Кеңес заманының құқық қорғаушысы Виктор Некипелов

Soviet human rights activist

Viktor Aleksandrovich Nekipelov (Ви́ктор Алекса́ндрович Некипе́лов, 29 September 1928 – 1 July 1989) was a Soviet Russian poet, writer, Soviet dissident, and a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group. He spent about nine years in prison for his participation in the Moscow Helsinki Group.

Nekipelov was born to a Soviet family of workers of the Chinese Eastern Railway. In 1937, he and his mother came to the Soviet Union. In 1939, his mother was arrested and died in imprisonment. He left a high school in Omsk. From 1947 to 1950, he studied at the Omsk Army Medical School. In 1960, he graduated from the army medical faculty of the Kharkiv Medical Institute with honours as well. He worked as a pharmacist.

In 1973, he was arrested for "spreading of known false fabrications that is damaging the Soviet political system" (Article 190 1 of the RSFSR Criminal Code). Nekipelov was sent to the Section 4 of the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry for psychiatric evaluation, which lasted from 15 January to 12 March 1974, was judged sane (which he was), tried, and sentenced to two years' imprisonment. based on his personal experience at Psychiatric Hospital of the Serbsky Institute and translated into English in 1980. In October 1977, Nekipelov joined the Moscow Helsinki Group. After publishing Institute of Fools, he was sentenced to the maximum punishment for "anti Soviet agitation and propaganda" of seven years in a labour camp and then five years in internal exile. On 20 March 1983, Nekipelov and 9 other political prisoners in their letter to US President of Ronald Reagan sought his aid in urging inspection of Soviet camps. Along with Arina Ginzburg, Malva Landa, Tatyana Velikanova and Andrei Sakharov he demanded a referendum in the Baltic republics to determine their political destiny. Released in 1987, he emigrated to France where he died in 1989. In 1992, the selection of his verses was published by Memorial society.

In his book Institute of Fools, he wrote compassionately, engagingly, and observantly of the doctors and other patients; most of the latter were ordinary criminals feigning insanity in order to be sent to a mental hospital, because hospital was a "cushy number" as against prison camps. According to the response by Robert van Voren, Pekhterev in his article condescendingly argues that the Serbsky Institute was not so bad place and that Nekipelov exaggerates and slanders it, but Pekhterev, by doing so, misses the main point: living conditions in the Serbsky Institute were not bad, those who passed through psychiatric examination there were in a certain sense "on holiday" in comparison with the living conditions of the Gulag; and all the same, everyone was aware that the Serbsky Institute was more than the "gates of hell" from where people were sent to specialized psychiatric hospitals in Chernyakhovsk, Dnepropetrovsk, Kazan, Blagoveshchensk, and that is not all. Their life was transformed to unimaginable horror with daily tortures by forced administration of drugs, beatings and other forms of punishment. Many went crazy, could not endure what was happening to them, some even died during the "treatment" (for example, a miner from Donetsk Alexey Nikitin). Many books and memoirs are written about the life in the psychiatric Gulag and every time when reading them a shiver seizes us.