Viktor Isaakovich Fainberg is a philologist, a fighter against punitive psychaitry and a prominent figure known for human rights activism and participation in the dissident movement in the Soviet Union (he was participant of the 1968 Red Square demonstration). 

 Viktor was born to the couple of Isaac Fainberg and Sarah Dashevskaya. When he was a child, while attending school during an antisemitic campaign of 1948-1952, he was subjectted to a harassment. He never reconciled, but always have been joining a fray with his abusers. As a result, he was sent to a psychiatrist and this fact played a negative role in his life. In 1957 year he fight with a policeman in connection of a antisemitic insult and was sentenced to a year of corrective labor. 

In 1968, he graduated from the English unit of the philological department of the Leningrad University where he defended his diploma thesis about writer Salinger. In the summer of 1968, Fainberg worked as a guide for the Pavlovsk Palace. That year he met human rights activists. 

He was one of the seven persons who demonstrated on the Red Square in Moscow on 26 of August, 1968. They protested the Soviet military intervention in Czechoslovakia. 

Fainberg says: "The hopes are the same. Back then it was called 'Prague Spring,' while now it is called 'New Europe,' the part that lived through totalitarianism — Poland, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Slovakia — and Old Europe, which is looking around in all directions just as it did back then. I would like to say that Prague Spring was our hope, too; we hoped that spring would somehow migrate and become our spring, or our summer".

The activists of the demonstration were promptly arrested and sentenced. Viktor Fainberg was examined by psychiatrist and he was found insane. He was subjected to compulsory treatment. But the KGB faced a problem. When seized on the Red Square by the KGB during the demonstration, Feinberg was beaten in the face and he lost all his front teeth during the fight. It was too undesirable to demonstrate Viktor in court. Thus, it was decided to send Viktor to a special psychiatric hospital (such a decision could be adopted by a court while a defendand is absent). 

In the hospital he was examined by the Serbsky Institute comission. In the report it wasn't mentioned about events in Czechoslovakia that lead to the demonstration. Viktor's actions were described as "disorderly conduct at Red Square". As a result, he was sent to the Special Psychiatric Hospital in Leningrad (January 1969 — February 1973). In the hospital he went on a hunger strike and he was fed with a force, he was also treated with chlorpromazine. Hospital's psychiatrist Marina Vaykhanskaya assisted Fainberg, she gave all the information about Viktor's condition to dissidents outside. Her aid helped Viktor to get out of there, but she was fired. 

In 1974 Viktor and Marina Vaykhanskaya married and emigrated from the Soviet Union. 

In November, 2007, a man, named Sergey Potylitsyn, tryed to make an attempt to murder Viktor.