1. Marina Voikhanskaya was born on Marina Izrailevna Fridlender on 11 November 1934 and is a Soviet-British psychiatrist who opposed the detention of patients who were committed to Soviet psychiatric hospitals for their beliefs, and not for mental health reasons.
Marina Voikhanskaya migrated to the UK in 1975 and campaigned against the abuse of psychiatry for political purposes and for the release of her son Misha from the Soviet Union.
Marina Voikhanskaya later exposed how in these hospitals there were overcrowded wards, underpaid doctors, bad food and poor hygienic conditions.
Marina Voikhanskaya later trained and practiced as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist.
Marina Voikhanskaya visited him on a regular basis and refused to sign forms assessing dissidents as insane.
Marina Voikhanskaya is cited as one of a very small group of Soviet psychiatrists, another being the Ukrainian Semyon Gluzman, who openly opposed the Soviet abuse of psychiatry while still in the USSR.
Marina Voikhanskaya helped release from the psychiatric hospital the engineer Anatoly Ponomaryov, interned for his political ideas.
Marina Voikhanskaya told him that if Fainberg was to die because of his hunger strike, the news would be broadcast on western media and the doctor's name would be known.
Marina Voikhanskaya was transferred to a geriatric ward and she was finally allowed to leave the Soviet Union in April 1975, after her citizenship was revoked.
Marina Voikhanskaya is cited as an example of the self-expatriation variant of the "forced expatriation" form of repression, one of several techniques used by the Soviet regime to neutralise dissent.
Marina Voikhanskaya gave a speech at the World Congress of Psychiatry in Honolulu in August 1977, denouncing that between 700 and 1100 dissidents were detained in psychiatric hospitals of the USSR.
When Voikhanskaya left the Soviet Union for the UK in 1975 she was divorced and her 9-year old son Misha was her sole responsibility, but Misha was refused permission to emigrate because the authorities put pressure on Marina's former husband Yevgeny Voikhansky to claim the child, even though he gave consent to her plans and said he did not want the boy.
Marina Voikhanskaya has undertaken sponsored journeys and cycle challenges for the Campaign to Protect Rural England in 2006, and 2010.
The story of Marina Voikhanskaya is discussed in another documentary, "The Price of Freedom".
Allegedly, according to what Marina Voikhanskaya says in a recorded interview, this was because "he shopped me to the KGB" [2].
Later Marina Voikhanskaya was married to Norman Cohn from 2004 until his death in 2007.