ABSTRACT
The Soviet Union inherited its tsarist predecessor’s system of institutions for psychiatric care centred upon hospitals. The importance of outpatient psychiatry remained limited during the New Economic Policy period, which partially restored a market economy in order to save the regime from the disaster it faced as a result of the civil war. During the first congress of psychiatrists in 1887, Ivan Sikorski underlined the great importance of heredity from both a practical and theoretical point of view. Nervism and hypnotism inspired psychiatrists to believe in a dual component – somatic and psychological – of nervous and mental illnesses. Leonid Prozorov thus argued that predisposition is not a determining factor for people suffering from psychological or nervous disorders following imprisonment. With the recognition of the psychological vulnerability of the individual, psychiatrists developed structures for the personal treatment of patients during the earliest stages, specifically targeting alcoholism and associated disorders.
