For his political activities, such as founding and editing samizdat almanac Phoenix, he was incarcerated in prisons, camps and forced treatment psychiatric hospitals (Psikhushkas).
Galanskov’s first publication, Phoenix came in 1961, and contained direct criticism of the Soviet government, partly in the form of poetry.
[1] During the years of Nikita Khrushchev’s leadership, frustrations had been mounting in the Kremlin over the difficulty of suppressing the Samizdat literary movement.
Instead, it provoked the first spontaneous political demonstration to occur in the Soviet Union in 30 years, which Galanskov helped organize.
Yuri Galanskov and Alexander Ginzburg also compiled detailed notes of the trial and released their observations in a four-hundred page report known as The White Book.
In collaboration with Ginzburg, he wrote a letter describing the poor conditions and cruel guards of the labor camp.
According to accounts that reached the West at that time, Galanskov who suffered from bleeding ulcers, was not allowed to receive medical care after his imprisonment, and was fed prison fare of salt fish and black bread.