From the early 1960s Soviet authorities increasingly dealt with political dissent through compulsory psychiatric committal rather than criminal trial, using a broad diagnostic category, 'sluggish schizophrenia', associated with Andrei Snezhnevsky's school at the Serbsky Institute in Moscow, under which symptoms could include pessimism, poor social adaptation and conflict with authority. Those found not responsible were sent either to ordinary psychiatric hospitals or to special psychiatric hospitals run by the interior ministry, which operated as prisons; detainees and their advocates documented forced administration of drugs including sulfazine and haloperidol, beatings and indefinite confinement dependent on renouncing their views. The practice was exposed from inside the USSR by the Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes and by samizdat, and abroad by Amnesty International and Western psychiatrists; facing expulsion, the Soviet psychiatric society withdrew from the World Psychiatric Association at its 1983 Vienna congress and was readmitted in 1989 after acknowledging past abuse. The Russian Federation has acknowledged that psychiatry was used for political purposes and accepted responsibility toward the victims. Soviet-era psychiatrists and some Russian commentators have continued to argue that most committals were clinically motivated.
Soviet security organs and state psychiatrists confined dissenters, believers and would-be emigrants in psychiatric hospitals without criminal trial
The 1959 census recorded 208,826,650 people. The 20,000 figure is not an official statistic: it is an approximation built up from the case files compiled by the Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes, from émigré testimony, and from the partial disclosures of the late Soviet and Russian psychiatric professions.
There was no mass killing and no aggregate death toll exists. Deaths did occur in the special hospitals from drug regimes, beatings and neglect, and some detainees emerged with lasting psychiatric injury, but no systematic count has been produced from the archives.
Compulsory confinement without trial and the punitive use of drugs and restraint were documented by Amnesty International, by the Moscow Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes and by the World Psychiatric Association's 1983 proceedings.
Russia