The History of One Utopia: Why Did a Labor Refuge or the Mentally Ill Fail to Emerge at Yasnaya Polyana?

Abstract

This article will examine the key stages in the establishment of psychiatric assistance in the provincial government of Tula. Major focus will be given to a project for organizing a labor refuge for the mentally ill at Yasnaya Polyana. The project was conceived by Nikolai Petrovich Kamenev (1857‒1936), senior doctor at the regional psychiatric hospital of Tula, whose life and work were dedicated to the development and improvement of psychiatric assistance for the people of Tula and its regional districts. We will analyze two unpublished works of Kamenev – “The Yasnopolyanskij Labor Refuge for the Mentally Ill” and “Immediate Goals for the Yasnopolyanskij Psychiatric Labor Refuge,” which are dated to the summer of 1906. In these works, the basic goals of the venture are expressed, the particulars for its organization and management are described, and the necessary means for building the given facility are specified. The plan outlined by Kamenev for providing assistance to people with borderline mental disorders (e.g., neurosis, psychopathy, psychasthenia, among others) will be examined. First and foremost, Kamenev’s plan called for the proposed labor refuge at Yasnaya Polyana. In Kamenev’s opinion, labor (especially farm labor) and psychotherapy in the form of moral-pedagogical action were the fundamental healing factors of a medical treatment. An attempt will be made to determine the underlying factors for why the project was never realized. Analysis of the project to establish the Yasnopolyanskij Labor Refuge will give us a picture of Kamenev’s views regarding preventative psychiatry, the ideas of which were realized only in the post-revolutionary period.