedev case. When speakers demanded that the Congress go on record against the confinement of dissidents in psychiatric hospitals, the Soviet delegation and Snezhnevsky instantly walked out. They said that they could not talk about the issue since the Congress lacked official interpretation into Russian. At this congress, Western psychiatrists tried to censure their Soviet colleagues for the first time. But the charges of psychiatric abuse were new, the campaign was disorganized, and Snezhnevsky, who headed the Soviet delegation, remained unscathed. He said in rebuttal that the accusations were a "cold-war maneuver carried out at the hands of experts." The WPA General Secretary Denis Leigh said that the WPA was under no obligation to accept complaints from one member society directed against another member society, and he informed Snezhnevsky of the complaints and sent him the "Bukovsky Papers." Leigh proposed to constitute a committee for considering the ethical aspects of psychiatric practice, but also in this instance the issue of political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR was not mentioned.One of the key apologists of Soviet psychiatric abuse, Soviet psychiatrist Marat Vartanyan, was chosen as associate secretary of the Executive Committee. A day after the Mexico Congress Vartanyan announced publicly that the nature of Soviet system was such that this could not possibly happen. As Robert van Voren wrote, the Armenian Vartanyan was as slick as one could be, and had no problem lying in the twinkling of an eye. He was masterful in his dealings with the WPA and continued to represent the Soviet Union at symposiums and congresses of the WPA. Being in grain hospitable, flamboyant, full of humor and with a Western style, Vartanyan managed to fool one after another. In the end, no action was taken by the Congress. As Psychiatric News reported, it became apparent that the WPA leaders had no desire to take an action which would have alienated the USSR delegation and would quite probably make them "walk out" and sever communications for some time to come.
Bukovsky and Gluzman in prison
The failure to debate the issue opened the door for Soviet authorities to adjudge Bukovsky to 12 years of camp and exile, and to enlarge the use of psychiatry as a tool of repression. In January 1972, Bukovsky was convicted of spreading anti-Soviet propaganda under Article 70 of the RSFSR Criminal CodeCriminal Code
A criminal code is a document which compiles all, or a significant amount of, a particular jurisdiction's criminal law...
, mainly on the ground that he had, with anti-Soviet intention, circulated false reports that mentally healthy political dissenters were incarcerated in mental hospitals and were subjected to abuse there.
In 1974, Bukovsky and the incarcerated psychiatrist Semyon Gluzman
Semyon Gluzman
Semyon Fishelevich Gluzman is a Ukrainian psychiatrist, human rights activist, the president and founder of the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association, founder of the American-Ukrainian Bureau for Human Rights, director of the International Medical Rehabilitation Center for the Victims of War and...
wrote A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissenters, in which they provided potential future victims of political psychiatry with instructions on how to behave during inquest in order to avoid being diagnosed as mentally sick. The Manual focuses on how "the Soviet use of psychiatry as a punitive means is based upon the deliberate interpretation of heterodoxy
Heterodoxy
Heterodoxy is generally defined as "any opinions or doctrines at variance with an official or orthodox position". As an adjective, heterodox is commonly used to describe a subject as "characterized by departure from accepted beliefs or standards"...
(in one sense of the world) as a psychiatric problem." Semyon Gluzman, a first psychiatrist in the Soviet Union who openly opposed Soviet abuse of psychiatry against dissenters, was one of three authors of the document An In Absentia Psychiatric Opinion on the Case of P.G. Grigorenko otherwise known as An In Absentia Forensic-psychiatric Report on P.G. Grigorenko; this document started circulating in samizdat
Samizdat
Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader...
form in 1971 and was based on the medical record of Grigorenko who spoke against the human rights abuses in the Soviet Union. Gluzman came to the conclusion that Grigorenko was mentally sane and had been taken to mental hospitals for political reasons. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Gluzman was forced to serve seven years in labor camps and three years in Siberian exile for refusing to diagnose Grigorenko as having the mental illness.
In December 1976, in his eleventh year of psychiatric hospitals and prison camps, Bukovsky was exchanged by the Soviet government for the imprisoned Chilean Communist leader Luis Corvalán
Luis Corvalán
Luis Alberto Corvalán Lepe was a Chilean politician. He served as the general secretary of the Communist Party of Chile ....
at Zürich
Zürich
Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...
airport and, after a short stay in Holland, took up refuge in Great Britain
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
where later moved from London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
to Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
for his studies in biology. Voluntary and involuntary emigration allowed the authorities to rid themselves of many political active intellectuals including writers Valentin Turchin
Valentin Turchin
Valentin Fyodorovich Turchin was a Soviet and American cybernetician and computer scientist. He developed the Refal programming language, the theory of metasystem transitions and the notion of supercompilation...
, Georgi Vladimov
Georgi Vladimov
Georgi Nikolaevich Vladimov , real family name Volosevich was a Russian dissident writer.-Biography:...
, Vladimir Voinovich
Vladimir Voinovich
Vladimir Nikolayevich Voinovich is a Russian writer and a dissident...
, Lev Kopelev
Lev Kopelev
Lev Zalmanovich Kopelev was a Soviet author and a dissident.- Biography :...
, Vladimir Maximov, Naum Korzhavin
Naum Korzhavin
Nahum Moiseyevich Korzhavin is a Russian poet of Jewish descent, a dissident and emigrant living in Boston.Korzhavin was given the Big Book National Award-2006 for his contribution into literature...
, Vasily Aksyonov
Vasily Aksyonov
Vasily Pavlovich Aksyonov was a Soviet and Russian novelist. He is known in the West as the author of The Burn and Generations of Winter , a family saga depicting three generations of the Gradov family between 1925 and 1953.-Early life:Vasily Aksyonov was...
and others.
The appeal made by Bukovsky in 1971 caused the formation of the first groups to campaign against the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union. In France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, a group of doctors constituted the "Committee against the Special Psychiatric Hospitals in the USSR," while in Great Britain
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
a "Working Commission on the Internment of Dissenters in Mental Hospitals" was created. Among its founding members were Peter Reddaway, a Sovietologist and lecturer at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Sidney Bloch, a South-African born psychiatrist. In September 1975, there was formed the "Campaign Against Psychiatric Abuse" (CAPA), an organization constituted as the British section of the Initiating Committee Against Abuses of Psychiatry for Political Purposes and composed of psychiatrists, other doctors, and laymen. In July 1976 in Trafalgar Square
Trafalgar Square
Trafalgar Square is a public space and tourist attraction in central London, England, United Kingdom. At its centre is Nelson's Column, which is guarded by four lion statues at its base. There are a number of statues and sculptures in the square, with one plinth displaying changing pieces of...
, CAPA held a rally against the abuse of psychiatry in the USSR. In 1978, Royal College of Psychiatrists established the Special Committee on abuse of psychiatry. 20 December 1980 saw the formation in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
of the International Association on the Political Use of Psychiatry (IAPUP) whose first secretary was Gérard Bles of France.
Honolulu Congress
In 1975, the American Psychiatric AssociationAmerican Psychiatric Association
The American Psychiatric Association is the main professional organization of psychiatrists and trainee psychiatrists in the United States, and the most influential worldwide. Its some 38,000 members are mainly American but some are international...
agreed to host the WPA's sixth World Congress of Psychiatry during August 28 – September 3, 1977, in Honolulu. The request to discuss the Soviet issue during the World Congress of the World Psychiatric Association in Honolulu was made by Americans and the British and was supported by other societies.
On 10 September 1976, Chairman of the KGB Yuri Andropov
Yuri Andropov
Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov was a Soviet politician and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 12 November 1982 until his death fifteen months later.-Early life:...
submitted to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , abbreviated in Russian as ЦК, "Tse-ka", earlier was also called as the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party ...
his report informing of "anti-Soviet campaign with nasty fabrications regarding the alleged use psychiatry in the USSR as an instrument in the political struggle with 'dissidents'." The report alleged that the campaign was a carefully planned anti-Soviet action in which a noticeable part was played by the British Royal College of Psychiatrists
Royal College of Psychiatrists
The Royal College of Psychiatrists is the main professional organisation of psychiatrists in the United Kingdom responsible for representing psychiatrists, psychiatric research and providing public information about mental health problems...
under the influence of pro-Zionist elements and that the KGB was undertaking measures through operational channels to counter hostile attacks. In October 1976, the Ministry of Health
Ministry of Health (Soviet Union)
The Ministry of Health of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , formed on 15 March 1946, was one of the most important government offices in the Soviet Union. It was formerly known as the People's Commissariat for Health...
constituted a special working group to develop a plan of action for a counter campaign. The working group had among its members leading Soviet psychiatrists Andrei Snezhnevsky
Andrei Snezhnevsky
Andrei Vladimirovich Snezhnevsky was a Soviet psychiatrist notorious for expanding the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, a step that allowed for arbitrary labeling of political dissidents as having sluggishly progressing schizophrenia...
