In the closing speech, Andrei Snezhnevsky, the lead author of the Session's policy report, stated that the accused psychiatrists "have not disarmed themselves and continue to remain in the old anti-Pavlovian positions", thereby causing "grave damage to the Soviet psychiatric research and practice". The vice president of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences accused them of "diligently worshipping the dirty source of American pseudo-science". Those who articulated these accusations at the Joint Session – among them Irina Strelchuk, Vasily Banshchikov, Oleg Kerbikov, and Snezhnevsky – were distinguished by their careerist ambition and fear for their own positions. Not surprisingly, many of them were promoted and appointed to leadership posts shortly after the session. The Joint Session also had a negative impact on several leading Soviet academic neuroscientists, such as Pyotr Anokhin, Aleksey Speransky, Lina Stern, Ivan Beritashvili, and Leon Orbeli. They were labeled as anti-Pavlovians, anti-materialists and reactionaries and subsequently they were dismissed from their positions. In addition to losing their laboratories some of these scientists were subjected to torture in prison. The Moscow, Leningrad, Ukrainian, Georgian, and Armenian schools of neuroscience and neurophysiology were damaged for a period due to this loss of personnel. The Joint Session ravaged productive research in neurosciences and psychiatry for years to come. Pseudo-science took control. Following a previous joint session of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences (28 June–4 July 1950) and the 10-15 October 1951 joint session of the Presidium of the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Board of the All-Union Society of Neuropathologists and Psychiatrists, Snezhnevky's school was given the leading role. The 1950 decision to give monopoly over psychiatry to the Pavlovian school of Snezhnevsky was one of the crucial factors in the rise of political psychiatry. The Soviet doctors, under the incentive of Snezhnevsky, devised a "Pavlovian theory of schizophrenia" and increasingly applied this diagnostic category to political dissidents. "Sluggish schizophrenia" Psychiatric diagnoses such as the diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia" in political dissidents in the USSR were used for political purposes. It was the diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia" that was most prominently used in cases of dissidents. Sluggish schizophrenia as one of the new diagnostic categories was created to facilitate the stifling of dissidents and was a root of self-deception among psychiatrists to placate their consciences when the doctors acted as a tool of oppression in the name of a political system.