The Insulin Gulag: Involuntary Hospitalization, Stalin's Psycho-Zone, and the Making of Soviet Punitive Psychiatry

• In Event: Punitive Psychiatry in Russian Empire, the USSR, and Socialist Eastern Europe, 1905 – 1970s

Abstract

Scholars have long viewed Soviet psychiatry as an instrument of social control, but the origins and character of punitive psychiatric interventions in the Soviet context have eluded study. Between 1929 and 1953, Soviet legal and medical administrators gradually linked forensic psychiatry, the sub-discipline responsible for examining the intersection of criminal behavior and mental illness, intimately to the institutions of the now infamous Gulag, where forensic psychiatric research centers, departments, and sections served simultaneously as sites of refuge and repression, survival and social control. I argue that the Stalinist emphasis on the curative nature of punishment (as labor) within the camps and the subsequent failure of the Gulag to actually rehabilitate prisoner-patients circumscribed the discursive, methodological, and practical operations of forensic psychiatry during and after the Stalin era, and that while the limited legal liberalization that followed Stalin’s death granted forensic psychiatrists the opportunity to reassert their expertise and authority, literally transforming the installations of the Gulag into new forensic psychiatric facilities, it did not supplant the embedded revolutionary and technocratic project to coercively transform bodies and minds for the benefit of the Soviet social body and its productive capacity.

Author

• Garret James McDonald, St. Mary's College of Maryland