About the book: 2021 / "The Ninth Circle" is a story about punitive psychiatry that arose in the USSR on the initiative of F. Dzerzhinsky in the early 1920s. Decades passed, and thousands of completely innocent people were in Soviet special hospitals and nothing changed. Journalist and human rights activist Viktor Davydov knows firsthand about the existence of special mental hospitals: he himself was their prisoner. In these secret institutions, unlike the usual islands of the “GULAG archipelago,” the prisoners no longer seemed to exist. Their applications to government agencies were not considered, injuries and deaths were not investigated, and the period was not determined by law. There were terrible rumors about these institutions even in the camps, and for a long time in the West they were not known at all. Fortunately, the author of “The Ninth Circle” managed to survive, be released and talk not only about what he himself had experienced, but also about the suffering of many people - workers, intellectuals, artists, writers, who experienced all the horrors of punitive psychiatry..