Any war leaves behind not only destruction but also long-term psychological consequences. Against that backdrop, Novaya Gazeta Europe notes that after more than four years of Russia’s war against Ukraine, tens of thousands of servicemen have returned from the front with damaged mental health. According to the outlet, veterans commit murder 2.5 times more often and are involved in cases of grievous bodily harm twice as often as men in Russia overall.
Historian Rustam Alexander turns to the Soviet experience after World War II. As early as 1943, Soviet psychiatrists were writing about the scale of the problem: about 55% of new patients had suffered cranial injuries at the front, while another 30% had neuroses. Doctors recorded anxiety, hysterical reactions, depression, paranoid states, and personality changes they described as “post-traumatic psychopathicization.”
Providing care was difficult. Public acknowledgment of war trauma was effectively taboo, psychiatric infrastructure had been destroyed or repurposed, and surviving institutions lacked staff and medicine. Former soldiers themselves often avoided clinics because of shame and the stigma attached to psychiatric diagnoses.
In 1944–1945, psychiatrist Vasily Gilyarovsky introduced the concept of “nervous demobilization.” He argued that severe disorders do not emerge at the moment of trauma, but later, when the need for extreme mobilization of inner resources disappears. In a 1946 article, he wrote that these were serious nervous disturbances appearing only after conditions improved.
Gilyarovsky proposed assigning a staff psychiatrist to every major hospital, believing that wartime trauma often turned into physical illness. But many general physicians saw psychiatrists as specialists only for the “insane” and were reluctant to refer patients to them.
By the late 1940s, there was no officially recorded mass surge in mental disorders in the USSR, but this was linked in part to stigma and doctors’ reluctance to diagnose them. Instead, psychiatrists said trauma often surfaced through somatic symptoms and a “pathological craving for alcohol.” In the RSFSR Health Ministry’s 1950 report, alcoholism and drug addiction were already described as leading psychiatric problems, and by the mid-1950s the issue of veterans’ mental health had largely disappeared from professional discussion.