Short answers, pulled from the story.
Soviet dissidents were people who disagreed with Soviet ideology and were willing to speak out against it, a term used in the Soviet Union from the mid-1960s until the fall of Communism. The most influential subset of the dissidents became known as the Soviet human rights movement.
Soviet dissidents who criticized the state in most cases faced a choice between exile abroad with revocation of citizenship, confinement in a mental hospital, or a labor camp. Some acts, such as demonstrating for reform, were treated simultaneously as a crime under Article 70 of the Soviet Criminal Code, a psychiatric symptom, and a formal diagnosis.
The Chronicle of Current Events was an underground periodical launched by Soviet dissidents in April 1968 to document human rights violations and protest activity across the Soviet Union. It later tallied 424 political trials involving 753 convictions, with 164 people declared insane and sent for compulsory psychiatric treatment.
The KGB routinely sent Soviet dissidents to psychiatrists rather than to open trial, avoiding the embarrassment of a public trial and framing dissent as illness rather than conviction. Those judged psychotic were confined in psychiatric hospitals and treated with neuroleptics, a practice widely known as psychiatric terror.
The 1970s marked the height of Soviet dissidents' presence in Western public life, largely because of the Helsinki Accords signed in August 1975. The accords inspired dissidents in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland to openly protest human rights failures by their own governments.
KGB head Yuri Andropov wrote that the actions of monitors such as Yuri Orlov and Alexander Ginzburg needed to be terminated on the basis of existing law. The KGB then launched large-scale arrests against Helsinki Watch Groups in Moscow, Kiev, Vilnius, Tbilisi, and Erevan in 1977-1979 and again in 1980-1982, imprisoning 50 members in total.