The World - News from Nov. 23, 1988

Psychiatry was systematically used in the 1970s to suppress Soviet dissidents by declaring them mentally ill and committing them to asylums, a Soviet doctor wrote in the first article printed by state-run media to acknowledge such abuses. “The leadership was content: in our country there were no dissidents--there were only insane people,” Mikhail I. Buyanov, a psychiatrist and neurologist, wrote in an article published by the educational newspaper Uchitelskaya Gazeta. Under the late Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev, psychiatrists gave law enforcement officials the idea that “anyone who is against anything . . . is a covert or overt mental case,” Buyanov wrote. The article gave no figures for the number of dissidents sent to mental hospitals.