, Georgi Morozov, Marat Vartanyan, and Eduard Babayan under the chairmanship of Deputy Minister of Health Dmitri Venediktov. The plans they worked out consisted in, inter alia, compiling documents with counterarguments for being spread before and during the World Congress; actively lobbying the media for explaining the human nature of Soviet medicine; actively lobbying inside the World Psychiatric Association for preventing the issue from being put on the agenda; lobbying the World Health Organization
World Health Organization
The World Health Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations that acts as a coordinating authority on international public health. Established on 7 April 1948, with headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, the agency inherited the mandate and resources of its predecessor, the Health...
for exerting pressure on the WPA not to allow this unacceptable anti-Soviet campaign; and establishing closer working relations with positively inclined colleagues in the West. In February 1977, representatives of the secret services of the USSR, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
, Hungary
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
, Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
, Bulgaria
Bulgaria
Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...
, and Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
met in Moscow to talk about a common approach to the issue of political abuse psychiatry and the upcoming World Congress in Honolulu. This meeting was mainly chaired by Major General Ivan Pavlovich Abramov, deputy head of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB (which dealt, inter alia, with dissenters), with the support of deputy head of the First Division of the Fifth Directorate Colonel Romanov who, according to the report, would travel with the Soviet delegation to Honolulu as "political advisor". The minutes of the meeting demonstrate that Western preparations for the Honolulu World Congress were under the Soviet concern in which the leading part was played by the KGB of the Soviet Union. Not long before the World Congress, a high-level conference was held in East Berlin
East Berlin
East Berlin was the name given to the eastern part of Berlin between 1949 and 1990. It consisted of the Soviet sector of Berlin that was established in 1945. The American, British and French sectors became West Berlin, a part strongly associated with West Germany but a free city...
, and the Soviet psychiatric leaders met with colleagues from Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
, Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
, the GDR, Hungary
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
, and Bulgaria
Bulgaria
Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...
to coordinate their positions. Much to the vexation of Georgi Morozov, the Romanians did not come to this meeting, while both the Hungarians and the Poles openly criticized the Soviet stance.
However, all this activity of the Soviets cold not prevent the issue from dominating the Congress from the very outset. At the fist plenary session of the Congress, the introduction of the Declaration of Hawaii took place. This statement of ethical principles of psychiatry had been drafted by the Ethical Sub-Committee of the Executive Committee established in 1973 in response to the increasing number of protests against using psychiatry for non-medical reasons. One of the principles stated in the Declaration was that a psychiatrist must not take part in compulsory psychiatric treatment in the absence of mental disease, and the Declaration also included other clauses which could be considered as heaving a bearing on the political abuse psychiatry. The General Assembly accepted the Declaration of Hawaii without difficulty, and without opposition by the Delegation of the Soviets. However, the Declaration was later criticized by Hanfried Helmchen, who found its ethical guideline No 1 to be misleading and stated that when health, personal autonomy and growth—without referring to mental illness—are to be formulated as the direct aim of psychiatry, the menace of vast expansion of psychiatry will increase and that the renunciation of an illness concept appeared to be an essential source for the 'total psychiatrisation of everybody and everything' which was also deplored by Blomquist in his commentary. At the plenary session, an Ethics Committee was also established under the chairmanship of Costas Stephanis from Greece
Greece
Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....
; among of the members was Marat Vartanyan from the USSR.
The Soviet issue passed the General Assembly less easily. The Soviets did all possible to prove their point, and according to the report of the Soviet delegation, Marat Vartanyan had successfully prevented former Soviet political prisoner Leonid Plyushch from being registered as a delegate at the Congress and "anti-Soviet materials" from being spread in the main congress hall. In 1977 at the World Congress in Honolulu, Snezhnevsky again defended psychiatric practices used in his country. Two motions were put to the vote, a British one condemning the systematic political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR and an American one calling on the World Psychiatric Association to constitute a Review Committee to investigate the allegations of political abuse of psychiatry. The British resolution passed with 90 to 88 votes and only because the Poles did not come and the Russians, having been tardy in their dues payments, were not allowed to cast all votes allocated to them. This resolution was the climax of a lengthy campaign in the West to expose the Soviet practice of committing some of its political and other dissenters to mental hospitals. The allegations, confirmed by some Soviet psychiatrists who have fled or emigrated to the West, induced the World Psychiatric Association to condemn the USSR for the "systematic abuse of psychiatry for political purposes." Kremlin spokesmen ignored the action as a provocation "by a handful of antipsychiatric and antisocial elements" and began a propaganda campaign to contradict the accusations. The American resolution requesting to set up a Review Committee received a larger majority of votes, 121 votes against 66. Snezhnevsky returned to Moscow wounded, with members of his delegation putting the blame for their defeat on the "Zionists."
1978 saw a public statement made by Soviet psychiatrist Yuri Novikov, who was the head of a section of the Serbsky Institute for six years and first secretary of the Association of Soviet Psychiatrists until he left the Soviet Union in June 1977. In his statement, he said that political abuses of psychiatry took place in the Soviet Union and that it was not the scale of this that mattered, but the fact that it existed.
Review Committee
In December 1978, the Review Committee was set up under the chairmanship of Canadian psychiatrist Jean-Yves Gosselin and, in August 1979, received the first complaints submitted by the British Royal College of Psychiatrists. From the very first day, the Soviets refused to recognize its existence. Originally they attempted to prevent its establishment, maintaining that it would divert the WPA from its major function, namely the exchange of scientific ideas. When the Review Committee was constituted, the Soviet society asserted overtly that they would not collaborate with the Review Committee, and they confirmed their stance in three letters, in which they claimed that the Review Committee was an "illegal formation," that it would continue not to acknowledge its existence and that no cooperation could be expected. That stance would remain unaltered over the years to come. Finally, the Review Committee was largely made powerless when the President and General Secretary of the WPA decided to bypass it and began to communicate with the Soviets directly.However, later, at the General Assembly during the World Congress in Vienna in 1983, the status and work of the Review Committee were discussed and it was resolved to allow the Committee to become statutory. The General Assembly resolved further to change the Committee scope towards complaints about not only political but any abuse of psychiatry. As it was emphasized, the WPA is not a human rights organization and the Review Committee should only examine complaints about specific acts of abuse carried out by specific psychiatrists against specific persons. The 1999 General Assembly modified the mandate of the Review Committee as follows: "The Review Committee shall review complaints and other issues and initiate investigations on the violations of the ethical guidelines for the practice of psychiatry as stated in the Declaration of Madrid and its additional guidelines in order to make recommendations to the Executive Committee as to any possible action."
Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry For Political Purposes
Moscow Helsinki Group
The Moscow Helsinki Group is an influential human rights monitoring non-governmental organization, originally established in what was then the Soviet Union; it still operates in Russia....
founded by Yuri Orlov
Yuri Orlov
Yuri Feodorovich Orlov is Professor of Physics and Government at Cornell University,a prominent nuclear physicist, a former Soviet dissident, and a human rights activist....
along with ten others including Elena Bonner and Anatoly Shcharansky in 1976 to monitor Soviet compliance with the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Accords
Helsinki Accords
thumb|300px|[[Erich Honecker]] and [[Helmut Schmidt]] in Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe held in Helsinki 1975....
. The commission was composed of five open members and several anonymous ones, including a few psychiatrists who, at great danger to themselves, conducted their own independent examinations of cases of alleged psychiatric abuse. The leader of the commission was Alexandr Podrabinek
Alexandr Podrabinek
Alexandr Podrabinek is a Russian journalist, human rights activist and editor-in-chief of Prima information agency. He is a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism.-Dissident activities in the Soviet Union:...
who published a book Punitive Medicine containing a "white list" of two hundred of prisoners of conscience in Soviet mental hospitals and a "black list" of over one hundred medical staff and doctors who took part in committing people to psychiatric facilities for political reasons.
