Volume 24, Number 17 · October 27, 1977
Victims of Soviet Psychiatry: A Report from Honolulu
By Robert Coles
Psychiatric Terror: How Soviet Psychiatry Is Used to Suppress Dissent
by Sidney Bloch, by Peter Reddaway
Basic Books, 510 pp., $12.95
In the Soviet Union today, Marxist and psychiatric ideologues work together efficiently, even smoothly. This is a fairly recent development. During the power struggles of the 1920s and the mass purges of the 1930s, there was no need for the Kremlin's self-proclaimed Marxists to summon assistance from psychiatrists. In Stalin's time, his enemies, real or imaginary, were subjected to mock trials, then shot or locked up for good; there was no inclination to call them crazy. The Soviet ideological system had its convenient designations of 'bourgeois' or 'capitalist' or 'reactionary,' which were quite enough. The NKVD ran its own psychiatric hospital in the 1940s, but a substantial number of those confined in it were political prisoners who were obviously in bad shape psychologically—plagued by hallucinations, delusions, etc. The Russian poet Naum Korzhavin told Sidney Bloch, a psychiatrist, and Peter Reddaway, a political scientist, both English and co-authors of Psychiatric Terror, that up until '1948 at least, the practice of placing healthy people in mental hospitals was not malicious in intent but benevolent.'
Review, 4670 words
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