exceptional cases. According to American psychiatrist Jonas Robitscher, psychiatry has been playing a part in controlling deviant behavior for three hundred years. Vagrants, "originals," eccentrics, and homeless wanderers who did little harm but were vexatious to the society they lived in were, and sometimes still are, confined to psychiatric hospitals or deprived of their legal rights. Some critics of psychiatry consider the practice as a political use of psychiatry and regard psychiatry as promoting timeserving. As Vladimir Bukovsky and Semyon Gluzman point out, it is difficult for the average Soviet psychiatrist to understand the dissident's poor adjustment to Soviet society. This view of dissidence has nothing surprising about it—conformity reigned in Soviet consciousness; a public intolerance of non-conformist behavior always penetrated Soviet culture; and the threshold for deviance from custom was similarly low. An example of the low threshold is a point of Donetsk psychiatrist Valentine Pekhterev, who argues that psychiatrists speak of the necessity of adapting oneself to society, estimate the level of man's social functioning, his ability to adequately test the reality and so forth. In Pekhterev's words, these speeches hit point-blank on the dissidents and revolutionaries, because all of them are poorly functioning in society, are hardly adapting to it either initially or after increasing requirements. They turn their inability to adapt themselves to society into the view that the company breaks step and only they know how to help the company restructure itself. The dissidents regard the cases of personal maladjustment as a proof of public ill-being. The more such cases, the easier it is to present their personal ill-being as public one. They bite the society's hand that feed them only because they are not given a right place in society. Unlike the dissidents, the psychiatrists destroy the hardly formed defense attitude in the dissidents by regarding "public well-being" as personal one. The psychiatrists extract teeth from the dissidents, stating that they should not bite the feeding hand of society only because the tiny group of the dissidents feel bad being at their place. The psychiatrists claim the need to treat not society but the dissidents and seek to improve society by preserving and improving the mental health of its members. After reading the book Institute of Fools by Viktor Nekipelov, Pekhterev concluded that allegations against the psychiatrists sounded from the lips of a negligible but vociferous part of inmates who when surfeiting themselves with