SERBSKY INSTITUTE (The Professor V. P. Serbsky All-Union Research Institute of General and Forensic Psychiatry) – a central state institution in the USSR that developed the scientific foundations of social and forensic psychiatry and conducted forensic psychiatric examinations (SPE) of individuals facing criminal charges. Founded in 1921 in Moscow. It conducted inpatient and outpatient SPEs in criminal cases, including those handled by state security agencies. The conclusions of the SPEs served as the basis for court rulings to commit an arrested person to a special psychiatric hospital (SPH) with a regimen similar to that of a prison, or to a general-type hospital . The Institute also conducted medical re-examinations of SPH inmates and examinations of those who fell ill in places of detention.
From the mid-1930s, the Institute began to serve the political orders of the authorities. While formally subordinate to the USSR Ministry of Health, a number of the Institute’s departments were, in fact, under the control of state security agencies. Inpatient SPEs of individuals accused of “counter-revolutionary” (“especially dangerous state”) crimes were carried out in the Institute’s fourth department. Rulings on sanity were made by an expert commission that most often followed the “recommendations” of the investigative bodies. The actual mental state of the person being examined, as a rule, had no bearing on the commission’s conclusions. Beginning in the late 1950s, declaring dissidents mentally ill became an important component of Soviet punitive policy. The Institute began to consistently facilitate this form of repression, using its rulings to mask the political nature of the persecution.
The Institute’s role as an instrument of punitive psychiatry gained wide publicity thanks to the efforts of Moscow human rights activists—its former “patients” Pyotr GRIGORENKO and Vladimir Bukovsky. The Institute’s activities began to draw criticism from the international community of psychiatrists. A large body of material on the political bias of expert conclusions made by the Institute’s staff was successfully presented to the international community by the Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes (one of its members was the Kharkivite Anatoly KORYAGIN). In 1983, under threat of expulsion, the Soviet representatives were forced to withdraw from the World Psychiatric Association. In the late 1980s, the state security agencies’ control over the Institute ceased, as did the practice of using psychiatry for political purposes itself.
In 1992, the Institute was renamed the V. P. Serbsky State Scientific Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry (GNTsSSP). The Center’s activities continue to be criticized by independent psychiatrists and human rights activists, primarily for its unwillingness to condemn the punitive psychiatry of the Soviet period.
Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group – based on materials from the Moscow “Memorial”