medical departments that stipulated certain rules of handling the mentally sick and imposing different sanctions on them. A person with a mental disorder was automatically divested of all rights and depended entirely on the psychiatrists' will. Practically anybody could undergo psychiatric examination on the most senseless grounds and the issued diagnosis turned him into a person without rights. It was this lack of legal rights and guarantees that advantaged a system of repressive psychiatry in the country. According to American psychiatrist Oleg Lapshin, Russia until 1993 did not have any specific legislation in the field of mental health except uncoordinated instructions and articles of laws in criminal and administrative law, orders of the USSR Ministry of Health. In the Soviet Union, any psychiatric patient could be hospitalized by request of his headman, relatives or instructions of a district psychiatrist. In this case, patient's consent or dissent mattered not. The duration of treatment in a psychiatric hospital also depended entirely on the psychiatrist. All of that made the abuse of psychiatry possible to suppress those who opposed the political regime, and that created the vicious practice of ignoring the rights of the mentally ill. According to Yuri Savenko, the president of the Independent Psychiatric Association of Russia (the IPA), punitive psychiatry arises on the basis of the interference of three main factors: The ideologizing of science, its breakaway from the achievements of world psychiatry, the party orientation of Soviet forensic psychiatry. The lack of legal basis. The total nationalization of mental health service. Their interaction system is principally sociological: the presence of the Penal Code article on slandering the state system inevitably results in sending a certain percentage of citizens to forensic psychiatric examination. Thus, it is not psychiatry itself that is punitive, but the totalitarian state uses psychiatry for punitive purposes with ease. According to Larry Gostin, the root cause of the problem was the State itself. The definition of danger was radically extended by the Soviet criminal system to cover "political" as well as customary physical types of "danger". As Bloch and Reddaway note, there are no objective reliable criteria to determine whether the person's behavior will be dangerous, and approaches to the definition of dangerousness greatly differ among psychiatrists. Richard Bonnie, a professor of law and medicine at the University of Virginia School of Law, mentioned the deformed nature of the Soviet psychiatric profession as one of the