Roman Nikolaichik, and Anti-Putin activist and parliamentary candidate for Garry Kasparov’s Other Russia Party, was sent to a psychiatric hospital after being questioned by police about his political beliefs. Nikolaichik is a 27-year-old lawyer with a wife and three children. He is currently being held in an isolation ward, and friends and family have been unable to contact him. This type of involuntary re-education for dissidents is reminiscent of Soviet-era tactics, and allows politicians to write off anyone critical of their authority as mentally ill.

A similar sentence of psychiatric detention was recently given to Larissa Arap, a journalist and activist for The Other Russia, for writing an article that exposed child abuse in the same psychiatric unit she was to be sent to. Ms Arap says she was heavily drugged and threatened during her detention of 46 days. When freed due to the public outcry of human rights groups, doctors warned her that she would be locked up indefinitely if she talked about her treatment.

Yevgeny Svetovidov, a spokesman for one of the movements Nikolaichik is active in, said that the police tried to fabricate a charge of attempted murder against Mr. Nikolaichik, and then found a doctor who would certify him as mentally unstable. “Seeing the obvious absurdity of the fabricated accusation, and anticipating that the case would simply fall apart, the security services decided to employ punitive psychiatry in relation to Nikolaichik, and he was sent for detention to a psychiatric clinic,” Svetovidov said. “The current process has an obviously political nature, with Nikolaichik’s political position and his involvement with The Other Russia coalition serving as its cause.”

source