The Psychiatric Spectre Haunting Bolshevism

A Cautionary Tale from the Red Dawn

By John Mappin

In the blood-soaked ledger of the 20th century few ideologies have wrought more ruin than Bolshevism. Sold to the masses as a scientific roadmap to utopia, it delivered instead a godless furnace of repression, starvation and murder. Yet beneath the familiar tale of Marxist revolution lies a far stranger and darker undercurrent: the disturbing role played by psychiatry and its allied pseudo-sciences in midwifing this crimson catastrophe.

It is no idle provocation to suggest that psychiatry, far from being a neutral science, offered the theoretical scalpel with which the Soviet state sought to carve out its “New Man.” Indeed, it was not the factory floor but the psychiatric ward, not merely the commissar but the white-coated clinician, who helped author the most chilling chapters of the Bolshevik experiment.

We begin with a curious figure: Alexander Bogdanov, physician, psychiatrist, philosopher and, for a time, Lenin’s chosen co-conspirator. Trained in mental medicine, Bogdanov brought to Bolshevism a manic fusion of Marxist materialism and early psychological theory. His Empiriomonism blended Pavlovian reflexology with political fanaticism, asserting that human consciousness could be “restructured” as easily as a broken bone. The soul, he believed, was not divine nor sovereign, but a set of conditioned impulses, ready to be “re-educated.”

He was, in many ways, the ideological prototype for what would become the Soviet psychiatric state. In his chilling logic, dissent became disease, opposition to the regime, a symptom of pathology. The line between heresy and hallucination blurred. If you doubted socialism, you were not simply mistaken—you were mentally ill.

It was no metaphor. Bogdanov and his heirs believed revolution required not just the redistribution of wealth, but the transfusion of new minds into old skulls. His science fiction novel Red Star imagines a communist Martian society where life is sustained through blood transfusion—his real-world obsession. In both fantasy and experiment, Bogdanov saw biology as malleable, subservient to ideology. He eventually died transfusing himself with the blood of a younger comrade, a martyr not for medicine, but for the delusion that man could be engineered.

He was not alone. Trotsky, with his messianic zeal embraced Freud as a useful instrument for decoding class struggle. Psychoanalytic clinics sprang up across Moscow and Kazan. Children were studied like lab rats. Dreams became data. But by the 1930s Freud was out, deemed too bourgeois. In his place rose Pavlov, whose dogs salivated on cue and whose reflex theories would become state doctrine.

This was not science—it was sorcery dressed in sterile white.  Bekhterev and Kazhinsky attempted to present telepathy (a known and now scientifically proven spiritual phenomenon ) as a mechanical one , asserting that thoughts could be transmitted like radio signals by the brain.

Others at the same time like Gastev applied industrial engineers   “scientific management” to the minds of workers, demanding they regulate their thoughts as precisely as their muscle movements.

It was psychiatry unbound, no longer treating illness, but defining reality.

From this infernal laboratory emerged the “New Soviet Man”- emotionless, obedient, collectivised. Trotsky envisioned him as a being who could “master his own feelings” and exert will “into the recesses of the unconscious.” This was not evolution, it was psychic lobotomy. And it laid the groundwork for the later reign of psychiatric terror.

When the Gulag was not sufficient, dissenters were thrown into mental hospitals, diagnosed with fabricated syndromes like “sluggish schizophrenia.” Their crime? A refusal to conform. Their cure? Chemical restraint, electroshock, and the erasure of identity. Psychiatry had become the scalpel of the state.

Some understood the madness from the start. In 1919, American journalist John Spargo diagnosed Bolshevism itself as a mass psychosis, an epidemic of delusion masquerading as progress.   Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev described Bogdanov’s chilling habit of interrogating his opponents’ ideas not as arguments, but as symptoms. Debate had become diagnosis. Truth itself had been sectioned.

Now, let us be clear: Bolshevism was not invented in the clinic.

But its architects were ideologues, not doctors.  The source of any political movement is a philosophy and in this case the founding philosophy of Bolshevism, is lethal.

Psychiatry gave them a weapon more insidious than bullets or propaganda: a system for invalidating the soul. Not through coercion alone, but through classification, through the redefinition of thought, dissent and even personhood as disorders to be managed, not ideas to be refuted.

The great warning here is not historical, it is contemporary.  Today, in our own liberal democracies, we are told that resistance to prevailing orthodoxy may indicate trauma, or bias, or “disinformation syndrome.”

Our children are pathologised for normal behaviour.  Our elders drugged for non-conformity. Entire populations are nudged, medicated, and diagnosed into docility. The psychiatric state no longer wears the hammer and sickle. It wears a lanyard, carries a clipboard, and asks, “How are we feeling today?”

What began under the Red Star did not end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The spectre remains, not in Moscow alone, but in every institution worldwide, that places “mental health” above liberty, and “wellbeing” above truth and spiritual capacity.  As history has shown, there is no tyranny more complete than the one that claims to cure you for your own good.

The soul of man is not a sickness. And it cannot, nor must not, be attempted to be healed by force.