The incarceration of freethinking, healthy people in madhouses is spiritual murder. It is a variant of the gas chamber, but it is an even more cruel variation, for the tortures of those being held are more vicious and prolonged.
With those words, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russia's greatest living novelist, last week lashed out at what has become perhaps the most sinister aspect of the current Soviet crackdown on internal dissent: the confinement of dissidents in mental institutions on the grounds that they are mentally unbalanced. Said Solzhenitsyn in his protest statement, which was circulated...