Psychotic reaction: Putin puts away dissidents.

• Author: Moynihan, Michael C.
• Position: Dissenters' psychological profile - Brief article

IN THE SOVIET era, political persecution sometimes took a pseudoscientific turn: Doctors diagnosed dissidents with maladies such as "sluggish schizophrenia" and confined them to mental hospitals because they dared to criticize the state. A series of recent incidents suggests this practice might be making a comeback.

In the lead-up to Russia's parliamentary elections in December, the government threw a handful of nettlesome political activists into psychiatric institutions. One of them was Artem Basyrov, a 20-year-old member of the opposition Other Russia coalition, who, according to London's Independent newspaper, was detained by police in December and committed to a psychiatric institution just days before a planned anti-Putin protest in Moscow. After criticism from local and international human rights organizations, Basyrov was released from custody a month later without explanation.

It wasn't the only recent incident of this kind. Six months earlier, authorities confined the journalist and activist Larisa Arap...