The Ninth Circle is a story about punitive psychiatry that arose in the USSR at the initiative of F. Dzerzhinsky in the early 1920s. Decades passed, and thousands of completely innocent people sat in Soviet special hospitals and nothing changed. The journalist and human rights activist Viktor Davydov knows firsthand about the existence of special psychiatric hospitals: he himself was their prisoner. In these secret institutions, in contrast to the usual islands of the 'Gulag archipelago', the prisoners no longer seemed to exist. Their applications to state bodies were not considered, their injuries and death were not investigated, and the term was not determined by law. Terrible rumors circulated about these institutions even in the camps, and for a long time the West did not know about them at all. Fortunately, the author of The Ninth Circle managed to survive, to be released and to tell not only about his own experiences, but also about the sufferings of many people - workers, intell