Legal and Political Developments in the Gorbachev and Yeltsin Administrations and After

Abstract

Political use of FSU psychiatric hospitals in the mid-nineties has virtually dropped off the horizon of reported post-Soviet affairs, displaced by more proximal, typically and traumatically Third World public concerns about the exploding inflation rate, bondage to international lending agencies, the growth of the second economy, the resurgent power of organized crime, public safety, disparate risks of outside encroachment, internal war and conflict in the near abroad. These emergency circumstances, with potentially global repercussions in world markets and on immigration, may eclipse the human rights concerns of the calmer seventies and eighties and overshadow the psychiatric reform efforts of the late eighties and nineties. Precisely because the reforms largely failed to redesign the underlying structures which made psychiatric abuse possible, this phenomenon could recur, should it serve the purposes of executive or other governmental agencies. A review of relevant Soviet and Russian law can illustrate why this potential still exists, even after the splintering of the Communist Party and the collapse of the Union.

In advanced industrialized societies and in modern, bureaucratic and welfare states, the institutions of violence generally operate more covertly. A whole array of educational, social welfare, medical, psychiatric, and legal experts collaborate in the management and control of sentiments and practices that threaten the stability of the state and the fragile consensus on which it claims to base its legitimacy.

(Scheper-Hughes, 1992:221)

The author would like to acknowledge her debt for background information for this chapter to the authors of a number of analyses, summaries and interpretations not publicly released or circulated. Due to the confidential nature of the materials, they cannot be formally cited.