26 January 2025
by Sergei Tashevsky
Source: Sibir.Realii
On 23 January, at a session of the Kostroma region Duma, the local deputies unanimously approved the fateful decision to rename the psychiatric hospital in Nikolskoe. From now on it will be named after Academician Andrei Snezhnevsky, who is famous as the founding father of Soviet punitive psychiatry and the inventor of the term “sluggish schizophrenia”. It was he who at one time personally diagnosed Vladimir Bukovsky, Petro Grigorenko, and many other well-known dissidents. A very telling decision—bearing in mind that of late the Russian regime has been more and more willing to use psychiatry for their struggle against dissenters. This is a tested and cruel instrument, after all. True, as history shows, it’s not terribly effective.
“Soft and liberal”
Punitive psychiatry is based on a very simple, even primitive idea: if a dissenter is deemed insane, then everyone will quickly forget about him. This theory has not once been confirmed in all human history. As a rule, it works exactly the other way around. Many populations remember the “madmen”, whose names sometimes even go into school textbooks. Century after century, decade after decade, though, the Russian regime has sent its opponents (and is again sending them) to psikhushki (psychiatric hospitals), sincerely thinking that this is the best way to get rid of them. Who’s the insane one here? A rhetorical question, of course.
First to step on this rake was Emperor Nicholas the First. In 1826, immediately after publication of Chaadaev’s first article from his “Philosophical Letter” cycle in Teleskop, Chief of Gendarmes Benkendorf (here is who probably can be considered the founding father of punitive psychiatry in Russia) proposed to Nicholas that Chaadaev be deemed insane, inasmuch as “his article speaks of Russia, of the Russian people and their conceptions, faith, and history, with such contempt that it is incomprehensible even how a Russian might lower himself to such a degree as to write something like this”. In short, discreditation. But if the author was declared a “psycho,” no one would believe him.
“Very good”, Nicholas I wrote on Benkendorf’s report, and Chaadaev was immediately put under house arrest with a daily examination by doctors. True, people say that upon first meeting, the doctor summoned to observe him said to Chaadaev, “If it weren’t for my family, my wife and six children, I would show them who, in fact, is insane”.
Indeed, not only was Chaadaev not forgotten, but people literally caught every word of his, and his later “Philosophical Letters” and other writings, especially his “Apology of a Madman”, were widely circulated and were published abroad.
“I prefer castigating my homeland, I prefer grieving her, I prefer humiliating her—just so I don’t deceive her”.
Petr Chaadaev, “Apology of a Madman”
Nevertheless, the medical monitoring of Chaadaev was finally discontinued only 11 years later, in 1837, on condition that “he never write anything more”.
The confidence that the philosopher might agree to this unquestionably exposes in the gendarmes a certain inadequacy. Actually, though, not only in the gendarmes. The emperor himself took any word spoken against the state as a sign of insanity and thought he could “restore normality”.
When Pushkin was killed in a duel and someone named Lermontov wrote a poem extremely unflattering for the Russian authorities (a poem that to this day, apparently, every schoolchild learns by heart), Nicholas I reacted immediately: “Pleasant verse, no doubt. I sent Veimar to Tsarskoe Selo to look over Lermontov’s papers and, should other suspect ones be discovered, to seize them. For now I have ordered the senior medic of the Guards corps to pay this gentleman a visit and to ascertain whether he is mad; whereupon we shall deal with him according to the law”. However, someone probably dissuaded the monarch. Otherwise, Lermontov pronounced insane, Lermontov would have become a classic during his lifetime.
Whether experience had its effect or the rake rusted (and maybe the Benkendorf era simply dwindled to nothing), the Russian authorities for a surprisingly long time did not hide away any dissenters in madhouses. That is, Russia did have prison-type psychiatric hospitals, but it was almost exclusively dangerous criminals with real psychiatric disorders who ended up there. There were no illustrative stories like Chaadaev’s imprisonment up until the revolution.
Aleksandr Podrabinek, author of Punitive Medicine , one of the fundamental works on the history of this question in Russia, thinks that the “…mild, liberal nineteenth century was not yet capable of this, therefore the matter never got going—the moment hadn’t come”. Perhaps he is right, although the people who went through Siberian hard labor in the nineteenth century might well dispute this. But it’s always been like this in Russia: the past is better than the present.
And after all, there is also the future, God help us.
