Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union - Wikipedia
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The Soviet system used psychiatry as a weapon by diagnosing political opponents as mentally ill in order to confine them as patients instead of trying them in court. Anyone who challenged the state such as dissidents, writers, would-be emigrants, religious believers, or human rights activists could be branded with fabricated disorders like sluggish schizophrenia. This turned normal political disagreement into supposed medical pathology and allowed the state to present dissent as insanity.

Once labeled in this way, people were placed in psychiatric hospitals where they could be held for long periods without legal protections. Harsh treatments were often used to break their resolve. The collaboration between state security organs and compliant psychiatrists created a system where political imprisonment was disguised as medical care, letting the Soviet regime suppress opposition while pretending it was addressing illness rather than silencing critics.

  • Justas🇱🇹@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    That day has come.

    The ‘compulsion for stealing’ has survived the era of hired agricultural hands. Socialism has not only sustained it, but extended it to the entire society. It became a built-in part of the whole system. Stealing (and I use this term in its broadest sense) in all its ritual, symbolic and other implications, has become an engrained element of peasant culture today, as much a part of it as, say, Maypoles or Easter eggs. Stealing these days is not done by just some people but by almost everyone. The chief accountant steals just the same as the animal-feeder who hides groats in his trousers or in her bra, or the watchman who knows full well what goods workers smuggle home, or the swine-tender who deliberately breaks the animal’s leg on the trough so that members of the cooperative may buy it cheaply. ('You want a suckling? You shall have it tonight … ') Everyone is familiar with the system. What a cooperative member finds demoralizing is not the fact that the whole system is based on stealing, but that he cannot steal enough (Sozan, 1985: 95-6, this author’s translation).