broad powers by allowing them to detain persons against their will conduct therapy — all while proclaiming it to be within the interest of the "patient" and the broader interests of society.

Called psikhushkas, Soviet psychiatric wards were a place where dissenters could be both confined and treated for their perceived conditions. Psikhushkas soon became an integral part of the larger psychiatric system, in which genuine psychiatric science worked in parallel with the politically imposed version. To a degree, it became part of a two-tiered system in which psychiatry was used as a form of political repression (primarily operating out of the Moscow Institute for Forensic Psychiatry) and a more genuine psychiatry (as practiced in the Leningrad Psychoneurological Institute). Once in full swing, the new system became integrated inhundreds of hospitals across the Soviet Union.

The campaign adopted a greater sense of mission during the late 1960s when open dissention started to become more commonplace, most notably through the agitation of such thinkers and activists as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. KBG chairman Yuri Andropov, who went on to become Premier, called for a renewed struggle against "dissidents and their imperialist masters." To that end he outlined and implemented a plan that went into effect in 1969. Looking to wipe out political dissent in the Soviet Union once and for all, Andropov made sure that psychiatry would continue to be used as a tool in the struggle.

Specifically, he issued a decree on "measures for preventing dangerous behavior (acts) on the part of mentally ill persons." Consequently, psychiatrists