Snezhnevsky’s diagnosis
The future came pitilessly in 1917, when the so-called Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. They began promoting punitive psychiatry immediately before they had even managed to prove their own normality. Why should they, though? At the time, normality was defined accordng to a saying: Where drums speak, laws are silent. One of the first victims of Soviet punitive psychiatry was Maria Spiridonova, the leader of the party of Left Social Revolutionaries, a bomb thrower and political assassin in the past, who spoke out (strangely) against Lenin and the Bolshevik terror. Inasmuch as her prerevolutionary services and fame were tremendous, Dzerzhinsky could not bring himself simply to execute her. And then a brilliant idea came to him that he shared with Lenin.
“We have to get together with Obukh and Semashka (this is what the “iron people’s commissar” called two famous doctors loyal to the regime) about putting Spiridonova in a psychiatric home, but on condition that she not get stolen from there and does not run away”.
And that is what they did.
Actually, Stalin later restored justice—and as a result Spiridonov was after all executed absolutely like a “normal person”.
As Aleksandr Podrabinek justly notes, in the beginning, the Bolsheviks simply “had no need of a punitive measure as refined as isolation in psych hospitals”. In the 1930s, however, when the Great Terror reached its maximum proportions, the need for prison psych hospitals did arise. After all, among the millions arrested there were quite a few people with sick psyches, and even more went mad during their investigations and interrogations.
In 1939, at Beria’s personal instruction, a special section was created at the Kazan prison psychiatric hospital where they locked up thousands of people. There were towers at the corners of the territory and barbed wire stretched above the prison wall. This “hospital” was famous because during the war it became basically a death camp: virtually all the patients who arrived before summer 1942 perished from cold and hunger. It was this hospital that held Estonian president Konstantin Päts, who was arrested by osobisty (NKVD agents), a man whom Soviet doctors not without ridicule diagnosed as having a “mania of grandeur”: that is, he considered himself the president of some nonexistent country.
Held there later, now under Brezhnev, was Natalya Gorbanevskaya, a participant in the 25 August 1968 demonstration against the incursion of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia. After the war, more such “special” hospitals were added, in particular, one section was opened next to Petersburg’s Kresty prison (in the building of the former women’s prison, where in the late 1940s there were as many as a thousand people convicted under Article 58, moreover half were considered insane, while the diagnosis for the second half was not confirmed). Moreover, there was a psych hospital next to the Butyrka (the Butyrsk prison) in Moscow and also a prison-psychiatric hospital operating outside Tomsk. But more about this last a little later.
Many famous people passed through these “institutions”. For example, aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev, or Sergei Pisarev, an employee of the Sverdlovsk District Committee of the CPSU who dared write Stalin a letter opposing the “Doctors Plot”. It was Pisarev, whom the court rehabilitated in 1955, who became the first vocal fighter in the Soviet Union against punitive psychiatry, and he continued to demand the closure of psychiatric special hospitals under both Khrushchev and Brezhnev.
True, he did not consider himself a dissident. Pisarev thought he could achieve justice by sending letters to the Central Committee and appealing to Communist ideals, and, according to the recollections of people who knew him, “he was devoted to the CPSU, like a loyal dog”. He got what he deserved for his loyalty: in 1968 he was once again expelled from the party, and although he was not sent to a psikhushka again, up until his very death he was regarded as a madman. People like that could not be derailed by new repressions using punitive psychiatry.
Especially since in the 1960s this mode of struggle with dissenters was finally put on a massive scale in the Soviet Union, and it was Academician Andrei Snezhnevsky who played a considerable role in this. His career had begun before the war, when he was head doctor at the Kostroma Municipal Psychiatric Hospital, and in the early 1950s he was already heading the Serbsky Institute in Moscow, where he very successfully (“in the spirit of the times”) began a campaign against his colleagues who “relentlessly drank from the filthy spring of American pseudo-science”.
Snezhnevsky, out of spite for Western scientists, came up with a diagnosis that existed only in the Soviet Union and countries of the “Socialist camp”: sluggish schizophrenia”. His idea was that outwardly a person might look perfectly normal and his reactions might remain the reactions of a healthy person, but somewhere deep in his consciousness hid a schizophrenic pathology. This diagnosis could be given to anyone at all, and especially to freethinking people.
