general secretary, from november 1982 to february 1984, yury andropov demonstrated little patience with domestic dissafection and continued the brezhnev era policy of confining dissenters in mental hospitals. examination and hospitalization political dissidents were usually charged under articles 70 (agitation and propaganda against the soviet state) and 190-1 (dissemination of false fabrications defaming the soviet state and social system) of the rsfsr criminal code. forensic psychiatrists were asked to examine offenders whose mental state was considered abnormal by the investigating officers. in almost every case, dissidents were examined at the serbsky central research institute for forensic psychiatry in moscow, where persons being prosecuted in court for committing political crimes were subjected to a forensic-psychiatric expert evaluation. once certified, the accused and convicted were sent for involuntary treatment to the special psychiatric hospitals controlled by the ministry of internal affairs (mvd) of the russian soviet federative socialist republic. the accused had no right of appeal. the right was given to their relatives or other interested persons but they were not allowed to nominate psychiatrists to take part in the evaluation, because all psychiatrists were considered fully independent and equally credible before the law. according to dissident poet naum korzhavin, the atmosphere at the serbsky institute in moscow altered almost overnight when daniil lunts took over as head of the fourth department (otherwise known as the political department). previously, psychiatric departments were regarded as a 'refuge' against being dispatched to the gulag. now that policy altered. the first reports of dissenters being hospitalized on non-medical grounds date from the early 1960s, not long after georgy morozov was appointed director of the serbsky institute. both morozov and lunts were personally involved in numerous well-known cases and were notorious abusers of psychiatry for political purposes. most prisoners, in viktor nekipelov's words, characterized daniil lunts as "no better than the criminal doctors who performed inhuman experiments on the prisoners in nazi concentration camps." a well-documented practice was the use of psychiatric hospitals as temporary prisons during the two or three weeks around the 7 november (october revolution) day and may day celebrations, to isolate "socially dangerous" persons who otherwise might protest in public or manifest other deviant behavior. struggle against abuse main article: struggle against political abuse of psychiatry in the soviet union in the 1960s, a vigorous movement grew up protesting against abuse of psychiatry in the ussr. political abuse of psychiatry in the soviet union was denounced in the course of the congresses of the world psychiatric association in mexico city (1971), hawaii (1977), vienna (1983) and athens (1989). the campaign to terminate political abuse of psychiatry in the ussr was a key episode in the cold war, inflicting irretrievable damage on the prestige of medicine in the soviet union. classification of the victims main article: cases of political abuse of psychiatry in the soviet union upon analysis of over 200 well-authenticated cases covering the period 1962–1976, sidney bloch and peter reddaway developed a classification of the victims of soviet psychiatric abuse. they were classified as: advocates of human rights or democratization; nationalists; would-be emigrants; religious believers; citizens inconvenient to the authorities. the advocates of human rights and democratization, according to bloch and reddaway, made up about half the dissidents repressed by means of psychiatry. nationalists made up about one-tenth of the dissident population dealt with psychiatrically. would-be emigrants constituted about one-fifth of dissidents victimized by means of psychiatry. people detained only because of their religious activity made up about fifteen per cent of dissident-patients. citizens inconvenient to the authorities because of their "obdurate" complaints about bureaucratic excesses and abuses accounted for about five per cent of dissidents subject to psychiatric abuse. incomplete figures in 1985, peter reddaway and sidney bloch provided documented data on some five hundred cases in their book soviet psychiatric abuse. true scale of repression on basis of the available data and materials accumulated in the archives of the international association on the political use of psychiatry, one can confidently conclude that thousands of dissenters were hospitalized for political reasons. from 1994 to 1995, an investigative commission of moscow psychiatrists explored the records of five prison psychiatric hospitals in russia and discovered about two thousand cases of political abuse of psychiatry in these hospitals alone. in 2004, anatoly prokopenko said he was surprised at the facts obtained by him from the official classified top secret documents by the central committee of the cpsu, by the kgb, and mvd. according to his calculations based on what he found in the documents, about 15,000 people were confined for political crimes in the psychiatric prison hospitals under the control of the mvd. in 2005, referring to the archives of the cpsu central committee and the records of the three special psychiatrial hospitals — sychyovskaya, leningrad and chernyakhovsk hospitals — to which human rights activists gained access in 1991, prokopenko concluded that psychiatry had been used as punitive measure against about 20,000 people for purely political reasons. this was only a small part of the total picture, prokopenko said. the data on the total number of people who had been held in all sixteen prison hospitals and in the 1,500 "open" psychiatric hospitals remains unknown because parts of the archives of the prison psychiatric hospitals and hospitals in general are classified and inaccessible. the figure of fifteen or twenty thousand political prisoners in psychiatric hospitals run by the soviet ministry of internal affairs was first put forward by prokopenko in the 1997 book mad psychiatry ("безумная психиатрия"), which was republished in 2005. an indication of the extent of the political abuse of psychiatry in the ussr is provided by semyon gluzman's calculation that the percentage of "the mentally ill" among those accused of so-called anti-soviet activities proved many times higher than among criminal offenders. the attention paid to political prisoners by soviet psychiatrists was more than 40 times greater than their attention to ordinary criminal offenders. this derives from the following comparison: 1–2% of all the forensic psychiatric examinations carried out by the serbsky institute