Moscow Serbsky Institute

Moscow Serbsky Institute for Social and Forensic Psychiatry (Центр социальной и судебной психиатрии им. В.П.Сербского) is a psychiatric hospital and the main center for the forensic psychiatry of the Soviet Union and Russia. The hospital got a lot of negative publicity because many Soviet dissidents were incarcerated and tortured there.

Institute
The Institute was organized in 1921. The institute is named after Russian psychiatrist Vladimir Serbsky. One of the main stated purpose of the institute is forensic psychiatry for the criminal courts. Moscow Serbsky Institute conducts more than 2,500 court-ordered evaluations per year.

The Institute also claimed leadership in studying different types of psychosis, brain trauma, alcoholism and drug addiction. Among the celebrities treated there of addictions was Vladimir Vysotsky. The current director of the Institute is Tatyana Dmitrieva

Instrument of psychiatric repressions
In the Soviet Union, psychiatric hospitals were often used by the authorities as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally. The official explanation was that "no sane person would declaim against Soviet government and communism". Such hospitals were called Psikhushkas (a Russian colloquialism).

Alexander Esenin-Volpin, Viktor Nekipelov, and Zviad Gamsakhurdia  were among the prisoners of Serbsky Institute. Gen. Pyotr Grigorenko was determined as insane in the Serbsky Institute because he "was unshakably convinced of the rightness of his actions" and twisted by "reformist ideas."

The official Soviet psychiatric science also came up with the definition of "sluggishly progressing schizophrenia", a special form of the illness that supposedly affects only the person's social behavior, with no trace on other traits: "most frequently, ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure," according to the Serbsky Institute professors (a quote from Vladimir Bukovsky's archives). Some of them had high rank in the MVD, such as the infamous Danil Luntz, who was characterized by Viktor Nekipelov as "no better than the criminal doctors who performed inhuman experiments on the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps".

Recent years
According to the Institute director Tatyana Dmitrieva the Institute is completely changed now and is not used for the repressive psychiatry anymore. The rooms there Soviet dissidents were prisoned are used only to treat alcohol and drug addicts now.

Many psychiatric trials were pursued in order to confirm the unability to understand and to will of many high-rank official in cases of rapes and murders, as occurred in Chechnya by Yuri Budanov (he was eventually charged for his crimes, after more than three years of trials).

On the other hand, Yuri Savenko, head of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia alleges that "practically nothing has changed. They have no shame at the institute about their role with the Communists. They are the same people, and they do not want to apologize for all their actions in the past". Attorney Karen Nersisyan agrees: "If they didn’t tell me it’s the Russian Federation now, I wouldn’t know there was any difference at Serbsky Institute from Soviet times. Serbsky is not an organ of medicine. It’s an organ of power."

Recent controversies
Moscow Serbsky Institute conducts many court-ordered evaluations. Results of some of them are hotly disputed


 * When war criminal Yuri Budanov was tested there in 2002, the panel conducting the inquiry was led by Tamara Pechernikova, who condemned poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya. Budanov was found not guilty by reason of "temporary insanity". After public outrage, he was found sane by another panel that included Georgi Morozov, the former Serbsky director who declared many dissidents insane in the past.


 * Serbsky Institute also made an evaluation of the alleged mass poisoning of hundreds of Chechen school children Panel found that the disease was caused simply the "psycho-emotional tension".


 * There are numerous cases when people "inconvenient" for Russian authorities are imprisoned in psychiatric institutions in 2000s.  . Some of the these people were diagnosed at the Serbsky Institute.