Arkady Stepanchuk never forgot the cold November morning in 1961 when he was arrested by the KGB.  He was only 16.  His crime?  Going to the French embassy to seek information about relatives who had fled to France during the Second World War.

KGB agents searched his apartment and discovered a diary in which he had written: “Why do we need the cult of Lenin if we have Jesus Christ?”  He was charged with “anti‑Soviet agitation and propaganda” and confined to a Moscow psychiatric hospital.  There, he was diagnosed as schizophrenic and placed on the psychiatric register.  That stripped him of practically all of his rights, and he became a prisoner of the diagnosis.

He had no way of knowing that he would spend years in and out of psychiatric hospitals.  He was finally released for the last time in 1988.  A frail, withered man who looked older than his 48 years, said that no one, including the psychiatrists who treated him, ever questioned his sanity. “They never believed that I was mentally ill,” he says.  “They told me that I was being held to keep me from resuming my activities.”