The psychiatric consultants to the Commission were Alexander Voloshanovich and Anatoly Koryagin
Anatoly Koryagin
Anatoly Ivanovich Koryagin is a Russian psychiatrist and Soviet dissident. He holds a Candidate of Science degree .- Early career :...
. The task stated by the Commission was not primarily to diagnose persons or to declare people who sought help mentally ill or mentally healthy. However, in some instances individuals who came for help to the Commission were examined by a psychiatrist who provided help to the Commission and made a precise diagnosis of their mental condition. At first it was psychiatrist Alexander Voloshanovich from the Moscow suburb of Dolgoprudny
Dolgoprudny
Dolgoprudny is a town in Moscow Oblast, Russia, located about north of Moscow city center. The town's name is derived from Russian "" —a long and narrow pond situated in the northeastern part of the town. The town's name is sometimes colloquially shortened as Dolgopa. Population:...
, who made these diagnoses. But when he had been compelled to emigrate on 7 February 1980, his work was continued by the Kharkov psychiatrist Anatoly Koryagin. Koryagin's contribution was to examine former and potential victims of political abuse of psychiatry by writing psychiatric diagnoses in which he deduced that the individual was not suffering from any mental disease. Those reports were employed as a means of defense: if the individual was picked up again and committed to mental hospital, the Commission had vindication that the hospitalization served non-medical purposes. Also some foreign psychiatrists including the Swedish psychiatrist Harald Blomberg and British psychiatrist Gery Low-Beer helped in examining former or potential victims of psychiatric abuse. The Commission used those reports in its work and publicly referred to them when it was essential.
The commission gathered as much information as possible of victims of psychiatric terror in the Soviet Union and published this information in their Information Bulletins. For the four years of its existence, the Commission published more than 1,500 pages of documentation including 22 Information Bulletins in which over 400 cases of the political abuse of psychiatry were documented in great detail. Summaries of the Information Bulletins were published in the key samizdat publication, the Chronicle of Current Events. The Information Bulletins were sent to the Soviet officials, with request to verify the data and notify the Commission if mistakes were found, and to the West, where human rights defenders used them in the course of their campaigns. The Information Bulletins were also used to provide the dissident movement with information about Western protests against the political abuse. Peter Reddaway said that after he had studied official documents in the Soviet archives, including minutes from meetings of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Politburo , known as the Presidium from 1952 to 1966, functioned as the central policymaking and governing body of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.-Duties and responsibilities:The...
, it became evident to him that Soviet officials at high levels paid close attention to foreign responses to these cases, and if someone was discharged, all dissidents felt the pressure had played a significant part and the more foreign pressure the better. Over fifty victims examined by psychiatrists of the Moscow Working Commission between 1977 and 1981 and the files smuggled to the West by Vladimir Bukovsky
Vladimir Bukovsky
Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky is a leading member of the dissident movement of the 1960s and 1970s, writer, neurophysiologist, and political activist....
in 1971 were the material which convinced most psychiatric associations that there was distinctly something wrong in the USSR.
The Soviet authorities responded aggressively. Members of the group were being threatened, followed, subjected to house searches and interrogations. In the end, the members of the Commission were subjected to various terms and types of punishments: Alexander Podrabinek was sentenced to 5 years' internal exile, Irina Grivnina to 5 years' internal exile, Vyacheslav Bakhmin to 3 years in a labor camp, Leonard Ternovsky to 3 years' labor camp, Anatoly Koryagin to 8 years' imprisonment and labor camp and 4 years' internal exile, Alexander Voloshanovich was sent to voluntary exile.
Royal College of Psychiatrists
The Royal College of Psychiatrists is the main professional organisation of psychiatrists in the United Kingdom responsible for representing psychiatrists, psychiatric research and providing public information about mental health problems...
carried a resolution in which it reiterated its concern over the abuse of psychiatry for the suppression of dissent in the USSR and applauded the Soviet citizens, who had taken an open stance against such abuse, by expressing its admiration and support especially for Semyon Gluzman, Alexander Podrabinek, Alexander Voloshanovich, and Vladimir Moskalkov.
Resolutions for expulsion or suspension
On 12 August 1982, in preparation for the World Congress in ViennaVienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
, the American Psychiatric Association
American Psychiatric Association
The American Psychiatric Association is the main professional organization of psychiatrists and trainee psychiatrists in the United States, and the most influential worldwide. Its some 38,000 members are mainly American but some are international...
sent out to all member societies of the World Psychiatric Association a memorandum announcing their intention to organize a forum for discussing the issue of Soviet psychiatric abuse prior to the General Assembly in Vienna. On 18 January 1983, the Ambassador of the Soviet Union to the German Democratic Republic
German Democratic Republic
The German Democratic Republic , informally called East Germany by West Germany and other countries, was a socialist state established in 1949 in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, including East Berlin of the Allied-occupied capital city...
(GDR), Gorald Gorinovich, delivered a message from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany
Socialist Unity Party of Germany
The Socialist Unity Party of Germany was the governing party of the German Democratic Republic from its formation on 7 October 1949 until the elections of March 1990. The SED was a communist political party with a Marxist-Leninist ideology...
in which it said that the abnormal situation which had developed within the World Psychiatric Association put in effect its whole activity in question and that for this reason, All-Union Society took the decision to withdraw from the WPA. On 22 January 1983, the British Medical Journal
British Medical Journal
BMJ is a partially open-access peer-reviewed medical journal. Originally called the British Medical Journal, the title was officially shortened to BMJ in 1988. The journal is published by the BMJ Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of the British Medical Association...
published a letter by Allan Wynn, the chairman of the Working Group on the Internment of Dissenters in Mental Hospitals, reporting that in consequence of the continued abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union the American, British, French, Danish, Norwegian, Swiss, and Australasian member societies of the World Psychiatric Association
World Psychiatric Association
The World Psychiatric Association is an international umbrella organisation of psychiatric societies.-Objectives and goals:Originally created to produce world psychiatric congresses, it has evolved to hold regional meetings, to promote professional education and to set ethical, scientific and...
with the support indicated by many of its other members proposed resolutions for the expulsion or suspension of membership of the Soviet Society of Neurologists and Psychiatrists, which would be considered at the World Congress of the World Psychiatric Association in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
in July 1983. On 31 January 1983, the All-Union Society officially resigned from the World Psychiatric Association under threat of expulsion. In their letter of resignation, the Soviets complained about a "slanderous campaign, blatantly political in nature… directed against Soviet psychiatry in the spirit of the 'cold war
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
' against the Soviet Union" and, being especially angry about the memorandum of the American Psychiatric Association of August 1982, charged the WPA leadership with complicity by not having spoken out against this mailing.
According reports on hearing before the Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Organizations of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe
Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe
The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe , also known as the U.S. Helsinki Commission, is an independent U.S. Government agency created by Congress in 1976 to monitor and encourage compliance with the Helsinki Final Act and other OSCE commitments. It was established in 1976 pursuant to...
on 20 September 1983, the national associations justly held the opinion that 10 years of mild public protests, quiet diplomacy, and private conversations with Soviet official psychiatrists had produced no significant change in the level of Soviet abuses, and that this approach had, thereby, failed. In January 1983, the number of member associations of the World Psychiatry Association, voting for the suspension or expulsion of the Soviet Union, rose to nine. Inasmuch as these associations would have half the votes in the WPA governing body, the Soviets was now, in January, almost sure to be voted out in July.
