There was systematic political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, based on the interpretation of political opposition or dissent as a psychiatric problem, rather than a social, political, or material one.
The presence and extent to which this abuse occurred depended on the time period. It started in the late 1940s and was systemic in the 1960s to the mid-1980s.
The Criminal Code was applied in conjunction with the system of diagnosis for mental illness developed by Andrei Snezhnevsky to establish a framework within which non-standard beliefs could easily be defined as a criminal offences and subsequently be the basis for a psychiatric diagnosis. Diagnoses such as "sluggish schizophrenia" or "political intoxication" were applied to dissenters, who were then incarcerated in psychiatric wards with poor living conditions.
Psychiatry allowed Soviet authorities to bypass standard legal procedures and avoid the odium attached to political trials. Dissidence was also thus discredited as the result of unhealthy minds.
At least 15,000 dissenters were put in psychiatric hospitals for political crimes. Psychiatry in Russia is still impacted by Soviet political abuse of psychiatry.
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.
Punnitive psychiatry is based upon "the deliberate interpretation of dissent [...] as a psychiatric problem". It entails the exculpation and committal of citizens to psychiatric facilities based upon political rather than mental health-based criteria.
Punitive psychiatry is neither a distinct subject nor a psychiatric specialty. It is the result of members of the psychiatric profession serving the state's will in matters of repression â a phenomenon that happens in the applied sciences of many totalitarian countries.
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 is itself oppressive.
Punitive medicine (punitive psychiatry) is used to repress dissidents that cannot be punished by legal means. Psychiatry can be used to bypass standard legal procedures for establishing guilt or innocence and allow political incarceration without the ordinary odium attached to such political trials.
Psychiatric power in practically all societies expands on the grounds of public safety, which, in the view of the leaders of the USSR, was best maintained by the repression of dissidence. The definition of danger was radically extended by the Soviet criminal system to cover "political" as well as customary physical types of "danger".
Sending dissenters to psychiatrists also discredited dissidence as the product of unhealthy minds.
Forensic psychiatrists were asked to examine offenders whose mental state was considered abnormal by the investigating officers. People could also be hospitalized on the request request of their headman, their relatives or a district psychiatrist.
In almost every case, dissidents were examined at the Serbsky Central Research Institute for Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow, where persons being prosecuted in court for committing political crimes were subjected to a forensic-psychiatric expert evaluation. Once evaluated, the dissidents were sent for involuntary treatment to a Special Psychiatric Hospital controlled by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. The duration of the treatment depended entirely on the psychiatrist.
The "anti-Soviet" political behavior of some individuals was defined simultaneously as criminal acts (e.g., a violation of Articles 70 or 190âÂÂ1), symptoms of mental illness (e.g., "delusion of reformism"), and susceptible to a ready-made diagnosis (e.g., "sluggish schizophrenia", "political intoxication" or "philosophical intoxication"). The explanation of dissent as a psychiatric problem was called "psychopathological mechanisms" of dissent.
The accused had no right of appeal. The right was given to their relatives or other interested persons. They were not allowed to nominate psychiatrists to evaluate the patient as all psychiatrists were considered fully independent and equally credible before the law.
The political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR arose from the conception that opponents of the Soviet regime were sick since there was no other logical reason to oppose the best sociopolitical system.
The psychiatric incarceration of certain individuals was prompted by their attempts to emigrate, to distribute or possess prohibited documents or books, to participate in civil rights protests and demonstrations, and to become involved in forbidden religious activities and by being outspoken in their opposition to the authorities, demonstrating for reform and writing critical books.
Political abuse of psychiatry in the former Soviet Union was facilitated by the fact that the national classification included categories that could be employed to label dissenters, who could then be forcibly incarcerated. In this classification, there were categories with diagnoses that could be given to political dissenters and led to the harmful involuntary medication.
