“A most honest, balanced and tactful attempt to promote self-reflection and self-understanding in two nations involved in a brutal genocide”
Levas Kovarskis, Lithuanian psychoanalyst
For 20 years Soviet psychiatric abuse dominated world psychiatry. It ended only after the Soviet Foreign Ministry intervened. This book tells the full story, based on extensive research. Who were the secret actors, what were the hidden factors?
The book contains the memoirs of Robert van Voren covering the period 1977-2008 and provides unique insights into the dissident movement in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, both inside the country and abroad.
135-page summary of Robert van Voren's doctoral dissertation based on the book "Cold War in Psychiatry", October 2010, Kaunas Vytautas Magnus University
Robert van Voren (1959) is Chief Executive of the Federation Global Initiative on Psychiatry (FGIP) and Professor of Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies at Ilia State University in Tbilisi (Georgia) and at the Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas (Lithuania). He is a Sovietologist by education and graduated from Amsterdam University (modern and theoretical history + Russian language) in 1986, and defended his doctoral dissertation in Kaunas (Lithuania) in October 2010.
Starting in 1977 he became active in the Soviet human rights movement. For many years he traveled to the USSR as a courier, delivering humanitarian aid and smuggling out information on the situation in camps, prisons and psychiatric hospitals. The information was used in Western campaigns for the release of Soviet dissidents. Van Voren led the international campaigns against the political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR, as well as in defense of individual political prisoners such as Irina Grivnina and Anatoly Koryagin. He also organized eight annual Sakharov Congresses in Amsterdam as a contribution to the campaign to bring about the release of this Nobel Peace Prize winner.
In 1980 Robert van Voren co-founded the International Association on Political Use of Psychiatry (the predecessor of GIP) and became its General Secretary in 1986. He was Director of the Second World Center in Amsterdam and board member of many organizations in the field of human rights and mental health.
In 1997 Robert van Voren was elected Honorary Fellow of the British Royal College of Psychiatrists, and in 2003 he was given Lithuanian citizenship in recognition of his contribution to a democratic Lithuanian State. In 2005 he was knighted in the Order of Oranje-Nassau on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of GIP. Van Voren has written extensively on Soviet issues and, in particular, issues related to mental health and human rights, and published more than a dozen of books.
