On Sunday several thousand demonstrators marched in Moscow, demanding that the twelve men still imprisoned for their participation in the May 2012 Bolotnaya Square protests be freed. The treatment of one of those twelve has raised particular alarm bells: last week a Russian court ordered that Mikhail Kosenko be confined in a psychiatric hospital. For students of the Soviet dissident movement this raised the specter of the return of one of the worst chapters in late Soviet repression. Beginning in the 1960s the USSR used psychiatric confinement to punish dissidents.

Psychiatric confinement had a particular appeal to the Soviet government because it permitted the pretense that dissidents were not political prisoners – they were insane. Of course the main evidence of their insanity was that they protested against the state, but Soviet psychiatrists manufactured a diagnosis of “sluggishly progressing schizophrenia,” the only symptom of which was social maladaptation evidenced by … dissident activity. There were special psychiatric hospitals (sometimes called psych-camps) for dissidents, and they were the stuff of horror movies: the patients, heavily medicated with psychotropic drugs, shuffled about in a daze, watched by attendants whose principal qualification was that they were beefy enough to hold down recalcitrant “patients” while the next dose was administered.

The first cases of such psychiatric abuse came as early as the 1940s, but the widespread practice, and the establishment of special psych-camps for dissidents, began in the late 1960s, just as the USSR and the United States began actively pursuing détente. This was probably not a coincidence. The USSR needed to improve its human rights reputation to advance its international agenda, and the psych-camps provided a way to claim that dissidents were not political prisoners. The practice was also convenient for the Nixon administration, which could not easily ignore show trials like the infamous trial of Yulii Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky in 1966, but could more easily ignore the confinement of “schizophrenics.”

Is Putin heading down the same road? Russian human rights violations are becoming a regular feature in the Western press, just as Russia prepares to welcome the world to the Sochi Olympics. As Mark Galeotti describes in his excellent blog on Russian crime and security, there are other signs that Putin is trying to polish Russia’s international reputation by backing away from embarrassing political show trials. If Russia reopens the psych-camps on the eve of the Olympics, let us hope that Western governments do not again accept psychiatric confinement as a convenient fiction and turn their backs on the newest generation of dissidents.