Andrei Snezhnevsky developed a novel classification of mental disorders with an original set of diagnostic criteria. Despite a number of its controversial premises and in line with the traditions of then Soviet science, Snezhnevsky's hypothesis has immediately acquired the status of dogma which was later overcome in other disciplines but firmly stuck in psychiatry.
"Philosophical intoxication", for instance, was widely applied when people disagreed with nomenklatura or party leadership, or criticized sanctioned political philosophies, theory or the theoreticians who conceived them. When the dissidents were themselves communists, they were also accused "revisionism".
It was the diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia" that was most prominently used in cases of dissidents. Pessimism, poor social adaptation and conflict with authorities were themselves sufficient for a formal diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia".
Andrei Snezhnevsky was essentially responsible for the Soviet concept of schizophrenia with a "sluggish type" manifestation by "reformerism" including other symptoms. Sluggish schizophrenia as one of the new diagnostic categories was created to facilitate the stifling of dissidents and was a root of self-deception among psychiatrists to placate their consciences when the doctors acted as a tool of oppression in the name of a political system.
According to most scholars, 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, 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 for the behavior of critics of the regime who 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.
In the Soviet Union, dissidents were often confined in psychiatric wards commonly called psikhushkas. Psikhushka is the Russian ironic diminutive for "psychiatric hospital". One of the first penal 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 precursor of the KGB) on the orders of Lavrentiy Beria. Hospitalization did not have an end date, and, as a result, there were cases when dissidents were kept in psychiatric prison hospitals for 10 or even 15 years.
There, they would be subjected to forced administration of drugs, beatings and other forms of punishment. Many went crazy and some died during the treatment. Patients had no rights and depended entirely on the psychiatrists' will, and were only protected by rules put in place by legal and medical departments.
As early as 1948, the Soviet secret service took an interest in psychiatry. A system of political abuse of psychiatry was developed at the end of Joseph Stalin's regime. The use of psychiatry as a political weapon was ordered by Andrey Vyshinsky, a chief of the secret police.
Punitive psychiatry was not simply an inheritance from the Stalin era, however. The Gulag was already an effective instrument of political repression. There was no compelling requirement to develop a more expensive psychiatric substitute. The abuse of psychiatry came at a later era.
The USSR did not have legislative acts regulating psychiatry until 1988 as the patient was seen as a burden to society.
A precursor of later abuses in psychiatry in the Soviet Union, the "Joint Session" of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences and the Board of the All-Union Neurological and Psychiatric Association took place from 10 to 15 October 1951. The event was dedicated to the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov.
During the session, it was alleged that several of the USSR's leading neuroscientists and psychiatrists of the time were guilty of practicing "anti-Pavlovian, anti-Marxist, idealistic [and] reactionary" science, much to Soviet psychiatry's detriment. These eminent psychiatrists had to publicly admit that their scientific positions were erroneous and had to promise to conform to "Pavlovian" doctrines.
Several leading Soviet academic neuroscientists were labeled as anti-Pavlovians, anti-materialists and reactionaries and were subsequently dismissed from their positions. Some of these scientists were also imprisoned and tortured. The Joint Session ravaged productive research in neurosciences and psychiatry for years to come, which came to be dominated by pseudo-science.
Following the Pavlovian session and the Joint Session, Snezhnevky's school became predominant. The Pavlovian school of Snezhnevskyone was given monopoly over psychiatry in 1950 â an important factor in the rise of political psychiatry. Soviet doctors, motivated by Snezhnevky, devised a "Pavlovian theory of schizophrenia" and increasingly applied this diagnostic category to political dissidents.
The campaign to declare political opponents mentally sick and commit dissenters to mental hospitals began in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Nikita Khrushchev reckoned that it was impossible for people in a socialist society to have an anti-socialist consciousness. Whenever manifestations of dissidence could not be justified as a provocation of world imperialism or a legacy of the past, they were self-evidently the product of mental disease. In a speech published in the Pravda daily newspaper on 24 May 1959, Khrushchev said: By the end of the 1950s, confinement to a psychiatric institution had become the most commonly used method of punishing leaders of the political opposition.
