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The history of Russian medicine, and particularly of psychiatry, reflects both the meteoric rise of Russian science and those especially Russian peculiarities which were not lost in the process of rapid assimilation of foreign importations. Any aspect of Russian cultural effort is permeated with the spirit of high humanitarian social aspirations for reform, combined with a spirit of revolutionary struggle against the bureaucracy and the autocratic cruelty and stupidity of Russian political and economic absolutism. There was no inkling of psychiatry in Russia until the latter part of the eighteenth century. The first retreat for the mentally ill in St. Petersburg was opened as late as 1799 at a time when France already had a systematic classification of mental diseases. In 1862 the 'Society of Physicians for the Insane' was founded. The fact that in the following period of seventy-five years Russian neurology and psychiatry caught up with that of Europe, and contributed to the world such men as Merjeyevski, Korsakov, Bechterev and Pavlov, testifies to the unique, untiring and creative activity of Russian medical science. Born in the nineteenth century, Russian psychiatry established itself on somatic and neurological bases. Although it was French psychiatry with its succinct logic and clarity of description that seemed to appeal most to the Russians, their recent research leads more and more to an increasing acceptance of the exogenous factors in the etiology of psychopathological reactions.