Viktor Fainberg was born to the married couple of Isaac Fainberg and Sarah Dashevskaya. In his life as a child, while attending school during an antisemitic campaign of 1948-1952, he was subjected to harassment that, in his own words, he did not reconcile himself to, but entered the fray with an abuser. As the result of these frays, he got a referral to a psychiatrist. In 1957, in connection with antisemitic insult, he had a fight with a policeman and for this reason was sentenced to 1 year of corrective labor. In 1968, he graduated from the English unit of the philological department of the Leningrad University where he defended his diploma thesis about writer Salinger with distinction. In the summer of 1968, Fainberg worked as a guide for the Pavlovsk Palace. Viktor Fainberg was one of the seven persons who participated in the 1968 Red Square demonstration against the intervention into Czechoslovakia. During the demonstration and his arrest, he lost many teeth and in this unpresentable state was never presented for trial; instead, he was placed to a psychiatric hospital. Fainberg was examined by the Serbsky Institute commission composed of G.V. Morozov, D.R. Lunts and Y.L. Lindau. In their act No 35 / s dated October 10, 1968, they did not mention the invasion of Czechoslovakia, which gave rise to this demonstration, the action was merely described as 'disorderly conduct at Red Square,' and Fainberg's mental condition was described as follows: As a result, he was committed for compulsory treatment to the Special Psychiatric Hospital in Leningrad where he was confined from January 1969 to February 1973. At the hospital, Fainberg went on hunger strike in protest, was subjected to forced feeding and was treated with chlorpromazine despite his hyperthyroidism that was somatic contraindication to chlorpromazine therapy. Marina Vaykhanskaya, a psychiatrist at the hospital, assisted Fainberg by passing information about him to dissidents outside. She was dismissed for this activity which helped Fainberg be released. In 1974, they married and emigrated from the Soviet Union. In emigration, Fainberg has initiated the formation of "Campaign Against Psychiatric Abuses" to fight punitive psychiatry in the USSR. In 1983, the Soviet Union was expelled from the World Psychiatric Association.