The atmosphere at the Serbsky Institute in Moscow altered almost overnight when Daniil Lunts took over as head of the Fourth Department (otherwise known as the Political Department). Psychiatric departments had previously been regarded as a 'refuge' against being dispatched to the Gulag. The first reports of dissenters being hospitalized on non-medical grounds date from the early 1960s, not long after Georgy Morozov was appointed director of the Serbsky Institute.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the trials of dissenters and their referral for "treatment" to the Special Psychiatric Hospitals under MVD control and oversight became known, and the world learned of a wave of "psychiatric terror" which was flatly denied by those in charge of the Serbsky Institute. The practice of incarceration of political dissidents in mental hospitals in the USSR entailed strong condemnation from the international community and damaged the credibility of psychiatric practice.
In the 1960s, a vigorous movement grew up protesting against abuse of psychiatry in the USSR. Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union was denounced in the course of the Congresses of the World Psychiatric Association in Mexico City (1971), Hawaii (1977), Vienna (1983) and Athens (1989). The campaign to terminate political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR was a key episode in the Cold War, inflicting irretrievable damage on the prestige of medicine in the Soviet Union.
In the 1960s to 1986, the abuse of psychiatry for political purposes was systematic in the Soviet Union. Political abuse of psychiatry as a systematic method of repression was developed by Yuri Andropov with a group of associates, in the KGB.Andropov was responsible for a wide-range of psychiatric repression as soon as he was appointed to head the KGB on 18 May 1967. On 29 April 1969, Andropov submitted a plan to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to set up a network of mental hospitals to defend the regime from dissenters. Andropov's proposal was adopted and implemented.
On 15 May 1969, a Soviet Government decree (No. 345âÂÂ209) was issued, confirming the practice of psychiatrists confining undesirables in detention. Soviet psychiatrists were told whom to examine and could detain these individuals with the help of the police or entrap them into coming to the hospital. No court decision was required for an individual to be confined indefinitely in a psychiatric institution.
From the mid-1970s to the 1990s, the structure of the USSR mental health service was split in two distinct systems which for the most part co-existed peacefully. The first system was that of punitive psychiatry. It directly served the authorities, and was headed by the Moscow Institute for Forensic Psychiatry The second system was made up of elite, psychotherapeutically oriented clinics. It was headed by the Leningrad Psychoneurological Institute. The hundreds of hospitals combined elements of both systems.
If dissidents were mentally ill, they were sent to psychiatric hospitals and confined there until they died. If the state of their mental health was uncertain but they were not constantly unwell, they and their kharakteristika [testimonial from employers, the Party and other Soviet institutions] were sent to a labour camp or to be shot.
It was decided to prosecute dissidents under the principle of socialist legality. It became apparent that putting people who gave anti-Soviet speeches on trial was detrimental to the regime. Such individuals were instead were given a psychiatric examination and declared insane.
As General Secretary, Yury Andropov continued the Brezhnev Era policy of confining dissenters in mental hospitals.
In 1988 and 1989, about two million people were removed from the psychiatric registry at the request of Western psychiatrists. It was a condition for the re-admission of Soviet psychiatrists to the World Psychiatric Association. Between one million and two million people were removed from the psychiatric registry.
According to the "Commentary" to the post-Soviet Russian Federation Law on Psychiatric Care, individuals forced to undergo treatment in Soviet psychiatric medical institutions were entitled to rehabilitation in accordance with the established procedure and could claim compensation. The Russian Federation acknowledged that before 1991 psychiatry had been used for political purposes and took responsibility for the victims of "political psychiatry."
From 1993 to 1995, a presidential decree on measures to prevent future abuse of psychiatry was being drafted at the Commission for Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repression. When the materials for discussion in the Commission for Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repression were ready, however, the work came to a standstill. The documents failed to reach the head of the Commission Alexander Yakovlev.