According the statement made by the chairman of the APA Committee on International Abuse of Psychiatry and Psychiatrists Harold Vysotsky at the hearing, the Committee on behalf of certain persons had written hundreds of letters to the USSR, including those to authorities of the Soviet Government, to patients themselves, the families of patients, the psychiatrists who were treating these patients, but only indirectly heard from the families of patients and had never received a response from the authorities. In the statement, he mentioned that 20 cases were referred over to the World Psychiatric Association for further investigation by their committee to review alleged abuses of psychiatry for political purposes and a number of these cases were sent to the All Union Society of Neuropathologists and Psychiatrists of the USSR for clarification and response, but when months and months went by and the World Psychiatric Association had received no response from Soviet colleagues, the American Psychiatric Association
American Psychiatric Association
The American Psychiatric Association is the main professional organization of psychiatrists and trainee psychiatrists in the United States, and the most influential worldwide. Its some 38,000 members are mainly American but some are international...
and a number of other psychiatric associations across the world carried a resolution which stated:
Vienna Congress
The Seventh World Congress of the WPA was scheduled to meet on July 10 – 16, 1983, at ViennaVienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
where heated discussion and a close vote on the resolutions were anticipated. The General Assembly of the World Psychiatric Association in Vienna was likely one of the most tense and disorganized meetings in its existence. Some delegates, especially those from Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
, Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
, Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
, Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
, and the GDR angrily appealed to the WPA Executive Committee not to accept the resignation of the Soviets, whereas others voiced the view that it was a fact of life one had to live with, an opinion supported by the WPA President Pierre Pichot. The debate was preceded by a discussion of various resolutions which had been submitted, but the state of affairs was so perplexing that some delegates did not even know which resolution they were asked to vote upon. Finally a resolution drafted by the British delegate Kenneth Rawnsley, who served as the fourth president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists
Royal College of Psychiatrists
The Royal College of Psychiatrists is the main professional organisation of psychiatrists in the United Kingdom responsible for representing psychiatrists, psychiatric research and providing public information about mental health problems...
from 1981 to 1984, was carried by 174 votes to 18, with 27 abstentions. The resolution was strikingly conciliatory in tone:
Releases
The freedoms of the GorbachevMikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the USSR, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991...
period diminished the human rights movement because many of their decades-long concerns such as suppression of free expression, imprisonment of dissidents, and psychiatric abuse were not longer the main problems facing Soviet society. 1986 saw the discharge of nineteen political prisoners from mental hospitals. In 1987, sixty-four political prisoners were discharged from mental hospitals. In early 1988, Chief Psychiatrist Aleksandr Churkin stated in an interview with Corriere della Sera
Corriere della Sera
The Corriere della Sera is an Italian daily newspaper, published in Milan.It is among the oldest and most reputable Italian newspapers. Its main rivals are Rome's La Repubblica and Turin's La Stampa.- History :...
issued on 5 April 1988 that 5,5 million Soviet citizens were on the psychiatric register and that within two years 30 percent would be removed from this list. However, a year later the journal Ogoniok published a figure of 10,2 million provided by the state statistics committee. In 1990, Zhurnal Nevropatologii i Psikhiatrii Imeni S S Korsakova published almost the same figure of 10 million people registered at psychoneurological dispensaries and 335,200 hospital beds used in the Soviet Union by 1987. At a press conference held in Moscow on 27 October 1989, Gennady Milyokhin claimed that of the three hundred patients named by international human rights organizations, "practically all had left hospital."
Visit of the US delegation
In 1989, the stonewalling of Soviet psychiatry was overcome by perestroikaPerestroika
Perestroika was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev...
and glasnost
Glasnost
Glasnost was the policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions in the Soviet Union, together with freedom of information, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s...
. Over the objection of the psychiatric establishment, the Soviet government permitted a delegation of psychiatrists from the USA, representing the United States government, to carry out extensive interviews of suspected victims of abuse. They traveled to the Soviet Union on 25 February 1989. The group consisted of about 25 people among whom were Bill Farrand of the State Department; Loren Roth as head of the psychiatric team; psychiatrists of the National Institute of Mental Health
National Institute of Mental Health
The National Institute of Mental Health is one of 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health...
, including Scientific Director of the US Delegation Darrel A. Regier, Harold Visotsky from Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
as head of the hospital visit team, and four émigré Soviet psychiatrists living in the United States. There also were State Department interpreters, two attorneys, Ellen Mercer of the American Psychiatric Association
American Psychiatric Association
The American Psychiatric Association is the main professional organization of psychiatrists and trainee psychiatrists in the United States, and the most influential worldwide. Its some 38,000 members are mainly American but some are international...
and Peter Reddaway.
The delegation was able systematically to interview and assess present and past involuntarily admitted mental patients chosen by the visiting team, as well as to talk over procedures and methods of treatment with some of the patients, their friends, relatives and, sometimes, their treating psychiatrists. Whereas the delegation originally sought interviews with 48 persons, it eventually saw 15 hospitalized and 12 discharged patients. About half of the hospitalized patients were released in the two months between the submission of the initial list of names to the Soviets authorities and the departure from the Soviet Union of the US delegation. The delegation came to the conclusion that nine of the 15 hospitalized patients had disorders which would be classified in the United States as serious psychoses, diagnoses corresponding broadly with those used by the Soviet psychiatrists. One of the hospitalized patients had been diagnosed as having schizophrenia
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by a disintegration of thought processes and of emotional responsiveness. It most commonly manifests itself as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking, and it is accompanied by significant social...
although the US team saw no evidence of mental disorder. Among the 12 discharged patients examined, the US delegation found that nine had no evidence of any current or past mental disorder; the remaining three had comparatively slight symptoms which would not usually warrant involuntary commitment in Western countries. According to medical record, all these patients had diagnoses of psychopathology
Psychopathology
Psychopathology is the study of mental illness, mental distress, and abnormal/maladaptive behavior. The term is most commonly used within psychiatry where pathology refers to disease processes...
or schizophrenia.
When returned home after a visit of more than two weeks, the delegation wrote its report which was pretty damaging to the Soviet authorities. The delegation established not only that there had taken place systematic political abuse of psychiatry but also that the abuse had not come to an end, that victims of the abuse still remained in mental hospitals, and that the Soviet authorities and particularly the Soviet Society of Psychiatrists and Neuropathologists still denied that psychiatry had been employed as a method of repression. The report was published in Schizophrenia Bulletin
Schizophrenia Bulletin
Schizophrenia Bulletin is a peer-reviewed medical journal which covers research relating to the etiology and treatment of schizophrenia. The journal is published bimonthly by Oxford University Press in association with the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and Schizophrenia International...
, Supplement to Vol. 15, No. 4, 1989. As far as Robert van Voren could establish, the report was never published in the USSR. Only after twenty years, in 2009, the report was traslated into Russian, and its Russian version was published not in Russia but in Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
, on the website of the Global Initiative on Psychiatry
Global Initiative on Psychiatry
Global Initiative on Psychiatry is an international foundation for mental health reform which took part in the campaign against the political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR....
.
Athens Congress
In the months prior to the Eight World Psychiatric Assembly in AthensAthens
Athens , is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, as its recorded history spans around 3,400 years. Classical Athens was a powerful city-state...
, there was substantial dispute about the possible readmittance of the All-Union Society to the WPA. The Eighth World Congress of the World Psychiatric Association was held between 12 and 19 October 1989 in Athens
Athens
Athens , is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, as its recorded history spans around 3,400 years. Classical Athens was a powerful city-state...
. The Congress was reminiscent of the previous World Congress in 1983 in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
, and the one before that in 1977 in Honolulu. The issue of the Soviet political abuse of psychiatry raised its ugly head, and dominated the WPA proceedings.
On 16 October, the Soviet delegation convened a press conference. The panel was uniformly evasive and defensive. After a detailed and lengthy account by Karpov of Soviet psychiatric reforms in which he emphasized the specialities of the new mental health legislation and in particular the legal safeguards for patients, other panellists worked out on what they considered as positive aspects of the new developments. However then, abruptly, this sense of optimism was disrupted by the bluntest of questions posed by Anatoly Koryagin
Anatoly Koryagin
Anatoly Ivanovich Koryagin is a Russian psychiatrist and Soviet dissident. He holds a Candidate of Science degree .- Early career :...
: Had political psychiatric abuse occurred or not? Alexander Tiganov, who played a prominent part in the press conference, answered hesitatingly that "such cases" could have taken place during the period of stagnation "but there was a need to distinguish between psychiatric, legal and political aspects." Koryagin persevered with his challenge and countered that these answers failed to clarify whether an acknowledgment was being made that Soviet psychiatry had been misused for political reasons.
