The historical review and the need to look back upon the use of psychiatric hospitals in the incarceration of dissenters has been gaining more traction in recent years. 

However, fundamental scholarship was available directly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Such scholarship such as "The Legacy of Psychiatric Abuse in the USSR”  by the Human Rights Watch set the abuse in historical context and the lasting impacts that the practice left for the new government to face. The piece also maintains the possibility for such abuses to be made again if careful review of other nation's use of pyschiatry and pharmacy is not carried out. This work highlights the abuses seen in photos like that of the patient being injected with a sedative or the long lists of reasons for incarceration and the ever growing list of medications and pharmaceuticals which had violent reactions with others and caused great harm not only to the pysche of the patients, but their physical health as well. 

A major scholar in the historical study of Soviet psychiatry, Robert van Voren supplements to the understanding of the practice by explaining the political mechanisms and logic of why and how the government could carryout such a program. Voren's work Cold War in Psychiatry: Human Factors, Secret Actors completes his task and brings up the defense of the institution by departments like the KGB and even the general contemporary reasons for why the people and government felt like the institutions were needed. 

In Van Voren's article titled, “Political Abuse of Psychiatry—An Historical Overview,” he delves into the medical side of the equation. He discusses the treatments and ways in which the therapies were developed to cure the patient. But importantly, this cure would also allow for the government to sedate any dissent and rebellion. 

Van Voren in both of his works harken back to the ills and political strategy that was seen in oppressing individuals like Medvedev who's only crime was publishing a work disproving another scientist that was well regarded by the Soviet government. Van Voren's works also look to the political backlash that would be seen against the abuse of psychiatry and medicine through such sources that described Medvedev's arrest and the outbreak of support by other dissidents like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn.

However, Van Voren was not the only scholar to delve into the medical issues and science behind the abuses suffered in these institutions. Works like "‘Medicine Standing on Its Head’: Snezhnevsky, Sluggish Schizophrenia and Soviet Political Abuse of Psychiatry” by Sasha Shapiro and State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin by Rebecca Reich are elaborate in their analysis. They speak on the true and sometimes pseudoscience that the Soviet Union would use against its dissidents. They speak of the true horrors and the fields of psychiatry and pharmacology losing its way and in a way "Standing on its head." Shapiro and Reich's works contribute to the key issues and the discussion that science in the Cold War was based off of archaisms from Stalin and as far back as the beginning of the Kievan Rus. Many psychiatrists saw themselves as a continuance of their ancestors' work and believed that they were actually helping treat sick men and women. However, they point to the political subversion of the old practices and the way in which the treatment turned into punishment and experimentation. Only after the global medical community became outraged did those in power condemn and try to change policy, at least on the surface.