ABSTRACT
The most noteworthy case, in the very early days of the new regime, was the prominent political figure Maria Spiridonova. During the Stalin period, the picture of psychiatric abuse is rather obscure but it does seem as if an embryonic policy to detain political dissenters in mental hospitals evolved in the late 1930s. The core group, probably no more than several dozen in number, contains psychiatrists who have participated in the examination of dissenters have been consulted in some way about them. The phenomenon of veiled dissent more properly fits into our final category of the average psychiatrist, which is composed of the many thousands of ordinary Soviet practitioners, bulk of the profession. The ordinary psychiatrist observes the norms and conventions of his society, knowing only too well that taking a single deviant step embodies great risk and danger. In January 1971 Vladimir Bukovsky took the crucial initiative of compiling 150 pages of documentation and sending them to Western psychiatrists.