Koryagin stated that readmission would offer carte blanche to the KGB to continue its repressive practices, that there would be further abuse of psychiatry, and that the plight of prisoners would be hopeless. He proposed four conditions for readmission:
- Soviet psychiatrists must acknowledge previous political abuses and reject them;
- all detainees must be released;
- participation in monitoring of future practice must be obligatory;
- and representatives of the World Psychiatric Association must be permitted to function freely on Soviet territory.
Several national associations, including the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Australasian College, the Swiss Psychiatric Association, and the West German Psychiatric Association insisted that the Soviet Society should not be admitted until specific conditions had been satisfied; these included the release of all dissidents unjustifiably detained in psychiatric hospitals, and the dissociation by the authorities from the past abuse and their obligation to prevent its repetition.
The Soviet delegation to the 1989 World Congress of the WPA in Athens eventually agreed to admit that the systematic abuse of psychiatry for political purposes had indeed taken place in their country. At the Congress, the Soviet Society's International Secretary Pyotr Morozov on behalf of his delegation made a statement containing the following five points, which are quoted in full:
Felice Lieh Mak, just chosen as President-Elect, proposed a resolution which included the statement read by Morozov, and then adding that within one year the Review Committee should visit the Soviet Union and that if evidence of continued political abuse of psychiatry were to be found, a special meeting of the General Assembly should be convoked to give consideration to suspension of membership of the Soviets. In the end, 291 votes were cast for the resolution, 45 against, with 19 abstentions. The Soviets were readmitted to the WPA under conditions and on the ground of having made a public confession of the existence of previous psychiatric abuse and having given a commitment to review any present or subsequent cases and to sustain and introduce reforms to the psychiatric system and new mental health legislation.
Deeply shocked, Anatoly Koryagin, who had considered the statement by the Soviets as completely hypocritical and insincere and had not thought that the Soviets would be permitted to return, officially renounced his Honorary Membership of the WPA by submitting on 8 November 1989 to the WPA General Secretary a short letter:
The Soviet delegates returned to Moscow jubilantly. In an interview with a Soviet television crew, Marat Vartanyan replied to the question whether any conditions had been set to a Soviet return:
The next day, the government newspaper Izvestiya carried a report on 19 October which did not mention any of the conditions while asserting that the All Union Society had been granted full membership. The dissemination of disinformation on the part of the Soviets had distinctly not yet come to an end. Only on 27 October 1989, Meditsinskaya Gazeta reported the conditions set by the WPA General Assembly.
Establishing the IPA
In 1989, the Independent Psychiatric Association of RussiaIndependent Psychiatric Association of Russia
The Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia is a non-state professional human rights organization.- History :The IPA was established in Moscow in March 1989 and became the first psychiatric association in the USSR which was not controlled by the State...
(IPA) was created as an association publicly opposing itself to official Soviet psychiatry and its offspring, the All-Union Society of Neuropathologists and Psychiatrists, which was completely under the control of the Soviet government and implemented its political principles. From the very beginning the IPA and its President Yuri Savenko
Yuri Savenko
Yuri Sergeevich Savenko is a Russian psychiatrist, the president since 1989 of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia. He is also a member of the Council of Experts under the Ombudsman for Human Rights in the Russian Federation. He holds M.D. and Ph.D...
had to take on human rights functions in addition to educational ones: first, it was necessary to uncover the ideological basis on which the Soviet psychiatry carried out its punitive activities; second, it was necessary to develop legal norms which would forever prevent such abuses; third, it was necessary to show that it is not society that needs to be protected from the mentally ill, but the ill need to be protected from society as a whole, not only from the authorities; fourth, it was necessary to overcome rigidity and inhumane nature of modern domestic psychiatry detached from its old roots and, at the same time, artificially isolated from Western humanistic trends.
Visit of the WPA delegation
The WPA team spent three weeks in the Soviet Union, from 9 to 29 June 1991, and saw ten cases, all of which had been diagnosed by Soviet psychiatrists as having schizophrenia. When reviewed case notes and the results of their own interviews, the WPA team confirmed the diagnosis of schizophrenia only in one case and reported that there was still a wide gap between Soviet criteria for the diagnosis of schizophrenia and those used internationally in other countries. Of the six individuals committed to a Special Psychiatric Hospital, four of the cases were distinctly of a political nature and of these four, three had never been mentally sick.In a letter sent in 1991 to Aleksandr Tiganov, the new chairman of the All Union Society (or, the now called themselves, the Federation of Societies of Psychiatrists and Narcologists of the Commonwealth of Independent States
Commonwealth of Independent States
The Commonwealth of Independent States is a regional organization whose participating countries are former Soviet Republics, formed during the breakup of the Soviet Union....
), the WPA General Secretary Juan José Lopez Ibor wrote that the All Union Society made in the General Assembly a Statement that included five items, several of which was not yet fulfilled, and that thereby, the Executive Committee unanimously agreed that it would not recommend continuing membership of the society in June 1993. Less than two months after the visit of the team to the Soviet Union, a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Gorbachev
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the USSR, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991...
was carried out. The coup failed and was followed by the dissolution of the USSR. As a consequence, the All Union Society remained without a country to represent. The USSR Federation of Psychiatrists and Narcologists officially resigned from the World Psychiatric Association in October 1992.
Russian Mental Health Law
In Russia, the enactment of its Mental Health Law took place under dramatic circumstances despite the need for the Law because of 80 year delay, after which the Law passed by Russia beside all developed countries, and despite dimensions of political abuse of psychiatry which were unprecedented in history and were being persistently denied for two decades from 1968 to 1988. When Soviet rule was coming to an end, the decision to develop the Mental Health Law was taken from above and under the threat of economic sanctions from the United StatesUnited States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. At a meeting held by the Health Committee of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in the autumn of 1991, the Law was approved, particularly in the speeches by the four members of the WPA commission, but this event was followed by the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In 1992, a new commission was created under the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation and used a new concept of developing the Law; a quarter of the commission members were the representatives of the IPA. The Law has been put in force since 1 January 1993. Adoption of the Law On Psychiatric Care and Guarantees of Citizens’ Rights during Its Provision is regarded as an epoch-making event in the history of domestic psychiatry, as establishing the legal basis for psychiatric care, and, first of all, mediating all involuntary measures through judicial procedure. That is a main post-Soviet achievement of Russian psychiatry and the foundation for a basically new attitude to the mentally ill as persons reserving all their civil and political rights and freedoms. In 1993, when the IPA printed the Law in 50 thousand copies for general reader, quite a number of heads of the Moscow psychoneurologic dispensaries refused to circulate the Law. Over time, these difficulties were overcome. It became obligatory to know the Law to pass the certification exam.
However, article 38, which was once included in the Law as a guarantee of keeping the whole Law for patients of psychiatric hospitals, is still not working, and, as a result, the service independent of health authorities to defend rights of patients in psychiatric hospitals is still not created. According to a report of the European Committee against Torture, the Law does not reflect patient's right to obtain a court decision of involuntary hospitalization. In a hospital courtroom, its judge announces the decision, but the patient does not obtain any motivated decision. There are sometimes cases where the patient is not informed by the court at all and hears about the court decision from his or her treating doctor or head of the unit.
Analysis
In 1990, Psychiatric Bulletin of the Royal College of PsychiatristsRoyal College of Psychiatrists
The Royal College of Psychiatrists is the main professional organisation of psychiatrists in the United Kingdom responsible for representing psychiatrists, psychiatric research and providing public information about mental health problems...
published the article Compulsion in psychiatry: blessing or curse? by the Russian psychiatrist Anatoly Koryagin
Anatoly Koryagin
Anatoly Ivanovich Koryagin is a Russian psychiatrist and Soviet dissident. He holds a Candidate of Science degree .- Early career :...
. It contains analysis of the abuse of psychiatry and eight arguments by which the existence of a system of political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR cаn easily be demonstrated. As Koryagin wrote, in a dictatorial State with a totalitarian regime, such as the USSR, the laws have at all times served not the purpose of self-regulation of the life of society but have been one of the major levers by which to manipulate the behavior of subjects. Every Soviet citizen has constantly been straight considered state property and been regarded not as the aim, but as a means to achieve the rulers' objectives. From the perspective of state pragmatism, a mentally sick person was regarded as a burden to society, using up the state's material means without recompense and not producing anything, and even potentially capable of inflicting harm. Therefore, the Soviet State never considered it reasonable to pass special legislative acts protecting the material and legal part of the patients' life. It was only instructions of the legal and medical departments that stipulated certain rules of handling the mentally sick and imposing different sanctions on them. A person with a mental disorder was automatically divested of all rights and depended entirely on the psychiatrists' will. Practically anybody could undergo psychiatric examination on the most senseless grounds and the issued diagnosis turned him into a person without rights. It was this lack of legal rights and guarantees that advantaged a system of repressive psychiatry in the country.
