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Russian term
психушка (slang)
Translit: psikhushka
English: psychiatric hospital

Psikhushka (Russian: психушка) is a Russian colloquialism for psychiatric hospital. It has been occasionally used in English since the dissident movement in the Soviet Union became known in the West. In the Soviet Union, psychiatric hospitals were often used by the authorities as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally. The official explanation was that "no sane person would declaim against Soviet government and communism".

Contents 1 History 2 Soviet psychiatric abuse exposed 3 Reaction by the World Psychiatric Association 4 Recent developments 5 People 6 References 7 See also 8 Bibliography

Historians debate the circumstances around the origins of this practice, but there is evidence that it was used by the end of 1940s (see Alexander Esenin-Volpin), and it is generally believed that it was in wide use in the wake of the Khrushchev Thaw period in the 1960s.

On April 29, 1969 the head of KGB Yuri Andropov submitted to the Central Committee of CPSU a plan for creating of a network of psikhushkas.^[1]

The official Soviet psychiatric science came up with the definition of sluggishly progressing schizophrenia (вялотекущая шизофрения), a special form of the illness that supposedly affects only the person's social behavior, with no trace on other traits: "most frequently, ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure," according to the Moscow Serbsky Institute professors (a quote ^[2] from Vladimir Bukovsky's archives). Some of them had high rank in the MVD, such as the infamous Danil Luntz, who was characterized by Viktor Nekipelov as "no better than the criminal doctors who performed inhuman experiments on the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps".^[2]

The sane individuals who were diagnosed as mentally ill were sent either to a regular psychiatric hospitals or, those deemed particularly dangerous, to special ones, run directly by the MVD. The treatment included various forms of restraint, electric shocks, a range of drugs (such as narcotics, tranquilizers, and insulin) that cause long lasting side effects, and sometimes involved beatings. Nekipelov describes inhuman uses of medical procedures such as lumbar punctures.

In 1971, Bukovsky managed to smuggle to the West over 150 pages documenting abuse of psychiatric institutions for political reasons in the USSR. The facts galvanized the human rights activists worldwide, including inside the USSR. In January 1972, the Soviet authorities incarcerated Bukovsky for 7 years of imprisonment plus 5 years in exile, officially for contacts with foreign journalists and possession and distribution of samizdat (Article 70-1).

Together with a fellow inmate in Vladimir prison, psychiatrist Semyon Gluzman, Bukovsky coauthored A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents^[3] in order to help other dissidents fight abuses of the authorities.

In 1971, a renowned Soviet physicist Academician Andrei Sakharov supported protest of two political prisoners, V. Fainberg and V. Borisov, who announced a hunger strike against "compulsory therapeutic treatment with medications injurious to mental activity" in a Leningrad psychiatric institution.^[4] For his activism in defense of human rights Sakharov was expelled from the Soviet Academy of Sciences and sent to internal exile.

When early concerns were raised in the World Psychiatric Association (WPA), the Soviet delegation threatened to withdraw from the international organization and WPA held out its involvement in the issue. As the number of documented cases of abuse continued to increase and international protests started to mount, WPA changed its stance and adopted ethical code of conduct for its members and established investigative bodies to enforce it.

The first committee against the political abuse of psychiatry was founded in 1974 in Geneva. In 1977, the WPA's World Congress in Honolulu adopted the Declaration of Honolulu, the first document to set forth a set of basic ethical standards guiding the work of psychiatrists worldwide. The congress also officially condemned Soviet political psychiatric abuses for the first time. In 1982, facing imminent expulsion from the WPA, the Soviet delegation voluntarily withdrew, and in 1983 the WPA's World Congress in Vienna adopted a resolution that placed strict conditions on its return.

Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost campaign significantly contributed to the exposure of more evidence in the Soviet press. In 1989, two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Soviet delegation to the WPA's World Congress in Athens acknowledged that systematic abuse of psychiatry for political purposes had indeed taken place in their country.^[5]

Little has changed in Moscow Serbsky Institute since the 1980s. It conducts more than 2,500 court-ordered evaluations per year. When war criminal Yuri Budanov was tested there in 2002, the panel conducting the inquiry was led by Tamara Pechernikova, who earlier condemned poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya. Budanov was found not guilty by reason of "temporary insanity". After public outrage, he was found sane by another panel that included Georgi Morozov, the former Serbsky director who declared many dissidents insane in the past. ^[6]

It was reported that Serbsky Institute developed an expertise of mass poisoning of hundreds of Chechen school children by an unknown chemical substance of strong and prolonged action, which made them completely incapabale for many months. Panel found that the disease was caused simply the "psycho-emotional tension".^{[7] [8]}

There have beem numerous cases in the 2000s in which people "inconvenient" for Russian authorities have been imprisoned in psychiatric institutions. ^{[9] [10] [11]}

• Vladimir Bukovsky
• Alexander Esenin-Volpin
• Pyotr Grigorenko
• Zhores Medvedev
• Viktor Nekipelov
• Andrei Sakharov
• Natan Sharansky
• Andrei Sinyavsky

• Psychiatric imprisonment
• Human rights
• Gulag

• Antébi, Elizabeth (1977). Droit d'asiles en Union Soviétique. Paris: Julliard. ISBN 2260000657. 
• Applebaum, Anne (2003). Gulag: A History. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 0-7679-0056-1. 
• Boulet, Marc (2001). Dans la peau d'un.... Paris: Seuil. ISBN 2-02-038072-2. 
• Fireside, Harvey. Soviet Psychoprisons.