The political abuse of psychiatry in Russia has continued since the fall of the Soviet Union, and human rights activists may still face the threat of a psychiatric diagnosis for their legitimate civic and political activities.
Psychiatric labels, or stigmas, have spread so widely that the media commonly calls disliked persons schizo and generalized psychiatric assessments to phenomena of public life. The word psikhushka entered everyday vocabulary. All persons who deviate from the usual standards of thought and behavior are declared mentally ill, to the public's approval. Not surprisingly, because of such a stigmatization, people with real mental disorders avoid publicity at all cost.
Today Russian patients are defensive toward medical psychologists and psychiatrists, preventing attempts to understand the patient and assess his condition. The psychiatrist became a scarecrow attaching psychiatric labels. He is feared, not confided in, not given secrets and asked only to provide medications. Such a disposition is related to a constant, subconscious fear of psychiatrists and psychiatry. This fear is caused by the abuse of psychiatry, and the constant violence in the totalitarian and post-totalitarian society.
Psychiatry lost its credibility and professional basis entirely when it was abused to stifle dissidence in the former USSR. Psychiatry is vulnerable because many of its notions have been questioned, and the sustainable pattern of mental life, of boundaries of mental norm and abnormality has been lost, director of the Moscow Research Institute for Psychiatry Valery Krasnov says, adding that psychiatrists have to seek new reference points to make clinical assessments and new reference points to justify old therapeutical interventions.
Modern Russian psychiatry and the structure of providing mental health care are aimed not at protecting the patient's right to an own place in life, but at discrediting such a right, revealing symptoms and isolating the patient.
According to St Petersburg psychiatrist Vladimir Pshizov, a disastrous factor for domestic psychiatry is that those who had committed crimes against humanity were allowed to stay on their positions until their death.
Critics allege that practically nothing has changed at the Serbky institute, as the people who worked there in Soviet times are still working there. The Serbsky Institute would still be subservient to the State.
In 2007, Alexander Dugin, a professor at the Moscow State University and adviser to State Duma speaker Sergei Naryshkin, presented opponents of Vladimir Putin's policy as mentally ill by saying, "There are no longer opponents of Putin's policy, and if there are, they are mentally ill and should be sent to prophylactic health examination." In 2012, psychiatrist Dilya Enikeyeva gave and publicized the diagnosis in absentia of histrionic personality disorder to Kseniya Sobchak, a Russian TV anchor and member of the political opposition, in violation of medical privacy and medical ethics. She also stated that Sobchak was harmful to society.
According to the commentary by the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia on the 2007 text by Vladimir Rotstein, a doctrinist of Snezhnevsky's school, there are patients with delusion of reformism in psychiatric inpatient facilities for involuntary treatment. In 2012, delusion of reformism was a symptom of mental disorder according to Psychiatry. National Manual. In the same year, Vladimir Pashkovsky reported that he diagnosed 4.7 percent of 300 patients with delusion of reform. Patients are also said to be suffering from "syndrome of litigiousness" if in addition they wrote complaints to Moscow, which should only be written by a reviewing authority or lawyer.
An official at the Serbsky Institute declared "patient" Vladimir Bukovsky, who was then going to run for the President of the Russian Federation, undoubtedly "psychopathic".
In 1994, a conference concerning the political abuse of psychiatry was attended by representatives from several former Soviet Republics including 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."
The political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union has been minimized by psychiatrist Fedor Kondratev and Tatyana Dmitrieva, and denied by Alan A. Stone, Mikhail Vinogradov, Aleksandr Tiganov, Anatoly Smulevich and many leaders of Russian psychiatry. According to Valery Krasnov and Isaak Gurovich, official representatives of psychiatry involved in its political abuse never acknowledged the groundlessness of their diagnostics and actions.
Classified government documents that became available after the dissolution of the Soviet Union confirm that the authorities consciously used psychiatry as a tool to suppress dissent.
According to data of the International Association on the Political Use of Psychiatry's archives, 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.
