ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY Semyon Gluzman and the Unraveling of Soviet Psychiatry Richard J. Bonnie J Am Acad Psychiatry Law 29:327-9, 2001 In 1971, Dr. Semyon Gluzman, a young Ukranian psychiatrist freshly out of medical training, wrote a report on the case of the dissident General Pytor Grigorenko, who had been prosecuted and found mentally nonresponsible in 1964, concluding that General Grigorenko had been hospitalized for polit ical reasons and without any medical justification. In response to thisdirect challenge to the Soviet regime, Dr. Gluzman was arrested and charged with "anti- Soviet agitation and propaganda" and was sentenced in October 1972 to seven years in a labor camp and three years of internal exile. While imprisoned, Dr. Gluzman persisted in calling attention to human rights violations in Soviet prisons and coauthored A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents (with Vladimir Bukovsky, 1974) as well as The Fear of Freedom (1978). Although reports had been circulating in the West for several years about the incarceration of po litical and religious dissenters in maximum-security psychiatric hospitals, Dr. Gluzman's imprisonment galvanized Western psychiatric associations into ac tion, leading to condemnation of Soviet psychiatry bytheWorld Psychiatric Association (WPA) in 1977 and to an active campaign for the release of Dr. Gluz man and other dissenting psychiatrists. Soviet psychiatric repression, representing a si multaneous violation of human rights and a breach of medical ethics, became a subject of in tenseconcern in international human rights circles and in the world medical community. Through- Mr. Bonnie is John S. Battle Professor of Law and Director of the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Address correspondence to Richard J. Bon nie, University of Virginia School of Law, 580 Massie Road, Char lottesville, VA 22903. E-mail: rbonnie@virginia.edu out this period, however, Soviet psychiatric offi cials denied the charges and refused to permit in ternational bodies to see the patients and hospitals in question. International criticism intensified. In 1983, the Soviet psychiatric association resigned from the WPA in the face of almost certain expulsion. Soviet Psychiatry was a "shadow overworld psy chiatry" for more than 20 years.1 Moreover, the con tinuing drama of psychiatric repression in the Soviet Union became a prominent feature of the intensify ing debate in the United States about the proper justifications for coerced psychiatric treatment and the ethical hazards of psychiatric diagnosis. Inevita bly, Soviet psychiatric abuses aroused the interest of leading figures in the developing subspecialty of law and psychiatry in thiscountry. Dr. Alan Stoneof the Harvard Law School evaluated Dr. Grigorenko in 1978 while he was in the West for medical treatment and found no evidence of mental illness.2 A decade later, as winds of change began to sweep across the Soviet Union, Dr. LorenRoth of the University of Pittsburgh Medical School undertook the complex task of negotiating with Soviet officials to set the terms of an investigatory mission by a U.S. State Department delegation instructed to "assess recent changes in Soviet psychiatry." Under the terms of this agreement, the delegation interviewed suspected victims of psychiatric imprisonmentand conducted unrestricted site visits to hospitals selected by the delegation. This extraordinary visit was arranged by the Soviet Foreign Ministry and the U.S. State De partment overthe objection of the Soviet psychiatric leadership. Volume 29, Number 3, 2001 327