num_pages: 292
description: A dissident's memoir of his detention in the most notorious Soviet psychiatric institution. Notes from the Serbsky. EDITED AND TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN Marco Carynnyk and Marta Horban. Introduction; Editors' Note; Preface; INSTITUTE OF FOOLS; APPENDIX; The Trial of Nekipelov; Oprichnina 1977; Oprichnina 1977 Continues; Our Searches; Notes to the Appendix; Bibliography; Index of Names. We now know, from grimly authentic sources, the truth about the Gulag labour camps in the Soviet Union. But we still know comparatively little, at first hand, about the increasing use of mental institutions as part of the system of political repression. Here for the first time is a detailed account, from the inside, of the notorious Serbsky Institute of Moscow, through which four-fifths of the dissidents interned in psychiatric hospitals are processed. Victor Nekipelov was sent there in 1974, and until his report almost nothing was known about its workings. It is indeed a mad world that he reveals, but the madness is in the people who run the place. Ironically most of the Serbsky's inmates were criminals, not politicals, and most of them were faking insanity in the hope of being certified and thus avoiding they felt that by comparison with prison, a mental hospital was a soft option. So, not surprisingly, they regarded the politicals as truly insane for wanting to assert their sanity. And as a means of judging his sanity, the "tests" to which Nekipelov was subjected were ludicrously inadequate. Yet, to his surprise, he was not certified, possibly owing to the influence of adverse publicity in the West. So in due course he stood trial, on trumped-up charges, and received a two-year prison sentence. And since his release he has (as he describes in an appendix) been continually harassed by the KGB. Now, in this year of the Olympic Games, he is again in prison. His book is a fascinating piece of writing, detached,...
language: Russian
title: Institute of Fools: Notes from the Serbsky
titlecomplete: Institute of Fools: Notes from the Serbsky
publisher: Orion Publishing Co