The current situation in Soviet psychiatry needs a surrealist of Kafka's skill to describe it. On the one hand, an increasing range of Soviet journals have, since last November, been forthrightly saying what Soviet dissidents and Western observers have said for 20 years. This is that politically motivated abuse of psychiatry has taken place in the USSR on a large scale for decades, causing enormous human suffering. Second, some of these journals point out that abuses, though much reduced in scale, continue to occur today.