State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin

Dr Rebecca Reich examines politics, culture and reality in the Soviet Union

“Dissenters in the USSR responded by making literary use of psychiatric discourse to both validate themselves and challenge the authority of the state. “The impact of their essays, transcripts, poems and works of fiction may have seemed limited within the isolation and silence of their psychiatric wards and unpublished exchanges – but the diagnosis they pronounced on Soviet society would resound with ever more prescience in decades to come.” – Rebecca Reich

Towards the end of the 1960s, rumours began to spread in secret pamphlets and foreign newspapers that nonconformist citizens of the USSR were being diagnosed with mental illnesses and confined to psychiatric hospitals. Reports, passed hand-to-hand in samizdat (clandestine literature banned by the state), included transcripts of encounters with psychiatrists, official psychiatric records, personal accounts of hospitalisation, letters to Soviet and Western authorities, literary works of poetry and fiction, and periodicals such as the Chronicle of Current Events, which updated readers on cases of psychiatric abuse as well as other human rights concerns.

Some were written by former and current patients, others by concerned psychiatrists such as the dissident physician Semyon Gluzman, pictured. They were passed around in secret because even possession of such material might taint their owners as ‘inakomysliashchie’ – differently-thinking people who shared the authors’ dissenting frame of mind, a dangerous position to find oneself in the Cold War-era USSR.

Using false diagnoses of mental ill-health as a punitive measure was not a new way of weaponising the state apparatus against its own people, but it did run directly counter to promises of reform made by Khrushchev and others who sought to distance themselves from Stalin’s brutality.

By 1959, Khrushchev had decreed in a speech to the Union of Soviet Writers: “A crime is a deviation from the generally accepted norms of behavior in society, often caused by mental disorders. “Can there be diseases, mental disorders among certain people in a communist society? It appears there can be. If so, then there can also be offenses that are characteristic of people with abnormal minds.”

Khrushchev’s comments appeared to sanction a practice of using catch-all diagnoses such as ‘sluggish schizophrenia’ to subject dissidents and dissenting writers to evaluation and treatment at the V. P. Serbsky Institute for Forensic Psychiatry and Moscow’s Kashchenko psychiatric hospital, among other establishments.

New research by Cambridge academic Dr Rebecca Reich has uncovered how psychiatrists who pronounced such diagnoses relied on literary styles of storytelling that were also employed by those whom they condemned as mentally unstable.

At the same time, dissenters turned the language of psychiatry against the USSR itself.

Reich’s book, State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin examines the relationship between psychiatry and literature following Stalin’s death in 1953 right through to the decline of the USSR in the 1980s….

https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/state-of-madness

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