[6]: 40 Despite his power and virtual monopolies on textbooks and conferences, some prominent Soviet doctors were unwilling to accept Snezhnevsky's methods, such as Iosif Polishchuk in Kiev, and Fyodor Detengof in Dushanbe.
[7] He was charged with cynically developing a system of diagnosis which could be bent for political purposes[7] and, in dozens of cases, he personally signed a commission decision on legal insanity of mentally healthy dissidents including Vladimir Bukovsky, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Leonid Plyushch, Mikola Plakhotnyuk,[4] Pyotr Grigorenko.
[10] On the covert orders of the KGB, thousands of social and political reformers—Soviet "dissidents"—were incarcerated in mental hospitals after being labelled with diagnoses of "sluggish schizophrenia", a disease fabricated by Snezhnevsky and "Moscow school" of psychiatry.
[12] However, Alexander Tiganov, a pupil of Snezhnevsky and full member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, believes his teacher was honest in his diagnosing dissenters.
[13] In 2011, Tiganov said it was rumored that Snezhnevsky took pity on dissenters and gave them a diagnosis required for placing in a special hospital to save them from a prison, but it was not true, he honestly did his medical duty.
[5]: 329 The college's Committee on Abuse passed the following judgment:[6]: 158 The evidence is now sufficient to conclude that Professor Snezhnevsky has acted unethically and no longer warrants a place of honour in the Royal College of Psychiatrists.In 1968, Snezhnevsky wrote of a distinction between the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia,[17]: 164 a concept long attributed to Snezhnevky but in fact introduced by John Hughlings Jackson and John Russell Reynolds.
[19] The American Psychiatric Association at its annual meeting held in San Francisco in 1970 honored Snezhnevsky by naming him a "distinguished fellow" for his "outstanding contribution to psychiatry and related sciences.
[24] However, the founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group Yuri Orlov has the opinion that Snezhnevsky did not willingly participate in the political abuse of psychiatry, and that the real criminal was Georgy Morozov, the director of the Serbsky Institute, who collaborated with the KGB since his students days.
[1] Despite a number of its controversial premises and in line with the traditions of then Soviet science, Snezhnevsky's hypothesis has immediately acquired the status of dogma which was later overcome in other disciplines but firmly stuck in psychiatry.
[28] Helen Lavretsky supposes that a totalitarian regime, the lack of a democratic tradition in Russia, and oppression and "extermination" of the best psychiatrists during the 1930–50 period prepared the ground for the abuse of psychiatry and Russian-Soviet concept of schizophrenia.
[30] Having learnt of his diagnosis of lung cancer and facing his death within a few years, Snezhnevsky started lamenting over his making a lot of blunders at the Pavlovian session and departed from his indisputable tone as to his own concept.