cakes pretended to be sufferers. 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. The Soviet psychiatric terror in its brutality and targeting the mentally ill as the most vulnerable group of society had nothing on the Nazi euthanasia programs. The punishment by placement in a mental hospital was as effective as imprisonment in Mordovian concentration camps in breaking persons psychologically and physically. The recent history of the USSR should be given a wide publicity to immunize society against possible repetitions of the Soviet practice of political abuse of psychiatry. The issue remains highly relevant. According to Fedor Kondratev, an expert of the Serbsky Center and supporter of Snezhnevsky and his colleagues who developed the concept of sluggish schizophrenia in the 1960s, those arrested by the KGB under RSFSR Criminal Code Article 70 ("anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda"), 190-1 ("dissemination of knowingly false fabrications that defame the Soviet state and social system") made up, in those years, the main group targeted by the period of using psychiatry for political purposes. It was they who began to be searched for "psychopathological mechanisms" and, therefore, mental illness which gave the grounds to recognize an accused person as mentally incompetent, to debar him from appearance and defence in court, and then to send him for compulsory treatment to a special psychiatric hospital of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The trouble (not guilt) of Soviet psychiatric science