Gulag

In the aftermath of the Thaw, the authorities began once again to use psychiatric hospitals to incarcerate dissidents—a policy which had many advantages for the KGB. Above all, it helped discredit the dissidents, both in the West and in the USSR, and deflected attention away from them. If these were not serious political opponents of the regime, but merely crazy people, who could object to their hospitalization?

With great enthusiasm, the Soviet psychiatric establishment participated in the farce. To explain the phenomenon of dissidence, they came up with the definition of “sluggish schizophrenia” or “creeping schizophrenia.” This, scientists explained, was a form of schizophrenia which left no mark on the intellect or outward behavior, yet could encompass nearly any form of behavior deemed asocial or abnormal. “Most frequently, ideas about a ‘struggle for truth and justice’ are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure,” wrote two Soviet professers, both of the Serbsky Institute:

A characteristic feature of overvalued ideas is the patient’s conviction of his own rectitude, an obsession with asserting his trampled “rights,” and the significance of these feelings for the patient’s personality. They tend to exploit judicial proceedings as a platform for making speeches and appeals.⁶⁸

And, by this definition, just about all of the dissidents qualified as crazy. The writer and scientist Zhores Medvedev was diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia” accompanied by “paranoid delusions of reforming society.” His symptoms included that of a “split personality”—meaning he worked both as a scientist and as a writer. Natalya Gorbanevskaya, the first editor of the Chronicle, was diagnosed with sluggish schizophrenia with “no clear symptoms,” but which resulted in “abnormal changes in emotions, wills and thought patterns.” The dissident Red Army General Pyotr Grigorenko was diagnosed with a psychological condition “characterized by the presence of reformist ideas, in particular for the reorganization of the state apparatus; and this was linked with ideas of overestimation of his own personality that reached messianic proportions. ”⁶⁹ In one report sent up to the Central Committee, a local KGB commander also complained that he had on his hands a group of citizens with a very particular form of mental illness: they “try to found new ‘parties,’ organizations, and councils, preparing and distributing plans for new laws and programs.”⁷⁰

Depending on the circumstances of their arrest—or non-arrest—prisoners deemed mentally ill could be sent to a variety of institutions. Some were assessed by prison doctors, others by clinics. In a category of its own was the Serbsky Institute, whose special diagnostic section, headed in the 1960s and 1970s by Doctor Danil Lunts, was responsible for assessing political offenders. Dr. Lunts personally examined Sinyavsky, Bukovsky, Gorbanevskaya, Grigorenko, and Viktor Nekipelov, among many others, and clearly had high status. ⁷¹ Nekipelov reported that he wore a blue uniform with two stars, “the insignia of a general in the MVD troops.” ⁷² Some Soviet émigré psychiatrists would claim that Lunts, and the others at the institute, were sincere in their belief that their patients were mentally ill. Most of the political prisoners who met him, however, have characterized him as an opportunist, carrying out the work of his MVD bosses, “no better than the criminal doctors who performed inhuman experiments on the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.” ⁷³

If diagnosed as mentally ill, patients were condemned to a term in a hospital, sometimes for a few months, sometimes for many years. The luckier ones were sent on to one of the several hundred ordinary Soviet psychiatric hospitals. These were unhygienic and overcrowded, and often staffed by drunks and sadists. Still, the drunks and sadists were civilians, and the ordinary hospitals were generally less secretive than prisons and camps. Patients were allowed to write letters with greater freedom, and could receive visit from people other than relatives.

Those deemed “especially dangerous,” on the other hand, were sent to the “special psychiatric hospitals,” of which there were only a handful. These were run directly by the MVD. The doctors in them had, like Lunts, MVD ranks. These hospitals looked and felt like prisons, and were surrounded by watchtowers, barbed wire, guards, and dogs. A photograph of the Oryol special psychiatric hospital taken in the 1970s shows patients exercising in an internal courtyard, indistinguishable from a prison exercise yard.⁷⁴