Additional Reading & Viewing

You may have to search used book stores, off- and online, to find some of these items, as this subject has been little documented since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Punitive Medicine, by Aleksandr Podrabinek, Alexander Lehrman (Translator), Karoma Publishers (1980).

Institute of Fools: Notes from Serbsky, by Victor Nekipelov, Marco Carynnyk (Translator), Leonid Plyushch (Translator), Marta Horban (Translator), Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1981).

Soviet Psychiatric Abuse: The Shadow over World Psychiatry, by Sidney Bloch, Peter Reddaway, Westview Press (1985).

Russian Psychology: A Critical History, by David Joravsky, Blackwell Publishers (1989).

Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, by Martin Alan Miller, Hardcover, October 1998, 256pp, Yale University Press (1998)

Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880-1930, by Irina Sirotkina, Johns Hopkins University Press (2002).

Ward No. 6, a short story by Anton Chekhov, in which a doctor starts up a friendship with a patient, with unhappy results.

Buddha’s Little Finger, by Victor Pelevin, Viking (2001), in which the protagonist floats back and forth between two realities, one in which he serves as commissar to the legendary Chapayev, another in which he is an inmate in a modern psychiatric ward. 

House of Fools, a film by Andrei Konchalovsky (2002), depicting an asylum caught in the middle of the Russo-Chechen war, when the inmates are left to run the asylum.