Soon after, Snezhnevsky’s efforts were properly appreciated at the KGB, where after the onset of Khrushhev’s “thaw” they were searching for a convenient instrument for their repressions—minus the prison camps and executions but no less effective. And here they’d found it. Now there was a “Soviet school of psychiatry”, which was prepared to issue the required diagnoses.
On 29 April 1969, KGB Chairman Andropov sent the Communist Party’s Central Committee a draft plan for expanding the network of psychiatric hospitals and proposals to perfect the use of psychiatric hospitals to protect the interests of the Soviet state and public order. These proposals were, needless to say, approved, and in a few years 11 new “special-type” psych hospitals had opened in the Soviet Union. According to statistics, from 1962 to 1974 the number of beds in psychiatric hospitals rose from 222,600 to 390,000.
Insanity holidays
Why so many? Were there really so many madmen or dissenters in the Soviet Union?
On ordinary days, no. But on public holidays…
Beginning in the 1970s, a couple of weeks before major public holidays (1 May and 7 November), the district and municipal committees of the CPSU would send out secret instructions to the head doctors of psych hospitals, prescribing hospitalization for “people with unpredictable behavior,” in order to ensure order on holidays. This category included both actual madmen, and dissidents, and members of religious communities, and independent activists, and many others. Many thousands of people were easily swept up. The same was repeated during visits from foreign guests, CPSU congresses, and—with special verve—the 1980 Olympics.
Moreover, in some central institutions, such as the waiting rooms of the Soviet Prosecutor’s Office and the Supreme Soviet, there was a practice of sending (with a police escort) particularly persistent visitors (“truthseekers”) to psychiatric hospitals. Documents of the Moscow Helsinki Group (1976, document No. 8) noted: “The police are sending approximately 12 people a day to duty psychiatrists just from the waiting room of the USSR Supreme Soviet; in addition, another 2-3 of those who attempted to enter an embassy; and in addition, an indefinite number from other offices as well as right off the street. Of these, approximately half have been hospitalized”.
Naturally, dissidents were sent to psych hospitals not only on “Red calendar days”. A broad wave of arrests began after the famous demonstration on Red Square against the incursion of troops into Czechoslovakia in 1968 and did not let up until the mid-1980s. Some were given prison camp sentences; others were hospitalized indefinitely in psych hospitals.
Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Petro Grigorenko, Valeriya Novodvorskaya, Zhores Medvedev, Leonid Plyushch, Vladimir Borisov, Viktor Fainberg, Aleksandr Esenin-Volpin, Vladimir Gershun… Nearly all of them received the imaginary Snezhnevsky diagnosis of “sluggish schizophrenia”. For the most part these names are known throughout the world as the names of people who were able to preserve their normality and dignity in the context of totalitarian insanity. In the late 1980s, Vladimir Bukovsky, giving an interview in the United States, said without irony, “…sluggish schizophrenia is a diagnosis invented by our country’s respected psychiatrist Professor Snezhnevsky, and the idea, consisting of the fact that schizophrenia can develop so imperceptibly and for so long that only he, Snezhnevsky, can discern it. He diagnosed me with ‘sluggish schizophrenia’ in 1962. I’m happy to report that it has remained sluggish to this day”.
But even if the matter did not reach the point of diagnosis and “treatment”, the “expert analysis” itself that went on in the special hospitals consisted of a series of agonizing procedures that were more like torture. And that, essentially, is what happened. High doses of haloperidol (which causes hellish pain and agonizing motor impairments) and “horse-sized” doses of the strongest neuroleptics, such as aminazine—all this could truly destroy the psyche of even the healthiest and sturdiest person. But there were other torments in these hospitals that were inquisitorially devised. As Joseph Brodsky, who went through “psychiatric analysis” in the special hospitals on “Pryazhka” after his arrest in 1964, recalled, “…late at night they would wake me up, submerge me in an icy bath, wind me in a wet sheet, and put me next to a radiator. The heat from the radiator would dry out the sheet so that it cut into my body”.
How many people in all went through this hell? To this day there are no precise statistics, but we are probably talking about tens of thousands. And although Aleksandr Podrabinek published Punitive Medicine back in 1978, this “medicine” went on just fine until the very last days of the Soviet Union. And afterward, the doctors who had essentially tortured their patients suffered no punishment whatsoever. To this day, many hold high positions, and medical students are required to cite their works. And some of their names have been given to psych hospitals, as only just happened in Kostroma.