According to Anatoly Prokopenko's calculations based on what he found in top secret documents in 2004, about 15,000 people were confined for political crimes in the psychiatric prison hospitals under the control of the MVD. In 2005, using the Archives of the CPSU Central Committee and the records of the three Special Psychiatrial Hospitals (Sychyovskaya, Leningrad and Chernyakhovsk hospitals), Prokopenko concluded that psychiatry had been used as punitive measure against at least 20,000 people for purely political reasons.
The percentage of "the mentally ill" among those accused of so-called anti-Soviet activities proved many times higher than among criminal offenders. The attention paid to political prisoners by Soviet psychiatrists was more than 40 times greater than their attention to ordinary criminal offenders.
The scale of psychiatric abuses in the past, the use of psychiatric doctrines by the totalitarian state have been thoroughly concealed. Relevant archives remain closed to researchers.
The report on political abuse of psychiatry prepared at the request of the commission by Gushansky with the aid of Prokopenko lay unclaimed and even the Independent Psychiatric Journal (Nezavisimiy Psikhiatricheskiy Zhurnal) would not publish it. The Moscow Research Center for Human Rights headed by Boris Altshuler and Alexey Smirnov and the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia whose president is Yuri Savenko were asked by Gushansky to publish the materials and archival documents on punitive psychiatry but showed no interest in doing so. Publishing such documents is dictated by present-day needs and by how far it is feared that psychiatry could again be abused for non-medical purposes.
The evidence for the misuse of psychiatry for political purposes in the Soviet Union was documented in a number of articles and books. Several national psychiatric associations examined and acted upon this documentation.
The widely known sources including published and written memoirs by victims of psychiatric arbitrariness convey moral and physical sufferings experienced by the victims in special psychiatric hospitals of the USSR.
In August 1969, Natalya Gorbanevskaya completed Noon ("ÃÂþûôõýÃÂ"), her book about the case of the 25 August 1968 Demonstration on Red Square and began circulating it in samizdat. It was translated into English and published under the title Red Square at Noon. Parts of the book describe Special Psychiatric Hospitals and psychiatric examinations of dissidents. The book includes "On Special Psychiatric Hospitals", an article written by Pyotr Grigorenko in 1968.
In 1971, twin brothers Zhores Medvedev and Roy Medvedev published in London their joint account of Zhores' incarceration in a psychiatric hospital and the Soviet practice of diagnosing political oppositionists as the mentally ill in London, in both English A Question of Madness: Repression by Psychiatry in the Soviet Union and Russian (Who is Mad? "ÃÂÃÂþ ÃÂÃÂüðÃÂÃÂõôÃÂøù") editions.
Yury Maltsev's Report from a Madhouse, his memoirs in Russian ("àõÿþÃÂÃÂðö ø÷ ÃÂÃÂüðÃÂÃÂõôÃÂõóþ ôþüð"), were issued by the New York-based Novy zhurnal publishing house in 1974.
1975 saw the article "My Five Years in Mental Hospitals" by Viktor Fainberg, who had emigrated to France the previous year after four years in the Leningrad Special Psychiatric Hospital.
In 1976, Viktor Nekipelov published in samizdat his book Institute of Fools: Notes on the Serbsky Institute documenting his personal experiences during two months' examination at the Serbsky Institute in Moscow. In 1980, the book was translated and published in English. The book was first published in Russia in 2005.
Various documents and reports were published in the Information Bulletin of the Working Commission on the Abuse of Psychiatry For Political Purposes, and circulated in the samizdat periodical Chronicle of Current Events. Other sources were documents by the Moscow Helsinki Group and in books by Alexander Podrabinek (Punitive Medicine, 1979) Anatoly Prokopenko (Mad Psychiatry, 1997, "ÃÂõ÷ÃÂüýðàÿÃÂøàøÃÂÃÂøÃÂ") and Vladimir Bukovsky (Judgment in Moscow, 1994). To these may be added Soviet psychiatry â fallacies and fantasy by Ada Korotenko and Natalia Alikina ("áþòõÃÂÃÂúðàÿÃÂøàøðÃÂÃÂøÃÂ. ÃÂðñûÃÂöôõýøàø ÃÂüÃÂÃÂõû") and Executed by Madness, 1971 ("ÃÂð÷ýøüÃÂõ ÃÂÃÂüðÃÂÃÂõÃÂÃÂòøõü").
