Over the course of its 69-year history, the Soviet Union was notorious for its heavy-handed suppression of political dissent — most infamously through its use of the Siberian GULAGs. But it was during the 1960s and 1970s that the Communist Party took their intolerance for ideological deviance to extremes by diagnosing and institutionalizing so-called counterrevolutionaries with mental illness. It was a frightening episode in Soviet history in which perfectly healthy citizens could be deemed psychotic simply on account of their political views.

And indeed, what better way to deal with activists and naysayers than to diagnose them as being mentally unstable. Dissenters, who were often seen as both a burden and a threat to the system, could be easily discredited and detained.

Moreover, it served as a powerful and disturbingdefined madness"

The advent of Soviet psychoprisons coincided with the rise in power and influence of the KGB, the infamous secret service wing of the Communist Party. They started to take an interest in medicine as a potential instrument of control as early as 1948 under the Stalin regime. The use of GULAGs was starting to fall out of favor, so it was around this time that the high-ranking KGB officer Andrey Vyshinsky ordered the use of psychiatry as a way to both quash dissent and still send a message to any would-be activists.

Indeed, psychiatry had great potential as a control mechanism — more so than other areas of medicine. The Communist Party was eager to take advantage. They knew that a diagnosis of mental illness could confer them