The misuse of psychiatry as a tool of political repression has a long and sordid history. In the modern era alone, repressive regimes – from Nazi Germany to Castro’s Cuba to Mao’s China – have used involuntary psychiatric imprisonment, false diagnoses of mental illness, and other pseudo-scientific methods as a means of marginalizing, neutralizing or destroying dissidents, ideological enemies and other individuals troublesome to the state. However, perhaps nowhere else were these methods used so extensively or with such great refinement as in the Soviet Union.
