Like some “especially advanced” young men from the 80s, Viktor Tsoi decided to “dodge” the army. In 1983, he was admitted to this well-known city clinic for a month and a half. The doctors treated the young man without due respect. The musician had to experience all the joys of Soviet psychiatric medicine firsthand.

“Despite his parents’ indignation, Viktor, on the advice of friends, decided to ‘pretend’ to be insane – it was the only way to get exemption from military service. With the help of Maryana Tsoi, he scratched his veins, and an ambulance was called, after which he ended up in Psychiatric Hospital No. 2, located on the embankment of the Pryazhka River…

Tsoi, remembering the stories of friends who had already ‘dodged’ the army this way, imagined two weeks in the ‘psychiatric hospital’ as a fun adventure, but alas, he was unlucky. Yuri Kasparyan recalls: “It wasn’t easy, Maryana visited him, I was waiting for him to get out… Maryana amusingly told how they admitted Tsoi to Pryazhka. You had to fake MDP, manic-depressive psychosis. Cut your veins and so on. That’s how they got in. And they somehow had connections there, so he would be accepted, but you still had to cut your veins. And Tsoi hated blood. Even pricking a finger was a problem, especially since he played guitar. And here he had to cut his veins!.. In general, they called the ambulance, the doctors arrived, and Tsoi was sitting there all pink, with some small scratches on his hands. But they took him anyway!

Due to the whim of a doctor who suspected the silent conscript of malingering and tried to expose him, Viktor had to spend a month and a half in the madhouse, after which he was discharged as a “legitimate Soviet psycho.” According to Maryana, he left the institution “almost transparent.” Maryana Tsoi: “It was scary to look at Tsoi. When they discharged him, I barely dragged Vitya to the car and took him home – to another apartment we were renting at the time. And then I woke up around two in the morning, and Tsoi wasn’t next to me. I went to the kitchen: in the pitch darkness, he was scratching something with a pencil on a torn matchbox. It was the text of ‘Tranquilizer.’” After this hospital, he became completely different from the person I knew. And he remained that way until his death. It was then that he became the Viktor Tsoi we know now.

He had a bunch of complexes, which is no secret. Everyone who knew him personally will confirm this. And apparently, he decided to get rid of all of them at once. And he overdid it a bit. Sometimes it seemed like he simply went mad.” Obviously, it wasn’t Tsoi who overdid it in the “madhouse,” “getting rid of his complexes” — psychiatric hospitals don’t provide psychological help, but psychiatric treatment… There is a difference! It was the orderlies and the attending doctor who “overdid it”…

What do they “treat” with in such institutions? Correct, with artificially produced medications! Mostly barbiturates – chemicals that slow down mental processes. But the “madhouse” apparently worked so “elegantly” that it completely “knocked out” that kind of energy from Tsoi: until the end of his days, he treated “booze” with more than coolness, and he was never caught “drinking unauthorized!” In other words, the “quacks” at Pryazhka, unknowingly, “switched something on” in Tsoi’s head, after which he changed radically and, in fact, began his “ascension”…

Sources:

https://zen.yandex.ru/media/lomoffart/viktor-coi-v-durke-5b138a99c33bcc00a9d447e3

https://www.spb.kp.ru/daily/26568.5/3584112/

Kalgin V.N.: Viktor Tsoi