used as punitive measure against about 20,000 people for purely political reasons. This was only a small part of the total picture, Prokopenko said. The data on the total number of people who had been held in all sixteen prison hospitals and in the 1,500 "open" psychiatric hospitals remains unknown because parts of the archives of the prison psychiatric hospitals and hospitals in general are classified and inaccessible. The figure of fifteen or twenty thousand political prisoners in psychiatric hospitals run by the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs was first put forward by Prokopenko in the 1997 book Mad Psychiatry ("Безумная психиатрия"), which was republished in 2005. An indication of the extent of the political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR is provided by Semyon Gluzman's calculation that the percentage of "the mentally ill" among those accused of so-called anti-Soviet activities proved many times higher than among criminal offenders. The attention paid to political prisoners by Soviet psychiatrists was more than 40 times greater than their attention to ordinary criminal offenders. This derives from the following comparison: 1–2% of all the forensic psychiatric examinations carried out by the Serbsky Institute targeted those accused of anti-Soviet activities; convicted dissidents in penal institutions made up 0.05% of the total number of convicts; 1–2% is 40 times greater than 0.05%. According to Viktor Luneyev, the struggle against dissent operated on many more layers than those registered in court sentences. We do not know how many the secret services kept under surveillance, held criminally liable, arrested, sent to psychiatric hospitals, or who were sacked from their jobs, and restricted in all kinds of other ways in the exercise of their rights. No objective assessment of the total number of repressed persons is possible without fundamental analysis of archival documents. The difficulty is that the required data are very diverse and are not to be found in a single archive. They are scattered between the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the archive of the Russian Federation State Statistical Committee (Goskomstat), the archives of the RF Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD of Russia), the FSB of Russia, the RF General Prosecutor's Office, and the Russian Military and Historical Archive. Further documents are held in the archives of 83 constituent entities of the Russian Federation, in urban and regional archives, as well as in the archives of the former Soviet Republics, now the 11 independent countries