A brief historical background will help to understand the context in which psychiatric oppression of transgender people operates in Russia. Since the 1960s, psychiatry was used systematically as a weapon against dissidents in the Soviet Union. The infamous diagnosis ‘sluggish schizophrenia’ was used to detain in mental hospitals, opponents of the government, and other people, whose behaviour was considered to be against social norms. There, they were subjected to compulsory treatment.
There is no evidence that transgender people in the USSR were intentionally subjected to the political abuse of psychiatry – for the simple reason they were invisible. However, when they appeared in front of the psychiatrist, either of their own volition or thanks to those who considered their behavior deviant, they were faced with the same cruel system, which goal was not the person's welfare but the continuation of social norms and official ideology. According to an interview with a trans woman, which appeared in the press in 1961, when she first tried to get help from the doctors, she was ‘beaten and medicated into a vegetative state’; and received the diagnosis ‘Paranoid schizophrenia’. Due to the preoccupation of Soviet psychiatry with ‘schizophrenia’, it seems that this diagnosis was often given to transgender people (however, direct evidence for that period is difficult to find).
This historical context is to some degree similar to the situation in post-Soviet Russia. Although on a smaller scale, punitive psychiatry is being revived in present-day Russia, the latest case is that of Mikhail Kosenko, a protester at the Bolotnaya Square protests in 2012, who was diagnosed with 'paranoid schizophrenia' and forced to receive psychiatric treatment. The attitude towards transgender people in Russian psychiatry continues to follow the Soviet model in some forms.
