or innocence and allow political incarceration without the ordinary odium attaching to such political trials. In the period from the 1960s to 1986, the abuse of psychiatry for political purposes was reported to have been systematic in the Soviet Union and episodic in other Eastern European countries such as Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. The practice of incarceration of political dissidents in mental hospitals in Eastern Europe and the former USSR damaged the credibility of psychiatric practice in these states and entailed strong condemnation from the international community. Psychiatrists have been involved in human rights abuses in states across the world when the definitions of mental disease were expanded to include political disobedience. As scholars have long argued, governmental and medical institutions have at times classified threats to authority during periods of political disturbance and instability as a form of mental disease. In many countries, political prisoners are still sometimes confined and abused in mental institutions. In the Soviet Union, dissidents were often confined in psychiatric wards commonly called psikhushkas. Psikhushka is the Russian ironic diminutive for "psychiatric hospital". One of the first penal psikhushkas was the Psychiatric Prison Hospital in the city of Kazan. In 1939, it was transferred to the control of the NKVD (the secret police and precursor of the KGB) on the orders of Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD. International human rights defenders such as Walter Reich have long recorded the methods by which Soviet psychiatrists in Psikhushka hospitals diagnosed schizophrenia in political dissenters. Western scholars examined no aspect of Soviet psychiatry as thoroughly as its involvement in the social control of political dissenters. Under Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev As early as 1948, the Soviet secret service took an interest in this area of medicine. One of those with overall responsibility for the Soviet secret police, pre-war Procurator General and State Prosecutor, the deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrey Vyshinsky, was the first to order the use of psychiatry as a tool of repression. Russian psychiatrist Pyotr Gannushkin believed that in a class society, especially during the most severe class struggle, psychiatry was incapable of not being repressive. A system of political abuse of psychiatry was developed at the end of Joseph Stalin's regime. Punitive psychiatry was not simply an inheritance from the Stalin era, however, according to Alexander Etkind. The Gulag, or Chief Administration for Corrective Labor Camps, was an effective instrument of