Political Abuse of Psychiatry in The Soviet Union - Mass Abuse Onset

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 Bukovsky, 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:

A crime is a deviation from generally recognized standards of behavior frequently caused by mental disorder. Can there be diseases, nervous disorders among certain people in a Communist society? Evidently yes. If that is so, then there will also be offences, which are characteristic of people with abnormal minds. Of those who might start calling for opposition to Communism on this basis, we can say that clearly their mental state is not normal.

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."