In 1972, 1975, 1976, 1984, and 1988 the United States Government Printing Office published documents on political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union .
From 1987 to 1991, the International Association on the Political Use of Psychiatry (IAPUP) published forty-two volumes of Documents on the Political Abuse of Psychiatry in the USSR. Today these are preserved by the Columbia University Libraries in the archival collection entitled Human Rights Watch Records: Helsinki Watch, 1952âÂÂ2003, Series VII: Chris Panico Files, 1979âÂÂ1992, USSR, Psychiatry, International Association on the Political Use of Psychiatry, Box 16, Folder 5âÂÂ8 (English version) and Box 16, Folder 9âÂÂ11 (Russian version).
In 1992, the British Medical Association published certain some documents on the subject in Medicine Betrayed: The Participation of Doctors in Human Rights Abuses.
In 1978, the book I Vozvrashchaetsa Veter... (And the Wind Returns...) by Vladimir Bukovsky, describing the 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 under the title To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter.
In 1979, Leonid Plyushch published his book Na Karnavale Istorii (At History's áarnival) in which he described how he and other dissidents were committed to psychiatric hospitals. The same year, the book was translated into English under the title History's Carnival: A Dissident's Autobiography.
In 1980, the book by Yuri Belov Razmyshlenia ne tolko o Sychovke: Roslavl 1978 (Reflections not only on Sychovka: Roslavl 1978) was published.
In 1981, Pyotr Grigorenko published his memoirs V Podpolye Mozhno Vstretit Tolko Krys (In Underground One Can Meet Only Rats), which included the story of his psychiatric examinations and hospitalizations. In 1982, the book was translated into English under the title Memoirs.
In 1982, Soviet philosopher Pyotr Abovin-Yegides published his article "Paralogizmy politseyskoy psikhiatrii i ikh sootnoshenie s meditsinskoy etikoy (Paralogisms of police psychiatry and their relation to medical ethics)."
In 1983, Evgeny Nikolaev's book Predavshie Gippokrata (Betrayers of Hippocrates), when translated from Russian into German under the title Gehirnwäsche in Moskau (Brainwashing in Moscow), first came out 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 which the book had originally been written in.
In 1983, Yuri Vetokhin published his memoirs Sklonen k Pobegu translated into English under the title Inclined to Escape in 1986.
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, Valeriya 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 Moskovsky Protsess (Moscow trial) 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 1998 under the title Reckoning With Moscow: A Nuremberg Trial for Soviet Agents and Western Fellow Travelers.
In 2001, Nikolay Kupriyanov published his book GULAG-2-SN which has a 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 the hospitalization of Viktor Fainberg.
In 2003, the book Moyð Sudba i Moyð Borba protiv Psikhiatrov (My Destiny and My Struggle against Psychiatrists) was published 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 (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.
In 2012, Soviet dissident and believer Vladimir Khailo's wife published her book Subjected to Intense Persecution.
2014 saw the book Zha Zholtoy Stenoy (Behind the Yellow Wall) by Alexander Avgust, a former inmate of Soviet psychiatric hospitals who in his book describes the wider circle of their inhabitants than literature on the issue usually does.
In 1965, Valery Tarsis published in the West his book Ward 7: An Autobiographical Novel based upon his own experiences in 1963âÂÂ1964 when he was detained in the Moscow Kashchenko psychiatric hospital for political reasons. The book was the 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 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 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.
The use of psychiatry for political purposes in the USSR was discussed in several television documentaries:
Archival sources
Government publications and official reports
Books
Journal articles and book chapters
Newspapers
Websites
Audio-visual material