This “Psychiatric Hospital of Special Type” (postal address: Dnepropetrovsk-6, postbox YaE-308) was established in 1965-6. The hospital occupies the premises of a former prison.
Dnepropetrovsk SPH
The regime is approximately the same as that of similar institutions in Kazan and Leningrad. The hospital consists of at least ten sections. The number of patients is about nine hundred. They were almost all sent there by court orders prescribing compulsory treatment. Politicals are held in the same cells as criminals. By mid-1969 the cell-wards were full to overflowing. In section 10 the most lightly-populated cells contained eleven or twelve persons, the remainder held as many as 30 each.
The absence of obvious or even faint symptoms of the illness indicated in the [pre-trial] report of the diagnostic team which accompanies the patient does not spare him from the most effective “therapy”. A course of twenty injections of sulphazin [a 1% sterile solution of purified sulphur in peach oil] is a widely-practised method; it is administered according to a curve rising from one c.c. to ten c.c., then falling back to one c.c.
About nine inmates of the Dnepropetrovsk hospital are known to have been confined there as a result of political cases. Our information about these people is inexact and incomplete. The names of some of them are known: Vitokhin, Shvedov, Fedosov, Morkovnikov, Maltsev and Palchevsky.
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