Xinhua News Agency: Soviet Revisionists' Cruel Suppression of the People Using “Psychiatric Hospitals” (1977)

Xinhua News Agency, February 21, 1977

Report by the agency's correspondent: In order to strengthen fascist dictatorship at home, the Brezhnev traitor group intensified the use of "psychiatric hospitals" as a tool to suppress the Soviet people. They labeled dissatisfied and rebellious revolutionaries and dissidents as "mentally ill" and arbitrarily persecuted them in "psychiatric hospitals," with methods as brutal as, or even exceeding, Hitler's concentration camps and prisons.

Currently, the Soviet Union has a multitude of psychiatric institutions, including psychiatric hospitals, psychiatric clinics, psychiatric research institutes, and psychiatric sanatoriums, most of which were established after Brezhnev came to power. These institutions are divided into general and special types, but even general psychiatric hospitals have special departments. Many are directly controlled by the state security committee, i.e., the KGB. Among those placed in these hospitals are genuine mental patients as well as mentally sound opponents of the Soviet revisionist regime. The Soviet newspaper "Pravda" once admitted: "Soviet medicine can ensure that only those with mental disorders receive treatment, but it cannot guarantee that among them there are no so‑called dissidents."

The use of "psychiatric hospitals" to suppress the Soviet people is ironclad evidence that the Soviet revisionist traitor group is moving ever farther down the fascist path, and also a sign of its cowardice. Fascist dictatorship has provoked increasingly strong resistance from the Soviet people, which the Soviet authorities hate to death and fear to death. They fear that normal trials would lead to public exposure and accusations of the authorities' crimes, so they declare those they deem "dangerous elements" as "madmen," transport them to "psychiatric hospitals," and subject them to secret persecution.

To legitimize this fascist atrocity, Soviet authorities fabricated a series of legal regulations. In October 1961, the Soviet Ministry of Health stipulated: if a mentally ill person poses a clear danger to those around him or to himself, the health department may, without the consent of the patient or his relatives or guardians, send him to a "psychiatric hospital." According to Articles 58‑60 of the Russian Criminal Code, a person lacking criminal responsibility, or a person with criminal responsibility who develops a mental illness before a court judgment or during imprisonment, "shall be ordered by the court to be sent to a general or special psychiatric hospital for compulsory treatment."

From Western newspaper reports and material disclosed within the Soviet Union, it can be seen that Soviet authorities used the above laws to throw tens of thousands of people into "psychiatric hospitals," a form of disguised prison. Among them were revolutionaries advocating the overthrow of the Soviet revisionist regime, dissidents opposing national oppression and defending human rights, and ordinary people opposing the Soviet revisionist traitor group's external aggression. As early as August 25, 1968, during the famous demonstration on Moscow's Red Square against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, protesters carried slogans such as "Long live free and independent Czechoslovakia!" and "Occupiers are shameful!" Seven demonstrators were arrested on the spot. Some were exiled, some sent to labor camps, and some sent to "psychiatric hospitals." The artist V. Feenberg and the poet N. Gorbanevskaya were both sent to "psychiatric hospitals." Feenberg was told, "Your illness is your dissenting way of thinking."

Even former Soviet Major General B. Grigorenko was twice confined to a "psychiatric hospital" for his dissent. On January 22, 1969, Soviet army engineer lieutenant Ilyin attempted to shoot a Soviet revisionist leader on Red Square; the Soviet authorities declared him "suffering from chronic schizophrenic psychosis" and sent him to a special "psychiatric hospital" for "compulsory treatment." An engineer was confined to a "psychiatric hospital" merely for having once opposed the politically motivated expulsion of a student at a student meeting. He repeatedly lodged complaints to the "hospital," but those complaints became further pretexts for his "treatment."

Many Soviet "psychiatric hospitals" were former prisons. For example, the Chernyakhovsk Psychiatric Hospital in Kaliningrad Oblast was once a Nazi German prison. The Arseninaia Psychiatric Hospital in Leningrad was a women's prison during the Tsarist era. The Orel Psychiatric Hospital in Orel Oblast occupies the former site of a central prison where the Tsar once incarcerated large numbers of Bolsheviks.

Staff of the "psychiatric hospitals" that housed political prisoners were selected from Soviet security agencies. Both senior and junior medical personnel held military ranks and wore uniforms under their white coats. The notorious head of the Moscow Serbsky Psychiatric Research Institute, Colonel Lentz, was a KGB colonel. He once told a "patient": "I say who is a schizophrenic patient, and they become schizophrenic. If I say a ashtray harms schizophrenia, it will have schizophrenia."

The methods used to "treat" "patients" in these "psychiatric hospitals" were essentially torture. Former Major General Grigorenko condemned: "'Psychiatric hospitals' are the most terrifying of all prisons." Political prisoners declared "mentally ill" were completely isolated from the outside world after being placed in these institutions, stripped of all rights, and subjected daily to beatings and humiliation. The "therapies" employed were varied, including a method called the "wet wrap," in which the patient was wrapped in wet canvas, bound with wide belts, and as the canvas dried it tightened, making breathing difficult. Another "therapy" involved forced injection of harmful drugs, such as a potent anesthetic that caused high fever, loss of muscle control, memory system damage, severe brain injury, and extreme exhaustion.

Another "therapy" used to crush the will of "disobedient patients" was the injection of a hallucinogen that "caused indescribable suffering and great destruction to the human body." A mathematics teaching assistant, punished for writing poetry as a hobby and charged with "anti‑Soviet propaganda," was confined to a "psychiatric hospital." He complained that after injection of chlorpromazine, the "patient" "lost personality, became intellectually dull, emotions were damaged, memory vanished; it was the death of creativity: after chlorpromazine injection, even the ability to read was gone."

When Lenin condemned the Tsar's dark rule, he wrote: the police's despotism, torture, and moral decay "reached such a pinnacle that even the hardest stone would sigh!" ("Internal Affairs Review," Lenin Complete Works, vol. 5, p. 258). Today, the new tsar's barbaric persecution of the Soviet people has long surpassed that of the old tsar. The methods used by the Brezhnev traitor group to oppress the people have been strongly condemned both inside and outside the Soviet Union.

Some say: "The use of so‑called psychiatric treatment to suppress dissenters can be compared to the practices of Nazi Germany." "Locking healthy, free‑thinking individuals in psychiatric hospitals is a mental murder; it is a variant of Hitler's gas chambers, even more cruel: there, the victims suffered harsher torture and longer torment. Like the gas chambers, these crimes will never be forgotten, and those who committed them will be cursed from life through death.