“Victor has a typical Jewish profile. Instinctively, the Asphalites rushed straight at him, shouting “Death to the Jews!” I couldn’t see exactly how they hit him because I was fighting my own little battle to keep the Czech flag from my hands. Only later, in the pre-trial detention center, I saw his swollen mouth, torn lips. He held four teeth in his fist.

Here is what Natalya Gorbanevskaya wrote in her autobiography “About the Demonstration of August 25, 1968 on Red Square”, which was smuggled out of the USSR and published in Frankfurt in 1970. This is a description of one of the most unimaginable and heroic acts of protest in world history: a demonstration by eight Soviet citizens on Red Square in Moscow against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia a week earlier. Others included Pavel Litvinov (whose comments against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine were published by K last year), as well as the then 37-year-old philologist Viktor Fainberg, who died on January 2 at the age of 92. demonstration.

In addition to the typical Jewish profile, the son of engineer Isaak Fainberg and teacher Sarah Dashevskaya, born in 1931 in Kharkov, also had a tendency to fight back: already as a student, during the years of the anti-Semitic campaign of 1948-52 (the era of Stalinist insanity and the “trial of doctors” – all they were Jewish) was referred to a psychiatrist for reacting to racist insults (this referral was later used against him in court). In 1957, he got into a fight with a policeman, again over an anti-Semitic remark, and was sentenced to a year of hard labor. He got a job in a factory, but due to an accident at work, he was left without work for several years and became partially disabled. In 1968 he graduated with honors from the Faculty of English Literature of Leningrad University with a Ph.D. thesis on J.D. Salinger and got a job as a tour guide. Then there was the invasion of Czechoslovakia, which served as a catalyst on many levels, both in the West and in the countries of existing socialism.

“The agents rushed at us. The instruction was not to respond. But when they started cursing us, hitting us and breaking posters, I felt so bad that I couldn’t react. I tried to get up, but Babitsky hugged me tightly and held me. For the first time in my life, I didn’t react. And it cost me,” he himself described a short demonstration in the documentary film by Kirill and Ksenia Sakharnov “Viktor Feinberg. Acharai! (2022).

Two of those arrested were sentenced to prison, three to exile, two to a psychiatric hospital: Gorbanevskaya because she had a young child, which would make it difficult to convict her in a criminal court, and Feinberg because he badly beaten. that he cannot appear in public. The charges concerned “violation of public order” and “dissemination of false information aimed at slandering the Soviet political and social system.” Words like “demonstration” and “Czechoslovakia” were carefully absent. Feinberg was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He was given the antipsychotic drug chlorpromazine despite contra-indications for health reasons at work, he witnessed merciless beatings of inmates by “orderlies”, submitted written reports of what he saw that mysteriously disappeared, and went on a hunger strike, which he stubbornly held on to despite force-feeding, which he eventually won.

With the help of psychiatrist Lev Petrov, a letter from Fainberg and cellmate Vladimir Borisov, who was arrested in September 1969 for distributing leaflets at the factory where he worked, reached the West and was published in The New York Times on March 19, 1971. Coincidentally, the climate in the West was particularly favorable: it was not until March 12 that the London Times published an appeal by neurologist and activist Vladimir Bukovsky to Western psychiatrists with a “campaign against the perverted use of psychiatry in the USSR.” In their letter, the two prisoners described how they had been arbitrarily drugged, force-fed, threatened with electric shocks, kept with dangerous and violent inmates for intimidation, deprived of any reading and writing materials—and concluded by complaining that, contrary to medical ethics, imprisonment in a psychiatric hospital and “treatment” lasted indefinitely: that is, until the imprisoned “patient” changed his views and ideas. The letter was signed by Andrey Zakharov, who five months earlier, on November 4, 1970, created the Commission on Human Rights in the USSR.

International influence forced the leadership of the psychiatric hospital to stop the “treatment” and soften the conditions of the two. Feinberg soon managed, through the mediation of psychiatrist Marina Vaiganskaya, to convey to the dissident movement a wealth of information about life inside the clinic. Feinberg was fired in early 1973, and Vaiganskaya lost her job. They got married and in 1974 left the USSR and settled in France.

Feinberg considered himself “a soldier in the human rights movement”. Consistent in this position, he retained his reflexes to the end, even when the USSR no longer existed. For example, he fought to have Russia’s attack on Chechnya declared a genocide, especially during the second war (1999-2000), the one that consolidated Vladimir Putin’s power. He belonged to that category of fighters for whom the movement for rights had a real and lasting content, so the term “dissidents”, highly non-specific, limits them, and therefore has only historical value. In other words, Feinberg and his friends represented the Soviet “generation of the 60s.” In a characteristic scene in Sakharnov’s documentary, he says of himself: “Even before I was ten years old, I decided that I would go to Palestine to organize an uprising against the British and establish the first truly communist state.” And with this phrase, he bursts into laughter.