Seven Years in Kresty: Prison Through the Eyes of a Psychiatrist

Seven years in one of the most famous places of detention in Russia is a serious term, quite worthy of such a time-tested genre as prison memoirs. Moreover, Alexey Gavrish spent these years in the Saint Petersburg pre-trial detention center "Kresty" not as a prisoner, but first as a psychiatrist, and then as the head of the largest psychiatric department in the criminal correctional system of the entire Northwest of the country. From this rather exotic point of view, he very candidly describes how the Russian prison and prison medicine are arranged: who works there and for what reasons; who is imprisoned and how; who treats and according to what principles; who is treated and for what. Simulators and operatives, drug addicts and schizophrenics, orderlies and pedophiles: what literally happens in the minds of all these people united by a very strange and complex place of common existence—starting with the author, who by the end discovers himself as a monster and decides to leave the criminal system.