The Tomsk story
In his book, Aleksandr Podrabinek lists ten Soviet psychiatric hospitals where there were special wards for “working with” dissidents. Tomsk Psychiatric Hospital is on this list.
Podrabinek writes: “A prison-psychiatric hospital near Tomsk. Located in the Chekist sovkhoz. Prisoners who were sick or feigned mental illness were sent to this hospital. In charge was Sofia Andreevna (surname unknown, unfortunately), a Tomsk deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR. There is evidence of systematic beatings taking place in this hospital.”
The Tomsk psychiatric treatment facility, which opened its welcoming doors in 1908, accepted patients from across the vast Tomsk Province, from Altai to the Arctic Circle. This led to the practice in Western Siberia of saying that peculiar people “came from Tomsk.” Meanwhile, in Tomsk, people deemed unusual might be advised to “visit Sosnovy Bor,” a quiet suburb where the red brick hospital buildings are tucked away under coniferous canopy.
Immediately after its opening early in the twentieth century, “one-hundred subjects under investigation” were sent there for forensic medical examination.
One of the first patients placed in the Tomsk hospital for forced treatment was Khioniya Guseva, a religious fanatic who made an attempt on the life of Grigory Rasputin in 1912.
The doctor treating the “terrorist” Guseva stated: “The subject speaks readily of her crime, noticeably drawing attention to it and boasting. She exclaims that she is now ‘a hero for all of Russia.’ The subject enjoys gathering an audience of patients and other subjects, trying to take centre stage, and making requests on behalf of others. Coquetry and affectation can be observed in her speech and deportment.”
Khioniya was held at the hospital until the February Revolution in 1917, after which she was released by personal order of Kerensky.
Under Soviet rule, the first use of the Tomsk psychiatric hospital for puntitive purposes was when Kronstadt mutineers were secretly sent there in 1921. These were the same revolutionary sailors praised by Soviet propaganda, who rebelled against Lenin and other “Bolshevik usurpers.” The Communists thought this was nothing short of madness, so those who escaped execution were sent for treatment. The exact details were not known when the treatment was taking place, but in 1925 local newspapers wrote about the state of the psychiatric hospital: “The property has been plundered, the buildings are falling into disrepair, two wards are totally empty, the patients (of which less than 800 remain) are starving, and the mortality rate has reached 50%.” The Tomsk psychiatric facility only began to emerge from disrepair in the 1930s, although it truly spread its wings during the war, when the Moscow Research Institute of Psychiatry was evacuated to the city, with all of its doctors and patients. Thus, it’s not surprising that after the war, in 1948, one of the prison-psychiatric wards opened was at Tomsk’s psychiatric hospital – the main one for all of Siberia. And it didn’t lie empty until the “thaw” began. In the late 1970s, it began to fill up with new patients, including dissidents and other free-thinkers.
In 1982, Tomsk was shaken by the “Scholar case,” the arrest of a group of professors and researchers from local universities who had been reading and distributing banned literature. One of these “scholars,” the translator Viktor Artsimovich, was sent to the psychiatric hospital, where he was given a diagnosis strange even by the ridiculous standards of the era: “philosophical intoxication.” When Artsimovich’s belongings were searched, “several bags of photocopied versions” of philosophical treatises were confiscated: Hegel and Kierkegaard in German, Sartre in French, and Saint Augustine in Latin.
“I had to translate the titles of these books for the KGB investigators,” Viktor Artsimovich told a Sib.Realii correspondent. “Every one of the investigators in Tomsk was ignorant and none knew foreign languages. Of course, they were completely unable to read all of these books and determine how ‘anti-Soviet’ they were. So the investigators simply used the fact that I had seen a psychiatrist a few years earlier, when I was going through a period of insomnia. The KGB decided they were better off sending me away to a psychiatric hospital than dealing with all that literature. The conditions at the hospital were initially difficult – I was doing so-called ‘occupational therapy,’ which actually just meant making clothespegs. They prescribed me haloperidol, which immediately made me feel sick. Luckily they stopped administering it quickly. And then the renowned Tomsk psychiatrist Vladimir Minvich came to my defence, and my life became much easier. In the hospital, I worked on translations; in particular, I translated the book One Hundred Years of Psychotherapy from English for Professor Krasik. I was allowed to take walks without supervision, and I even walked to Tomsk.”
