This reminds me of the book Where the Dog Is Buried by Czech dissident and activist Pavel Kohout. It is basically a book about various tactics that the police in communist Czechoslovakia used to harass and intimidate him and his fellow activists.

Some of those tactics were surprisingly creative and twisted... from using 'flexible laws' to justify arrests and constant surveillance to tricking him into emigration - he was a playwright and when police gave him a permission to travel to Austria to see the opening night of one of his plays he thought it was maybe a peace offering after years of troubles with the police. He went there with his wife but while they were there the police invalidated their passports and when they wanted to return home they were not allowed to cross the border and they were both forced to emigrate.