According to O.V. Lapshin, Russia until 1993 did not have any specific legislation in the field of mental health except uncoordinated instructions and articles of laws in criminal and administrative law, orders of the USSR Ministry of Health. In the Soviet Union, any psychiatric patient could be hospitalized by request of his headman, relatives or instructions of a district psychiatrist. In this case, patient’s consent or dissent mattered nothing. The duration of treatment in a psychiatric hospital also depended entirely on the psychiatrist. All that made the abuse of psychiatry possible to suppress those, who disagreed with the political regime, and that created the vicious practice of ignoring the rights of the mentally ill.
According to Yuri Savenko
Yuri Savenko
Yuri Sergeevich Savenko is a Russian psychiatrist, the president since 1989 of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia. He is also a member of the Council of Experts under the Ombudsman for Human Rights in the Russian Federation. He holds M.D. and Ph.D...
, the president of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia
Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia
The Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia is a non-state professional human rights organization.- History :The IPA was established in Moscow in March 1989 and became the first psychiatric association in the USSR which was not controlled by the State...
(the IPA), punitive psychiatry arises on the basis of the interference of three main factors:
- ideologizing of science, its breakaway from the achievements of world psychiatry;
- lack of legal basis;
- the total nationalization of mental health service.
Their interaction system is principally sociological: the presence of the Penal Code article on slandering the state system inevitably results in sending a certain percentage of citizens to forensic psychiatric examination. Thus, it is not psychiatry itself that is punitive, but the totalitarian state uses psychiatry for punitive purposes with ease.
According to Larry Gostin, the root cause of the problem was the State itself. The definition of danger was radically extended by the Soviet criminal system to cover 'political' as well as customary physical types of 'danger'.
According to Semyon Gluzman
Semyon Gluzman
Semyon Fishelevich Gluzman is a Ukrainian psychiatrist, human rights activist, the president and founder of the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association, founder of the American-Ukrainian Bureau for Human Rights, director of the International Medical Rehabilitation Center for the Victims of War and...
, abuse of psychiatry to suppress dissent is based on condition of psychiatry in a totalitarian state. Psychiatric paradigm of a totalitarian state is culpable for its expansion into spheres which are not initially those of psychiatric competence.
Richard Bonnie, a professor of law and medicine at the University of Virginia School of Law
University of Virginia School of Law
The University of Virginia School of Law was founded in Charlottesville in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson as one of the original subjects taught at his "academical village," the University of Virginia. The law school maintains an enrollment of approximately 1,100 students in its initial degree program...
, mentioned the deformed nature of the Soviet psychiatric profession as one of the explanations for why it was so easily bent toward the repressive objectives of the state, and pointed out the importance of a civil society and, in particular, independent professional organizations separate and apart from the state as one of the most substantial lessons from the period.
According to Moscow psychiatrist Alexander Danilin
Alexander Danilin
Alexander Gennadievich Danilin is a Russian psychiatrist and physician-narcologist, author of nine books, numerous articles, lectures and trainings on addiction psychology and existential psychotherapy.He is married and has two sons....
, the so-called "nosological" approach in the Moscow psychiatric school established by A.V. Snezhnevsky boiles down to the ability to make an only diagnosis, schizophrenia; psychiatry is not science but such a system of opinions and people by the thousands are falling victims to these opinions—millions of lives were crippled by virtue of the concept "sluggish schizophrenia" introduced some time once by Andrei Vladimirovich Snezhnevsky, academician, whom Danilin called a political offender.
St Petersburg academic psychiatrist Yuri Nuller
Yuri Nuller
Yuri Lvovich Nuller was a Soviet and Russian psychiatrist and professor. He spent many years investigating the problem of anxiety....
notes that the concept of Snezhnevsky's school allows, for example, to consider schizoid psychopathy or schizoidism as the early, sluggishly progressing stages of an inevitable progredient process rather than the personality characteristics of an individual, which may not develop along the path of schizophrenic process at all. That results in the extreme expansion of diagnosing sluggish schizophrenia and the harm it has done. Nuller adds that within the scope of the sluggish schizophrenia concept, any deviation from the norm evaluated by a doctor can be regarded as schizophrenia, with all the ensuing consequences for an examinee. That creates ample opportunity for voluntary and involuntary abuses of psychiatry. However, neither A.V. Snezhnevsky nor his followers, according to Nuller, found civil and scientific courage to review their concept that clearly reached a deadlock.
In 1977, British psychiatrist David Cooper
David Cooper (psychiatrist)
David Graham Cooper was a British psychiatrist, theorist and leader in the anti-psychiatry movement....
asked Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
the same question which Claude Bourdet
Claude Bourdet
Claude Bourdet , son of the dramatic author Édouard Bourdet, was a writer, journalist, polemist, and a militant French politician, who was born in 1909 and died in 1996 in Paris. He was a son of the poet Catherine Pozzi....
had formerly asked Viktor Fainberg
Viktor Fainberg
Viktor Isaakovich Fainberg is a philologist, prominent figure of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, participant of the 1968 Red Square demonstration, and fighter against punitive psychiatry....
during a press conference given by Fainberg and Plyushch
Leonid Plyushch
Leonid Plyushch is a mathematician and Soviet dissident.- Early life and career :Leonid Plyushch was born into a Ukrainian working-class family in 1939 in Naryn, Kirghizia. His father worked as railway foreman, and was killed at the front 1941...
: when the USSR has the whole penitentiary and police apparatus, which could take charge of anybody, and which is perfect in itself, why do they use psychiatry? Foucault answered it was not a question of a distortion of the use of psychiatry but that was its fundamental project.
American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz
Thomas Szasz
Thomas Stephen Szasz is a psychiatrist and academic. Since 1990 he has been Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, New York. He is a well-known social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, and of the social...
argued that the spectacle of the Western psychiatrists loudly condemning Soviet colleagues for their abuse of professional standards was largely an exercise in hypocrisy. According to Szasz, the problem, from which psychiatric abuse stems, is psychiatric power that is just as prevalent in democratic societies as it was in the USSR. He stated that psychiatric abuse, such as people usually associated with practices in the former USSR, was connected not with the misuse of psychiatric diagnoses, but with the political power built-in to the social role of the psychiatrist in democratic and totalitarian societies alike. In an article published in 1994 by Szasz on the Journal of medical ethics (open for debate) he stated "(...) The classification by slave owners and slave traders of certain individuals as Negroes was scientific, in the sense that whites were rarely classified as blacks. But that did not prevent the 'abuse' of such racial classification, because (what we call) its abuse was, in fact, its use. (...)"
Residual problems
Robert van Voren noted that after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it became apparent that the political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR was only the tip of the iceberg, the sign that much more was basically wrong. This much more realistic image of Soviet psychiatry showed up only after the Soviet regime began to loosen its grip on society and later lost control over the developments and in the end entirely disintegrated. It demonstrated that the actual situation was much sorer and that many individuals had been affected. Millions of individuals were treated and stigmatized by an outdated biologically oriented and hospital-based mental health service. Living conditions in clinics were bad, sometimes even terrible, and violations of human rights were rampant.According to Robert van Voren, although for several years, especially after the implosion of the USSR and during the first years of Boris Yeltsin
Boris Yeltsin
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was the first President of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991 to 1999.Originally a supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin emerged under the perestroika reforms as one of Gorbachev's most powerful political opponents. On 29 May 1990 he was elected the chairman of...
's rule, the positions of the Soviet psychiatric leaders were in jeopardy, now one can firmly conclude that they succeeded in riding out the storm and retaining their powerful positions. In addition, they also succeeded in avoiding an inflow of modern concepts of delivering mental health care and a fundamental change in the structure of psychiatric services in Russia. On the whole, in Russia, the impact of mental health reformers has been the least. Even the reform efforts made in such places as St. Petersburg, Tomsk
Tomsk
Tomsk is a city and the administrative center of Tomsk Oblast, Russia, located on the Tom River. One of the oldest towns in Siberia, Tomsk celebrated its 400th anniversary in 2004...
