Ongoing Russian aggression in Ukraine pushed the long-standing russophilic and faux-communist lid off the histories and images of Russia which have taken roots in psychoanalysis and beyond. At the very least Ukraine and other non-Russian nations’ subjectivity has been acknowledged albeit for many in psychoanalysis and beyond these histories and ongoing realities are experienced through old colonial prisms of russophilia or erasure of ethnic diversity and national histories (e.g., Soviet=Russian). This presentation will highlight long standing and persistent misreadings of Freud, other early psychoanalysts, and psychoanalytic history in relation to the Russian Empire, Bolshevism, and the USSR. Freud’s (1929) essay on Dostoyevsky, in which Freud emphasizes Dostoyevsky’s social sadism and spiritualized masochism, calling the writer a “jailer of humanity,” will be discussed in light of blithe obfuscations in reading of Dostoyevsky’s works (not just his fiction but also his extensive non-fiction or his posthumously published works such as Confessions of Stavrogin) which Freud read and discussed in his essay. Moreover, in light of known and widely discussed realities of Bolshevik and other communist groups “red terror” (e.g., Ferenczi’s term for events in Hungary), misinterpretation of psychoanalytic international conferences, publications, and discussions to promote them as an ideological opposite (i.e., Freud, Ferenczi as “communists”) will be questioned. Mythologized and sanitized versions of history of early Russian psychoanalysts, including Lev Vygostky, Alexandr Luria, and Sabina Speilrein, will be questioned in light of their own published writings in the early USSR. Erased psychoanalytic voices from Ukraine (both via russian  appropriation as well as literal mass murder and censorship) will be brought into this presentation. Lastly, the obfuscation, silence, and misinterpretations of Russian ongoing imperialism, including in writings by contemporary Russian psychoanalysts in the West, will draw parallels between history and the present. Freud’s comments in a letter to Fleiss at the end of the XIX century remain relevant today and may help further understand the impact of propaganda and revisionist history in reading psychoanalysis itself:

“Have you ever seen a foreign newspaper which has passed the Russian censorship at the frontier? Words, whole clauses and sentences are blacked out so that what is left becomes unintelligible. A Russian censorship of this kind comes about in psychoses and produces the apparently meaningless deliria.”