At the request of the KGB, the Tomsk Regional Court ruled to place Artsimovich in a special ward of the psychiatric hospital. However, his lawyer was able to get the case reviewed by the Supreme Court of the RSFSR, which overturned the Tomsk court’s decision. A rare case in the Soviet courts.
After he was discharged from hospital Viktor Artsimovich lived in Tomsk for several years, subsequently relocating to Latvia with his family in 1991. In his Autobiography he recounts the period in which he underwent compulsory ‘treatment’:
“I spent a total of seven months at the detention facility and around eight months in a Tomsk psychiatric hospital. I’ll give you a few anecdotes that encapsulate my experience there.
At the beginning I was in ward No. 10. It was there that I had not long before undergone a forensic psychiatric examination. But right at the point at which I began my compulsory ‘treatment’ the ward was transferred from the TPB [prison mental hospital] to within the walls of the SIZO [pre-trial detention facility]. This was because of a big prison break that was instigated by prisoners who were in hospital for examination.
I still to this day remember an interesting patient from this ward. He often sang a famous Soviet melody, but with different lyrics:
And you doctors, will never get, my head to crack, help dear capital, help dear Moscow.
He complained to me about the fact that he’d already been at the hospital for ten years, in spite of the fact that the statute under which he had been admitted for compulsory treatment stipulated a term of no more than two years.
I remember another patient. He was a young, rather handsome guy. The story of how he had ended up on a ‘psych ward’ was rather a peculiar one. He was serving a total of one month ‘inside’ for a minor offence. But then a riot broke out at the very facility in which he was housed, and he ended up taking part. As I see it, he was somehow too over-dependent – I’d go as far as to say ‘simple’. I went on to discuss his case with a long-time inmate. If he had refused to then take part in the riot that erupted amongst those awaiting imminent release, the inmates would have understood. Yet he did so anyway. It’s not surprising that the person assessing him would have been led to conclude that he wasn’t right in the head. And that’s how he ended up receiving compulsory treatment in a special hospital facility.
Who’s the mad one in all of this?
All of this might have been viewed as the stuff of bygone days, and the hospital’s being named after Snezhnevsky an idiotic mishap, if it weren’t for the increasing use of psychiatry as a lever of repression. Today there are dozens of people convicted on the grounds of ‘discrediting the army’ and ‘justifying terrorism’ (along with other new-age variations of the old Article 58 on treason) being sent for psychiatric assessment and compulsory treatment. Meanwhile, the decision to refer someone to a psychiatric facility lies often not in the hands of doctors, but rather with police officers and investigators.
“We’ve already reverted to the Soviet practice of exploiting psychiatry for political aims. For now, it remains less widespread than in the Soviet era, but we are already seeing steps being taken in that direction. The current regime doesn’t miss a beat when it comes to reproducing all that is vile from our history. This is yet another way of instilling fear in our society,” says Aleksandr Podrabinek.
But just who is instilling fear in whom? And who’s losing their nerve? Against this backdrop, the story of the shaman Aleksandr Gabyshev, who in 2019 set out on foot from Yakutsk to Moscow in order to exorcise Putin from the Kremlin, appears very telling. Gabyshev wasn’t armed with bombs or a firearm. All he sought to do was –as per Yakutsk tradition– light a bonfire on Red Square, stoke it with kumis [fermented horse milk] and horsehair, play his tambourine and pray, after which “Putin would come to his senses and resign.” In any normal country such a “political demonstration” would in the worst-case scenario be scoffed at, with firefighters sent along to extinguish the fire. But apparently someone really thought that Gabyshev could drive out Putin like an evil spirit. Indeed, after a series of farcical trials, trumped-up charges (of assaulting a member of the Russian National Guard) and a clearly staged psychiatric examination, he was incarcerated in a mental hospital. He is still undergoing compulsory treatment at a clinic near Ussurisk.
This is just another dissenter whom the Russian authorities would prefer to forget, having pronounced him to be mad – and for whom they are carving out an image of a true hero. It may well be that if the shaman ever emerges from captivity, Putin will melt into the sky above the Kremlin in a puff of smoke. It seems that even the Russian president’s associates, even his loyal servants, believe this, otherwise why would Gabyshev be kept in a mental hospital? Could it just be that they – the investigators, judges, doctors – are the mad ones?
Or might everyone be?
Translated by Marian Schwartz, Nina dePalma and Nathalie Wilson