, and Kaliningrad
Kaliningrad
Kaliningrad is a seaport and the administrative center of Kaliningrad Oblast, the Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea...
have faltered or were encapsulated as centrist policies under Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin served as the second President of the Russian Federation and is the current Prime Minister of Russia, as well as chairman of United Russia and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Union of Russia and Belarus. He became acting President on 31 December 1999, when...
brought them back under control.
At his press conference in 2008, Semyon Gluzman
Semyon Gluzman
Semyon Fishelevich Gluzman is a Ukrainian psychiatrist, human rights activist, the president and founder of the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association, founder of the American-Ukrainian Bureau for Human Rights, director of the International Medical Rehabilitation Center for the Victims of War and...
said that the surplus in Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
of hospitals for inpatient treatment of the mentally ill was a relic of the totalitarian communist regime and that Ukraine did not have epidemic of schizophrenia but somehow Ukraine had about 90 large psychiatric hospitals including the Pavlov Hospital where beds only in its children's unit were more than in the whole of Great Britain
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
.
In 1994, there was organized a conference concerned with the theme of political abuse of psychiatry and attended by representatives from different former Soviet Republics — from Russia, Belarus
Belarus
Belarus , officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered clockwise by Russia to the northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel ,...
, the Baltics, the Caucasus, and some of the Central Asian Republics. Dainius Puras made a report on the situation within the Lithuanian Psychiatric Association, where discussion had been held but no resolution had been passed. Yuri Nuller
Yuri Nuller
Yuri Lvovich Nuller was a Soviet and Russian psychiatrist and professor. He spent many years investigating the problem of anxiety....
talked over how in Russia the wind direction was gradually changing and the systematic political abuse of psychiatry was again being denied and degraded as an issue of "hyperdiagnosis" or "scientific disagreement." It was particularly noteworthy that Tatyana Dmitrieva, the Director of the Serbsky Institute, was an active adherent of this view. This was not so queer, because she was a close friend of the key architects of "political psychiatry."
In the early 1990s, Tatyana Dmitrieva, the Director of the Serbsky Center, brought the required words of repentance for political abuse of psychiatry which had had unprecedented dimensions in the Soviet Union for discrediting, intimidation and suppression of the human rights movement carried out primarily in this institution. Her words were widely broadcasted abroad but were limitedly published in the St. Petersburg newspaper Chas Pik within the country. However, in her 2001 book Aliyans Prava i Milosediya (The Alliance of Law and Mercy), Dmitrieva wrote that there were no abuses in psychiatry and if there were those, they were no more than in the vaunted Western countries. Moreover, the mentioned book by Dmitrieva administers to the old and new national intellectuals the rebuke that professor Vladimir Serbsky
Vladimir Serbsky
Vladimir Petrovich Serbsky was one of the founders of the forensic psychiatry in Russia. An author of The Forensic Psychopathology, Serbskiy thought delinquency to have no congenital diatheses, considering it to be caused by social reasons....
and others were wrong not to cooperate with the police department because otherwise there would have been neither revolution nor bloodshed and that the current intellectuals are wrong to oppose the authorities.
While speaking of the Serbsky Center, Yuri Savenko alleges that “practically nothing has changed. They have no shame at the institute about their role with the Communists. They are the same people, and they do not want to apologize for all their actions in the past.” Attorney Karen Nersisyan agrees: “Serbsky is not an organ of medicine. It’s an organ of power.”
In 2004, Savenko stated that the passed law on state expert activity and introduction of profession of forensic expert psychiatrist actually destroyed adversary-based examinations and that the Serbsky Center turned into a complete monopolist of forensic examination, which it had never been under Soviet rule. Formerly, a court could include any psychiatrist in a commission of experts, but now the court only chooses an expert institution. An expert has the right to participate only in commissions, in which he is included by the head of his expert institution, and can receive the certificate of qualification as an expert only after having worked in a state expert institution for three years.
According to Savenko, the Serbsky Center has long labored to legalize its monopolistic position of the Main expert institution of the country. It turned out to be a considerable drop in the level of its expert reports. Such a drop was inevitable and foreseeable in the context of the Serbsky Center efforts to eliminate adversary character of the expert reports of the parties and then to maximally degrade the role of a professional as a reviewer and critic of a presented expert report.
On 28 May 2009, Yuri Savenko wrote to the President of the Russian Federation
President of the Russian Federation
The President of the Russian Federation is the head of state, supreme commander-in-chief and holder of the highest office within the Russian Federation...
Dmitry Medvedev
Dmitry Medvedev
Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev is the third President of the Russian Federation.Born to a family of academics, Medvedev graduated from the Law Department of Leningrad State University in 1987. He defended his dissertation in 1990 and worked as a docent at his alma mater, now renamed to Saint...
an open letter
Open letter
An open letter is a letter that is intended to be read by a wide audience, or a letter intended for an individual, but that is nonetheless widely distributed intentionally....
, in which Savenko asked Medvedev to submit to the State Duma
State Duma
The State Duma , common abbreviation: Госду́ма ) in the Russian Federation is the lower house of the Federal Assembly of Russia , the upper house being the Federation Council of Russia. The Duma headquarters is located in central Moscow, a few steps from Manege Square. Its members are referred to...
a draft law prepared by the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia to address a sharp drop in the level of forensic psychiatric examinations, which Savenko attributed to a lack of competition within the sector and its increasing nationalization.
On 15 June 2009, the working group chaired by the Director of the Serbsky Center Tatyana Dmitrieva sent the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation
Supreme Court of the Russian Federation
The Supreme Court of the Russian Federation is the court of last resort in Russian administrative law, civil law and criminal law cases. It also supervises the work of lower courts. Its predecessor is the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union....
a joint application whose purport was to declare appealing against the forensic expert reports of state expert institutions illegal and prohibit courts from receiving lawsuits filed to appeal against the reports. The reason put forward for the proposal was that appeals against expert reports are allegedly filed “without regard for the scope of case” and that one must appeal against an expert report “only together with a sentence.” In other words, according to Yuri Savenko, all professional errors and omissions are presented as untouchable by virtue of the fact that they were infiltrated into the sentence. That is cynicism of administrative resources, cynicism of power, he says.
The draft of the application to the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation was considered in the paper “Current legal issues relevant to forensic-psychiatric expert evaluation” by Elena Shchukina and Sergei Shishkov focusing on the inadmissibility of appealing against an expert report without regard for the scope of evaluated case. While talking about appealing against “reports”, the authors of the paper, according to lawyer Dmitry Bartenev, mistakenly identify reports with actions of experts (or an expert institution) and justify the impossibility of “parallel” examination and evaluation of actions of experts without regard for the scope of evaluated case. Such a point of view taken by the authors appears clearly erroneous because abuse by experts of rights and legitimate interests of citizens including trial participants, of course, may be a subject for a separate appeal.
In 2010, when the outpatient forensic-psychiatric examination of Yulia Privedyonnaya, a member of a youth organization, was carried out in the Sebsky Center, its experts asked her the question “What do you think of Putin?” that Savenko called an inappropriate, unseemly, indelicate, and police one.
