Political Abuse of Psychiatry in The Soviet Union - Figures

Figures

At least 365 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 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.

According to Russian psychiatrist Emmanuil Gushansky, archives of MVD, the USSR Health Ministry, the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry that store evidences of psychiatric expansion and regulations, on which this expansion was founded, still remain closed as a grave. The scale of psychiatric abuses in the past, the use of psychiatric doctrines by the totalitarian state are thoroughly concealed.