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To gain a better understanding of the close links between psycho­analysis and Russian culture today, it is important to recall the conditions under which ­psychoanalysis developed in Russia. At the beginning of the twentieth century the situation was favourable for the diffusion of Freudian ideas, and Russia became the first country to take account of psychoanalysis outside the German culture where it was born. But after these early beginnings, psychoanalysis was attacked by the Bolsheviks and finally prohibited under Stalin. The gradual liberalization of Russia allowed for a redeployment of the private space absorbed by the totalitarian state. Russian ­psychoanalysis today is in full renaissance and widely present in all the ­cultural domains.