[2][3] During the Soviet period he was a human rights activist, being exiled, then imprisoned in a corrective-labour colony, for publication of his book Punitive Medicine in Russian and in English.

[12] Alexander enrolled in the Department of Pharmacology of a medical institute in 1970 and worked as an assistant in a biology laboratory at Moscow State University of Medicine and Dentistry.

After reading the notes that dissident poet Vladimir Gershuni's smuggled out of the Oryol Special Psychiatric hospital, Alexander became interested in the political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR.

In January 1977, he also travelled to Siberia as a courier for the Social Fund, delivering money to the needy families of political prisoners, held in the camps or forced to live in exile.

[13][23] In 1977, Podrabinek published Punitive Medicine [Карательная медицина], the Russian edition of his book on the systematic abuse of psychiatry for political purposes in the USSR.

[24][25] In December 1977, the KGB approached Podrabinek's father Pinkhos, and threatened to arrest and imprison both his sons (Kirill was suffering from TB) if the three of them did not agree to emigrate to Israel.

Alexander, supported by Velikanova, rejected the proposal and later held a press conference at the home of Andrei Sakharov, publicly asserting his refusal to given in to such blackmail.

[26] On 15 August 1978, Alexander Podrabinek was convicted of "anti-Soviet slander", sentenced to five years' banishment or internal exile, and was first transported to the Irkutsk Region, Siberia.

[29]) After the English edition of Punitive Medicine appeared, Podrabinek was again charged with political offences — he was by then exiled to Yakutia in the Soviet Far East — and at his trial in Ust-Nera on 6 January 1981, he was sentenced to three years in a local corrective-labour camp.

On 29 December 2003, however, units of the Russian Interior Ministry and the FSB seized 4,376 copies of the book purchased by Podrabinek's Prima information agency.

[5][38][39][40][41][42][43] In certain articles for Novaya gazeta, and comments on Radio Liberty, Podrabinek expressed concern that the use of psychiatry for political repression was reviving in Russia,[44][45] in the enforced hospitalization of Larisa Arap, for instance.

[46] In 2009, Podrabinek was targeted by the nationalist youth movement Nashi after writing on the Yezhednevny Zhurnal website about a Moscow eating place opposite the "Soviet" Hotel which had renamed itself the "Anti-Soviet" Restaurant and put up a sign using its popular nickname.

In March 2006 Podrabinek was briefly arrested in Minsk for involvement in peaceful protests against the re-election of the Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko for the third term.