Psychologists lost their positions and, on occasion, their lives. Centralization Up to 1991, all Soviet government functions were centralized in Moscow, including higher education. It was the Moscow Committee's approval that awarded aspirants their doctorates. In fact, the state routinely paid students a stipend to attend college, treating this as their full-time occupation. How different this is from Western universities, where students often must strain to finance tuition, relying on aid from their family, employer, government loans, or foundation grants.
Facilities Imagine a school with no photocopy machines.
This was the common situation in Soviet schools, where students had no access to photocopy or fax machines, Soviet-made computers often took days to return a job's output, and carbon paper was more common than word processors. In contrast, clinical psychology was virtually nonexistent in Soviet society, where citizens rarely sought out strangers to confide their personal difficulties. In fact, even American visitors to the USSR were warned to avoid Soviet psychiatrists, who had the ominous authority to confine against their will people the psychiatrist deemed threatening to society. Nonprivate Traditionally, everyone in the USSR was a state employee, with no private practices or associations. It became insular, avoiding Western concepts and sources.