Soviet Hospitals Were Actually Torture Chambers for Political Prisoners

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Did you know the Soviet Union turned hospitals into torture chambers? In 1963, psychiatrist Anatoly Koryagin discovered something horrifying.

[00:00:08]Perfectly healthy political dissidents were being declared insane and locked away in psychiatric hospitals, but they weren't receiving treatment. They were being destroyed. Doctors injected prisoners with sulfazine, a drug that caused excruciating pain and high fevers for days. Others received massive doses of insulin, triggering violent seizures and comas. Haloperidol was administered in doses 50 times higher than normal, causing uncontrollable muscle spasms and permanent brain damage. The victims weren't mentally ill. They were writers, activists, and religious believers whose only crime was opposing the state.

[00:00:41]Vladimir Bukovsky spent 12 years in these facilities. He described patients tied to beds, screaming as their minds were chemically shattered. The worst part? It was all documented as legitimate medical care. When Koryagin tried to expose the system, he was arrested and sentenced to 7 years in the gulag. The Soviet psychiatric abuse program operated for decades, turning the oath to do no harm into a weapon of terror. Medicine became torture, and doctors became executioners.