Memoirs
The widely known sources including published and written memoirs of victims of psychiatric arbitrariness convey moral and physical sufferings experienced by victims of psychiatric arbitrariness in special psychiatric hospitals of the USSR. In 1965, Valery Tarsis published in the West his book Ward 7: An Autobiographical Novel based upon his own experiences in 1963–1964 when he was detained in the Moscow Kashchenko psychiatric hospital for political reasons. The book was a first literary work to deal with the Soviet authorities' abuse of psychiatry. In 1968, the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky wrote Gorbunov and Gorchakov, a forty-page long poem in thirteen cantos consisting of lengthy conversations between two patients in a Soviet psychiatric prison as well as between each of them separately and the interrogating psychiatrists. The topics vary from the taste of the cabbage served for supper to the meaning of life and Russia's destiny. The poem was translated into English by Harry Thomas. The experience underlying Gorbunov and Gorchakov was formed by two stints of Brodsky at psychiatric establishments. In 1970, the book Red Square at Noon by Natalya Gorbanevskaya was published in Russian and English. Some parts of the book describe special psychiatric hospitals and psychiatric examinations of dissidents. In 1971, Zhores Medvedev and Roy Medvedev published their joint book A Question of Madness: Repression by Psychiatry in the Soviet Union describing the hospitalization of Zhores Medvedev for political purposes and the Soviet practice of diagnosing political oppositionists as the mentally ill. In 1976, Viktor Nekipelov published in samizdatSamizdat
Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader...
his book Institute of Fools: Notes on the Serbsky Institute documenting his personal experience at Psychiatric Hospital of the Serbsky Institute. In 1980, the book was translated and published in English. Only in 2005, the book was published in Russia. In 1977, British playwright Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom Stoppard OM, CBE, FRSL is a British playwright, knighted in 1997. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and...
wrote the play Every Good Boy Deserves Favour that criticized the Soviet practice of treating political dissidence as a form of mental illness. The play is dedicated to Viktor Fainberg
Viktor Fainberg
Viktor Isaakovich Fainberg is a philologist, prominent figure of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, participant of the 1968 Red Square demonstration, and fighter against punitive psychiatry....
and Vladimir Bukovsky
Vladimir Bukovsky
Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky is a leading member of the dissident movement of the 1960s and 1970s, writer, neurophysiologist, and political activist....
, two Soviet dissidents expelled to the West. In 1978, the book To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter by Vladimir Bukovsky, describing dissident movement, their struggle or freedom, practices of dealing with dissenters, and dozen years spent by Bukovsky in Soviet labor camps, prisons and psychiatric hospitals, was published and later translated into English. In 1979, Leonid Plyushch published his book History's Carnival: A Dissident's Autobiography in which he described how he and other dissidents were committed to psychiatric hospitals. At the same year, the book was translated into English. In 1981, Pyotr Grigorenko published his memoirs V Podpolye Mozhno Vstretit Tolko Krys (In Underground One Can Meet Only Rats) that included story of his psychiatric examinations and hospitalizations. In 1982, the book was translated into English under the title Memoirs. In 1983, Yevgeniy Nikolaev’s book Predavshie Gippokrata (The betrayal of Hippocrates), when translated from Russian into German under the title Gehirnwäsche in Moskau, was first published in München and told about psychiatric detention of its author for political reasons. In 1984, the book under its original title was first published in Russian that the book had originally been written in. In the 1983 novel Firefox Down
Firefox Down
Firefox Down is a 1983 novel by author Craig Thomas. It is a sequel to his novel Firefox. Craig Thomas dedicated the first edition of the novel to actor/director/producer Clint Eastwood, who starred as Mitchell Gant in the film adaptation of the first novel, stating, "For Clint Eastwood — pilot of...
by Craig Thomas
Craig Thomas (author)
David Craig Owen Thomas was a Welsh author of thrillers, most notably the Mitchell Gant series.-Background:...
, captured American pilot Mitchell Gant is imprisoned in a KGB psychiatric clinic "associated with the Serbsky Institute", where he is drugged and interrogated to force him to reveal the location of the Firefox aircraft, which he has stolen and flown out of Russia. In 1987, Robert van Voren published his book Koryagin: A man Struggling for Human Dignity telling about psychiatrist Anatoly Koryagin who resisted political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union. In 1988, Reportazh iz Niotkuda (Reportage from Nowhere) by Viktor Rafalsky was published. In the publication, he described his confinement in Soviet psychiatric hospitals. In 1993, Valeria Novodvorskaya published her collection of writings Po Tu Storonu Otchayaniya (Beyond Despair) in which her experience in the prison psychiatric hospital in Kazan
Kazan
Kazan is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Tatarstan, Russia. With a population of 1,143,546 , it is the eighth most populous city in Russia. Kazan lies at the confluence of the Volga and Kazanka Rivers in European Russia. In April 2009, the Russian Patent Office granted Kazan the...
was described. In 1996, Vladimir Bukovsky published his book Judgement in Moscow containing an account of developing the punitive psychiatry based on documents that were being submitted to and considered by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Politburo , known as the Presidium from 1952 to 1966, functioned as the central policymaking and governing body of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.-Duties and responsibilities:The...
. The book was translated into English in 1999. In 2001, Nikolay Kupriyanov published his book GULAG-2-SN which has the foreword by Anatoly Sobchak
Anatoly Sobchak
Anatoly Alexandrovich Sobchak was a Russian politician, a co-author of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, the first democratically elected mayor of Saint Petersburg, and a mentor and teacher of both Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev....
, covers repressive psychiatry in Soviet Army
Soviet Army
The Soviet Army is the name given to the main part of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union between 1946 and 1992. Previously, it had been known as the Red Army. Informally, Армия referred to all the MOD armed forces, except, in some cases, the Soviet Navy.This article covers the Soviet Ground...
, and tells about humiliations Kupriyanov underwent in the psychiatric departments of the Northern Fleet hospital and the Kirov Military Medical Academy. In 2002, St. Petersburg forensic psychiatrist Vladimir Pshizov published his book Sindrom Zamknutogo Prostranstva (Syndrome of Closed Space) describing hospitalization of Viktor Fainberg. 2003 saw the book Moyа Sudba i Borba protiv Psikhiatrov (My Destiny and Struggle against Psychiatrists) by Anatoly Serov who worked as a lead design engineer before he was committed to a psychiatric hospital. In 2010, Alexander Shatravka published his book Pobeg iz Raya (The Escape from Paradise) in which he described how he and his companions were caught after they illegally crossed the border between Finland
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...
and the Soviet Union to escape from the latter country and, as a result, were confined to Soviet psychiatric hospitals and prisons. In his book, he also described methods of brutal treatment of prisoners in the institutions.
The use of psychiatry for political purposes in the USSR was discussed in two television documentaries: They Chose Freedom
They Chose Freedom
They Chose Freedom is a four-part TV documentary on the history of political dissent in the USSR from the 1950s to the 1990s. It was produced in 2005 by Vladimir V...
produced by Vladimir V. Kara-Murza
Vladimir V. Kara-Murza
Vladimir V. Kara-Murza is a Russian journalist, historian and politician. He studied in Great Britain at the John Lyon School in Harrow, London, and graduated with an B.A. and M.A. in History from Cambridge University...
in 2005 and Prison Psychiatry produced by Anatoly Yaroshevsky of NTV in the same year.
Documents
From 1987 to 1991, the International Association on the Political Use of Psychiatry published forty-two numbers of Documents on the Political Abuse of Psychiatry in the USSR archived by the Columbia University Libraries in archival collection Human Rights Watch Records: Helsinki Watch, 1952-2003, Series VII: Chris Panico Files, 1979–1992, USSR, Psychiatry, International Association on the Political Use of Psychiatry, Box 16, Folder 5–8 (English version) and Box 16, Folder 9–11 (Russian version). A number of various documents and reports were published in Information Bulletins by the Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry For Political Purposes, Chronicle of Current Events by the Moscow Helsinki Group and in the books Punitive Medicine by Alexandr PodrabinekAlexandr Podrabinek
Alexandr Podrabinek is a Russian journalist, human rights activist and editor-in-chief of Prima information agency. He is a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism.-Dissident activities in the Soviet Union:...
, Bezumnaya Psikhiatriya (Mad Psychiatry) by Anatoly Prokopenko, Judgement in Moscow by Vladimir Bukovsky, Sovietskaya Psikhiatriya—Zabluzhdeniya i Umysel (Soviet Psychiatry: Fallacies and Intent) by Ada Korotenko and Natalia Alikina, and Kaznimye Sumashestviem (The Executed by Madness).
According to the Commentary on the Russian Federation Law on Psychiatric Care, persons, who were subjected to repressions in form of commitment for compulsory treatment to psychiatric medical institutions and were rehabilitated in accordance with the established procedure, receive indemnity payment; thereby the Russian Federation acknowledged the facts of the use of psychiatry for political purposes and the responsibility of the state to the victims of “political psychiatry.”
See also
- The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black DiseaseThe Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black DiseaseThe Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease is 2010 book written by psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl , and published by Beacon Press, covering the history of the 1960s Ionia State Hospital—located in Ionia, Michigan and now converted to a prison...