On 25 August 1968, Viktor Fainberg joined six other dissidents in Moscow’s Red Square to protest the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. After his arrest, during which he lost many teeth, he was not brought to trial. Instead, a commission at Moscow’s Serbsky Institute—psychiatrists G.V. Morozov, D.R. Lunts, and Y.L. Lindau—issued act No. 35/s on 10 October 1968. The report described his political views as evidence of mental disorder and omitted the invasion that motivated the demonstration, characterizing the event as “disorderly conduct.”
Fainberg was committed to the Special Psychiatric Hospital in Leningrad from January 1969 through February 1973. During a hunger strike, staff forcibly fed him and administered chlorpromazine despite his hyperthyroidism, identified in the account as a contraindication. Psychiatrist Marina Voikhanskaya secretly passed information about his treatment to dissidents and was demoted. After emigrating to Israel in 1974, Fainberg helped establish the Campaign Against Psychiatric Abuses. International scrutiny contributed to the Soviet Union’s expulsion from the World Psychiatric Association in 1983, making punitive psychiatry a lasting human-rights and medical-ethics scandal.
