During Leonid Brezhnev’s rule, Soviet authorities used psychiatric diagnoses and involuntary hospitalization as a punishment for dissent. Vladimir Bukovsky was arrested on 1 June 1963 after possessing banned literature, declared mentally ill under Article 70.1 of the RSFSR Criminal Code, and confined for almost two years at Leningrad’s Special Psychiatric Hospital. He later documented a broader system in which healthy dissidents were held indefinitely in psychiatric hospitals or prison-hospitals controlled by the KGB, exposed to psychotropic drugs, and isolated from society.
In 1971 Bukovsky smuggled more than 150 pages of medical and legal records to Western psychiatrists, naming cases including General Petro Grigorenko, Viktor Fainberg, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, and others. He was arrested on 29 March 1971 and sentenced in January 1972 to two years in prison, five years in a labour camp, and five years of internal exile. International pressure followed: 44 European psychiatrists questioned the diagnoses in 1972, the World Psychiatric Association condemned Soviet practices in 1977, and Soviet representatives withdrew from the association in 1983 rather than face expulsion. The episode helped establish international monitoring of political misuse of psychiatry.
