Soviet psychiatrists under Stalinist duress: the design for a 'new Soviet psychiatry' and its demise

Abstract

A Scientific Session of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences met in 1950 in Moscow, to comply with the order of I. V. Stalin to institutionalize the theory of higher nervous activity of I. P. Pavlov. This Scientific Session decreed that annual scientific conferences should be held to consider problems related to Pavlovian physiology. In response to this call, a session on the 'Physiological Teachings of the Academician I. P. Pavlov on Psychiatry and Neuropathology' was convened in Moscow in 1951. Certain influential Soviet psychiatrists - V. A. Giliarovskii, M. O. Gurevich and A. S. Shmar'ian — were condemned for adhering to anti-Marxist ideology and to psychiatric theories conceived by Western psychiatrists. The named psychiatrists acknowledged the correctness of the accusations, admitted their 'errors', and promised in the future to follow Pavlov's teachings on psychiatry. The session's Presidium urged the development of a 'New Soviet Psychiatry' based upon experimental and clinical findings and consistent with the Pavlovian conceptu alization of higher nervous activity, which considered psychiatric and neurotic syndromes in terms of the dynamic localization of the brain's functions. Long- range consequences of the 1951 session are considered.