Existing, Real Socialism

“A particularly gruesome method, increasingly used by the KGB, was to declare dissenters mentally ill.  From the point of view of the state, locking up dissenters in mental hospitals was a clever strategy because it saved the authorities from having to observe legal niceties.  Furthermore, sending opponents to mental institutions conveyed the message that only lunatics would oppose the just and powerful Soviet system” (Kenez, Peter, A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginnign to the End, p 227).