“The Institute of Fools” by Viktor Nekipelov is one of the famous documentary evidence about the IV department for political professors. D. R. Lunts at the Institute of Forensic Psychiatry named after. V.P. Serbsky, where the author spent two months in 1974. The book was published in 1980 in London in English translation, in 1999 - in Russian in Paris and, a quarter of a century later, in 2005 - for the first time in Russia, in Barnaul, through the efforts of the public organization “Help to victims of psychiatry” ( funded by a European network of former psychiatric patients and domestic human rights organizations).

The author, Viktor Aleksandrovich Nekipelov, was born in 1928 in Harbin. In 1950 he graduated from the Omsk Military Medical School, in 1960, also with honors, from the Military Pharmaceutical Faculty of the Kharkov Medical School Institute and in absentia Moscow Literary Institute. Throughout his unusually dramatic life from childhood, V.A., due to his high citizenship, inevitably came into conflict with the totalitarian system. His own poems, translations of Ukrainian poets into Russian, his friendship with Gulag prisoners, integrity in the service and, finally, transferring a copy of “Chronicles of Current Events” to an acquaintance led to his arrest in 1973 for “dissemination of deliberately false fabrications discrediting the Soviet state system” ( Art. 190-1 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR). In connection with the conclusion of Vladimir psychiatrists about the possible presence of sluggish schizophrenia, from January 15 to March 15, 1974, V.P. was undergoing a forensic psychiatric examination at the Institute. Serbsky, where he was declared mentally healthy. It was only the third case of this kind (Ilya Burmistrovich in 1969 and Vladimir Bukovsky in 1971). Until 1975 he served time in a criminal camp. In 1977, he applied to leave the country, and after being refused, he renounced Soviet citizenship. Became a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group and actively helped the Group for the Protection of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. In 1979 he was arrested under Art. 70 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (for “production of slanderous materials discrediting the Soviet social and state system and their distribution with the aim of weakening and overthrowing the Soviet regime”). Received 7 years in maximum security camps and 5 years in exile. “We will release you, V.A., abroad, but first we will destroy you as a person. We will release you when no one, no one, needs you anymore,” they told him during the investigation. And so it happened: he went through the most hard confinement places. For more than half of his term, he was kept in a punishment cell (punishment cell), where in those years he was fed every other day (1830 kcal), kept in complete isolation, not allowed to read and write, creating conditions conducive to tuberculosis, and tortured. The cancer he diagnosed in himself was classified as cancerophobia, which closed the possibility of examination. He died of cancer in Paris, two years after his release, a completely unconscious invalid. This is how the system dealt with a deeply decent and highly creative person, who throughout his life showed an example of freedom and dignity of the human person in any conditions. What remains from him is a collection of poems and this book of testimony. The music based on the poems by V. Nekipelov was written by another prisoner of conscience of those years, Pyotr Starchik, the first performer of these songs. V.N.’s book is a human document of great drama, it is an honest story about the nest of Soviet punitive psychiatry, it is a mirror into which psychiatrists must always look. – There are technologies for stretching the diagnosis, which are alive and expanding in our time. These are objective methods (x-ray of the skull and EEG), carried out, as the author rightly notes, often for scientific surroundings, but mostly subjective methods: collection of biographical facts and assessments of behavior. These are also methods of so-called disinhibition. “Any case of our “dissent” can easily be squeezed into the broad, vague (... for ours, accustomed to the dogmatic framework of thinking) template for the interpretation of schizophrenia and especially the doctrine of its so-called sluggish form, “love of freedom”, “love of truth”, etc. “Unconventional thinking”, “increased interest in social and political problems”, “propensity for conflict situations” - just listen to these symptomatic labels! And a little further on they follow: “a penchant for reformism”, “delirium of truth-seeking”, “delusion of the opposition”, “mania of anti-communism”, etc. The author reflected the wide variety of patients who underwent examination with him in this one, which enjoys the darkest reputation in history psychiatry department, and gave portraits of all its employees: D. R. Lunts, Ya. L. Landau, M. F. Taltse, L. I. Tabakova, A. A. Azamatov and A. A. Fokin. Not everyone looks like a villain. For example, a portrait of the head of the psychological laboratory N. N. Stanishevskaya is drawn with obvious sympathy. V. Nekipelov looks at everything through the eyes of a person whose eyes are not obscured by Soviet ideology, who, having emerged from well-worn social stereotypes, thanks to his biography and extraordinary personality, saw everything deeper and more adequately. The ironic title of the book is very apt. The prisoners called and still call the Institute of Forensic Psychiatry named after A. Serbian. But the similarity with the famous “Ship of Fools” by Sebastian Brant, published in Basel more than 500 years ago with illustrations by the young Durer (1494), is also obvious. The intention of this work was to become a mirror for all kinds of stupidity, in order to cleanse oneself of moral and social filth, to take it away, further away, to Stupidland. I would like to especially note the very informative and vivid notes and afterword by V.F. Abramkin and the piercing biography, written by the wife of V.A. – N.M. Komarova-Nekipelova. The book is not spoiled by a few excessive harshness and factual inaccuracies, nor by the anti-psychiatric preface of I. Girich. On the contrary, they help to better understand people who have unjustly found themselves in the role of sub-experts, their natural feelings and reactions. Viktor Nekipelov’s conclusion is not the harshest: “The Institute is for them. Serbsky is a real prison and perhaps the most sinister.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it much more sharply: “The psychiatric Gulag is the Soviet version of gas chambers,” and Vladimir Bukovsky – “G. V. Morozov is our doctor Mengele.” It is important to emphasize, as V. Abramkin very accurately writes, that “the majority of participants in the Democratic Movement were not engaged in any political activity. The poet Boris said it best Chichibachin:

A very important thing is emphasized here: human rights protection is not some kind of political ideology, not some kind of expansion, but protection from state expansion on the natural rights of citizens.Yu. S. Savenko