Semyonov, and Yakov Frumkin. All were members of the "Moscow school" of psychiatry. A majority of experts believe that the concept was developed under instructions from the Soviet secret service KGB and the Communist Party. Use against political dissidents Psychiatric diagnoses such as sluggish schizophrenia were used in the USSR for political purposes; the diagnosis of sluggish schizophrenia was most frequently used for Soviet dissidents. Sluggish schizophrenia as a diagnostic category was created to facilitate the stifling of dissidents and was a root of self-deception among psychiatrists to placate their consciences when the doctors acted as a tool of oppression in the name of a political system. American psychiatrist Peter Breggin points out that the term "sluggish schizophrenia" was created to justify involuntary treatment of political dissidents with drugs normally used for psychiatric patients. Critics implied that Snezhnevsky designed the Soviet model of schizophrenia (and this diagnosis) to make political dissent a mental illness. St. Petersburg academic psychiatrist professor Yuri Nuller notes that the concept of Snezhnevsky's school allowed psychiatrists to consider, for example, schizoid psychopathy and even schizoid character traits as early, delayed in their development, stages of the inevitable progredient process, rather than as personality traits inherent to the individual, the dynamics of which might depend on various external factors. The same also applied to a number of other personality disorders. It entailed the extremely broadened diagnostics of sluggish (neurosis-like, psychopathy-like) schizophrenia. Despite a number of its controversial premises, but in line with the traditions of then Soviet science, Snezhnevsky's hypothesis immediately acquired the status of dogma, which was later overcome in other disciplines but firmly stuck in psychiatry. Snezhnevsky's concept, with its dogmatism, proved to be psychologically comfortable for many psychiatrists, relieving them from doubt when making a diagnosis. On the covert orders of the KGB, thousands of social and political reformers—Soviet dissidents—were incarcerated in mental hospitals after being labelled with diagnoses of sluggish schizophrenia. Snezhnevsky himself diagnosed, or was otherwise involved in, a series of famous dissident cases, and in dozens of cases he personally signed a commission decision on the legal insanity of dissidents who were in fact mentally healthy, including Vladimir Bukovsky, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Leonid Plyushch, Mikola Plakhotnyuk, and Pyotr Grigorenko. Revaz Korinteli, a professor of the Grigol Robakidze University, says that Snezhnevsky broadened the borders of schizophrenia, and in this connection there was legal and theoretical justification for employing compulsory, involuntary treatment of