On 29 April 1969, Andropov submitted an elaborate plan to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to set up a network of mental hospitals that would defend the "Soviet Government and the socialist order" from dissenters. To persuade his fellow Politburo members of the risk posed by the mentally ill, Andropov circulated a report from the Krasnodar Region. A secret resolution of the USSR Council of Ministers was adopted. Andropov's proposal to use psychiatry for struggle against dissenters was adopted and implemented. In 1929, the USSR had 70 psychiatric hospitals and 21,103 psychiatric beds. By 1935, this had increased to 102 psychiatric hospitals and 33,772 psychiatric beds, and by 1955 there were 200 psychiatric hospitals and 116,000 psychiatric beds in the Soviet Union. The Soviet authorities built psychiatric hospitals at a rapid pace and increased the quantity of beds for patients with nervous and mental illnesses: between 1962 and 1974, the number of beds for psychiatric patients increased from 222,600 to 390,000. Such an expansion in the number of psychiatric beds was expected to continue in the years up to 1980. Throughout this period the dominant trend in Soviet psychiatry ran counter to the vigorous attempts in Western countries to treat as many as possible as out-patients rather than in-patients. On 15 May 1969, a Soviet Government decree (No. 345–209) was issued "On measures for preventing dangerous behavior (acts) on the part of mentally ill persons." This decree confirmed the practice of having undesirables hauled into detention by psychiatrists. Soviet psychiatrists were told whom they should examine and were assured that they might detain these individuals with the help of the police or entrap them into coming to the hospital. The psychiatrists thereby doubled as interrogators and as arresting officers. Doctors fabricated a diagnosis requiring detention and no court decision was required for subjecting the individual to indefinite confinement in a psychiatric institution. By the end of the 1950s, confinement to a psychiatric institution had become the most commonly used method of punishing leaders of the political opposition. In the 1960s and 1970s, the trials of dissenters and their referral for "treatment" to the Special Psychiatric Hospitals under MVD control and oversight came out into the open, and the world learned of a wave of "psychiatric terror" which was flatly denied by those in charge of the Serbsky Institute. The bulk of psychiatric repression spans