the period from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. As CPSU General Secretary, from November 1982 to February 1984, Yury Andropov demonstrated little patience with domestic dissafection and continued the Brezhnev Era policy of confining dissenters in mental hospitals. Examination and hospitalization Political dissidents were usually charged under Articles 70 (agitation and propaganda against the Soviet state) and 190-1 (dissemination of false fabrications defaming the Soviet state and social system) of the RSFSR Criminal Code. Forensic psychiatrists were asked to examine offenders whose mental state was considered abnormal by the investigating officers. In almost every case, dissidents were examined at the Serbsky Central Research Institute for Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow, where persons being prosecuted in court for committing political crimes were subjected to a forensic-psychiatric expert evaluation. Once certified, the accused and convicted were sent for involuntary treatment to the Special Psychiatric Hospitals controlled by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. The accused had no right of appeal. The right was given to their relatives or other interested persons but they were not allowed to nominate psychiatrists to take part in the evaluation, because all psychiatrists were considered fully independent and equally credible before the law. According to dissident poet Naum Korzhavin, the atmosphere at the Serbsky Institute in Moscow altered almost overnight when Daniil Lunts took over as head of the Fourth Department (otherwise known as the Political Department). Previously, psychiatric departments were regarded as a 'refuge' against being dispatched to the Gulag. Now that policy altered. The first reports of dissenters being hospitalized on non-medical grounds date from the early 1960s, not long after Georgy Morozov was appointed director of the Serbsky Institute. Both Morozov and Lunts were personally involved in numerous well-known cases and were notorious abusers of psychiatry for political purposes. Most prisoners, in Viktor Nekipelov's words, characterized Daniil Lunts as "no better than the criminal doctors who performed inhuman experiments on the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps." A well-documented practice was the use of psychiatric hospitals as temporary prisons during the two or three weeks around the 7 November (October Revolution) Day and May Day celebrations, to isolate "socially dangerous" persons who otherwise might protest in public or manifest other deviant behavior. Struggle against abuse In the 1960s, a vigorous movement grew up protesting against abuse of psychiatry in the USSR. Political abuse of psychiatry in the