Seven Years in Kresty: A Prison from a Psychiatrist's Perspective

Seven years in one of the most famous penitentiaries in Russia is a serious term, quite deserving of such a time-tested genre as prison memoirs. Moreover, Alexey Gavrish spent these years in the St. Petersburg remand prison "Kresty" not as a convict, but first as a psychiatrist, and later as the head of the largest psychiatric department in the criminal correction system of the entire northwest of the country. From this rather exotic point of view, he very candidly tells how the Russian prison and prison medicine are organized: who works there and for what purpose; who and how serves time; who treats and according to what principles; who heals and from what. Simulators and operatives, drug addicts and schizophrenics, orderlies and pedophiles: what literally happens in the minds of all these people gathered in a very strange and complex place of common residence — starting with the author, who by the end discovers himself as a monster and decides to leave the criminal system.