targeted those accused of anti-soviet activities; convicted dissidents in penal institutions made up 0.05% of the total number of convicts; 1–2% is 40 times greater than 0.05%. according to viktor luneyev, the struggle against dissent operated on many more layers than those registered in court sentences. we do not know how many the secret services kept under surveillance, held criminally liable, arrested, sent to psychiatric hospitals, or who were sacked from their jobs, and restricted in all kinds of other ways in the exercise of their rights. no objective assessment of the total number of repressed persons is possible without fundamental analysis of archival documents. the difficulty is that the required data are very diverse and are not to be found in a single archive. they are scattered between the state archive of the russian federation, the archive of the russian federation state statistical committee (goskomstat), the archives of the rf ministry of internal affairs (mvd of russia), the fsb of russia, the rf general prosecutor's office, and the russian military and historical archive. further documents are held in the archives of 83 constituent entities of the russian federation, in urban and regional archives, as well as in the archives of the former soviet republics, now the 11 independent countries of the commonwealth of independent states or the three baltic states (baltics). concealment of the data according to russian psychiatrist emmanuil gushansky, the scale of psychiatric abuses in the past, the use of psychiatric doctrines by the totalitarian state have been thoroughly concealed. the archives of the soviet ministries of internal affairs (mvd) and health (ussr health ministry), and of the serbsky institute for forensic psychiatry, which between them hold evidence about the expansion of psychiatry and the regulations governing that expansion, remain totally closed to researchers, says gushansky. dan healey shares his opinion that the abuses of soviet psychiatry under stalin and, even more dramatically, in the 1960s to 1980s remain under-researched: the contents of the main archives are still classified and inaccessible. hundreds of files on people who underwent forensic psychiatric examinations at the serbsky institute during stalin's time are on the shelves of the highly classified archive in its basement where gluzman saw them in 1989. all are marked by numbers without names or surnames, and any biographical data they contain is unresearched and inaccessible to researchers. anatoly sobchak, the former mayor of saint petersburg, wrote: the scale of the application of methods of repressive psychiatry in the ussr is testified by inexorable figures and facts. a commission of the top party leadership headed by alexei kosygin reached a decision in 1978 to build 80 psychiatric hospitals and 8 special psychiatric institutions in addition to those already in existence. their construction was to be completed by 1990. they were to be built in krasnoyarsk, khabarovsk, kemerovo, kuibyshev, novosibirsk, and other parts of the soviet union. in the course of the changes that the country underwent in 1988, five prison hospitals were transferred from the mvd to the jurisdiction of the ministry of health, while another five were closed down. there was a hurried covering of tracks through the mass rehabilitation of patients, some of whom were mentally disabled (in one and the same year no less than 800,000 patients were removed from the psychiatric registry). in leningrad alone 60,000 people with a diagnosis of mental illness were released and rehabilitated in 1991 and 1992. in 1978, 4.5 million people throughout the ussr were registered as psychiatric patients. this was equivalent to the population of many civilized countries. in ukraine, a study of the origins of the political abuse of psychiatry was conducted for five years on the basis of the state archives. a total of 60 people were again examined. all were citizens of ukraine, convicted of political crimes and hospitalized on the territory of ukraine. not one of them, it turned out, was in need of any psychiatric treatment. alexander yakovlev (1923–2005), the head of the commission for rehabilitation of the victims of political repression from 1993 to 1995, a presidential decree on measures to prevent future abuse of psychiatry was being drafted at the commission for rehabilitation of the victims of political repression. for this purpose, anatoly prokopenko selected suitable archival documents and, at the request of vladimir naumov, the head of research and publications at the commission, emmanuil gushansky drew up the report. it correlated the archival data presented to gushansky with materials received during his visits, conducted jointly with the commission of the independent psychiatric association of russia, to several strict-regime psychiatric hospitals (former special hospitals under mvd control). when the materials for discussion in the commission for rehabilitation of the victims of political repression were ready, however, the work came to a standstill. the documents failed to reach the head of the commission alexander yakovlev. the report on political abuse of psychiatry prepared at the request of the commission by gushansky with the aid of prokopenko lay unclaimed and even the independent psychiatric journal (nezavisimiy psikhiatricheskiy zhurnal) would not publish it. the moscow research center for human rights headed by boris altshuler and alexey smirnov and the independent psychiatric association of russia whose president is yuri savenko were asked by gushansky to publish the materials and archival documents on punitive psychiatry but showed no interest in doing so. publishing such documents is dictated by present-day needs and by how far it is feared that psychiatry could again be abused for non-medical purposes. in its 2000 report, the commission for rehabilitation of the victims of political repression included only the following four phrases about the political abuse of psychiatry: the commission has also considered such a complex, socially relevant issue, as the use of psychiatry for political purposes. the collected documents and materials allow us to say that the extrajudicial procedure of admission to psychiatric hospitals was used for compulsory hospitalization of persons whose behavior was viewed by the authorities as "suspicious" from the political point of view. according to the incomplete data, hundreds of thousands of people have been illegally placed to psychiatric institutions of the country over the years of soviet power. the rehabilitation of these people was limited, at best, to their removal from the registry of psychiatric patients and usually remains so today, due to