Leonid Plyushch

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Leonid Ivanovych Plyushch
Леонід Іванович Плющ
Order For Courage
Antonovych prize
(1987)

Leonid Ivanovych Plyushch (

Soviet dissident
.

Although he was employed to work on Soviet space missions, he became disillusioned with some aspects of the Soviet Union, and started to protest, by sending letters to multiple entities and signing petitions and declarations. These activities led to his interrogation and, in 1972, eventual arrest and imprisonment by the Soviet authorities, where he was injected with drugs and mistreated. He was put on trial in secret, closed to public scrutiny, by the Soviet authorities. Eventually, in 1976, he was able to leave the Soviet Union, and later settled in France, after which he became involved in trying to promote human rights.

In 1979, with the help of his wife, he wrote a book describing how he and other dissidents were placed in psychiatric facilities. Throughout his later years, he supported anti-totalitarian publications.

Early life and career

Leonid Plyushch was born into a working-class family in 1938 in Naryn, Kirghizia. His father worked as railway foreman, and died on the front in 1941. Leonid's childhood was marked by tuberculosis of the bone, which he contracted at the age of 8.[2][3]

Plyushch graduated from

USSR Academy of Sciences, which was often tasked with solving various problems for the Soviet space program.[4][5]

Dissident activities

Plyushch became a

UN Human Rights Commission asking it to investigate the violations by the USSR of the right to hold independent beliefs and to propagate them by legal means. Plyushch was one of the fifteen signatories to An Appeal to The UN Committee for Human Rights.[6] Due to blowback from his political stances, he was dismissed from the Cybernetics Institute in 1968, and the KGB confiscated a number of his manuscripts and interrogated him several times.[7][8]

Trial and imprisonment

He was arrested in January 1972 on charges of anti-Soviet activity, and was jailed for a year before his trial began. During his trial, the court sat

Dnipropetrovsk Special Psychiatric Hospital where high doses of haloperidol, insulin and other drugs were administered, which temporarily made him incapable of reading and writing.[9][10] Three commissions that examined him after a year of detention, one of which was chaired by Andrei Snezhnevsky, found him suffering from "reformist delusions" with "Messianic elements" and "sluggish schizophrenia."[11] On 28 November 1976, Plyushch said, Moscow has taken advantage of the Helsinki security pact to improve its economy while increasing the suppression of political dissenters.[12]

While he was imprisoned, he corresponded with Tatiana Khodorovich.[13] Plyushch's letters to her later formed the basis of the book The Case of Leonid Plyushch, first published in Russian in 1974 by an Amsterdam publisher, and translated into English two years later, which received attention in medical ethics journals.[9][14] His imprisonment triggered international protests, including a letter by 650 American mathematicians addressed to the Soviet embassy.[10] Henri Cartan brought the case to the attention of the participants to the 1974 International Congress of Mathematicians, which was held in Vancouver.[15]: 788  Amnesty International sponsored an International Day for Plyushch in April 1975,[13] and Andrei Sakharov also pleaded on his behalf.[16]

Freedom and later life

Eventually he was allowed to leave the Soviet Union together with his family in 1976.[13] His arrival in the West increased the friction between Western and Soviet psychiatrists leading eventually to a condemnation of Soviet practices by the World Psychiatric Association at the Sixth World Congress of Psychiatry.[17][18] At a press conference in Paris, Plyushch gave a memorable account of the effects of his detention and medications:[19]

I noted with horror the daily progression of my degradation. I lost interest in politics, then in scientific problems, finally in my wife and children. My speech became blurred; my memory worsened. In the beginning, I reacted strongly to the sufferings of other patients. Eventually I became indifferent. My only thoughts were of toilets, tobacco and the bribes to the male nurses to let me go to the toilet one more time. Then I began to experience a new thought: 'I must remember everything I see here, I told myself, so that I can tell about it afterwards.'

Leonid Plyushch (1939-2015) in Bessèges (France) in 2013

Plyushch became a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group in 1977, promoting human rights in his native Ukraine.[20]

On 23 July 1978, Plyushch visited Ukrainians in

Australian Parliament.[21]

In 1979, with the contribution of his wife, Plyushch published his book History's Carnival: A Dissident's Autobiography in which he described how he and other dissidents were committed to psychiatric hospitals.

Royal College of Psychiatry, was invited by his British colleagues to answer criticism relating to Plyushch and other dissidents. He refused to do so, and instead resigned his Fellowship.[24]

Later in life, although he retained communist convictions,

totalitarian publications in other communist countries, including Vietnam.[25]

In 2006, he translated the book Talking with angels (originally Dialogues avec l'ange,

ISBN 978-2700700350) into Russian[26] and Ukrainian[27]
with his wife Tatiana.

Plyushch died 4 June 2015 in Bessèges,[1] France.[28][29] His death was reported by a friend and fellow ex-Soviet dissident, Arina Ginzburg.[30]

References

  1. ^ a b "Lettre ouverte de Tatiana Pliouchtch" [Open letter from Tatiana Pliouchtch]. Blog Mediapart. 16 June 2015. Retrieved 2 August 2015.
  2. ^ Plyushch L., (1979) pp. 3-4
  3. ISBN 978-0-415-12290-0
    .
  4. ^ Plyushch L., (1979) pp. 31–37
  5. ^ Khodorovich T. (1976), p. xv
  6. ^ Yakobson, Anatoly; Yakir, Pyotr; Khodorovich, Tatyana; Podyapolskiy, Gregory; Maltsev, Yuri; et al. (21 August 1969). "An Appeal to The UN Committee for Human Rights". The New York Review of Books.
  7. Radio Free Europe
    Research material, 1973-1-31
  8. ^ Khodorovich T. (1976), p. 5
  9. ^
    PMC 1154526
    .
  10. ^
    PMID 17799035
    .
  11. ISBN 978-0-306-44156-1
    .
  12. ^ "Helsinki pact said abused". The Spokesman-Review. 28 November 1976. p. A11.
  13. ^
    ISBN 978-0-415-33186-9
    .
  14. PMID 691016
    .
  15. ^ "Interview with Henri Cartan" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 46 (7): 782–788. August 1999.
  16. ^ "Sakharov in appeal on detained Russian". The New York Times. 20 February 1974.
  17. ^ "Behavior: censuring the Soviets". Time. 12 September 1977.
  18. PMID 11661550
    .
  19. ^ "Soviet Union: the psukhushka horror". Time. 16 February 1976.
  20. ^ "Украинский диссидент Леонид Плющ умер сегодня во Франции" [Ukrainian dissident Leonid Plyushch died today in France] (in Russian). RBC Ukraine. 4 June 2015. Retrieved 4 June 2015.
  21. ^ "Plyushch visits Ukrainians in Australia, addresses Parliament" (PDF). The Ukrainian Weekly. Vol. LXXXV, no. 165. 23 July 1978. p. 4.
  22. ^ Плющ, Леонид (1979). На карнавале истории [The carnival stories] (in Russian). London: Overseas Publications Interchange.
  23. ISBN 978-0-00-262116-8
    .
  24. doi:10.1192/pb.5.5.94
    .
  25. ^ Milosz, Czeslaw; Sontag, Susan; Domenach, Jean-Marie; Barańczak, Stanisław; Arrabal, Fernando; et al. (13 May 1982). "Help Save "Que Me"". The New York Review of Books.
  26. ^ Диалоги с ангелом, Fact Publishers, Kyiv, 2006
  27. ^ Діалоги з Янголом, Fact publishers, Kyiv, 2006
  28. ^ "Помер правозахисник, дисидент Леонід Плющ" [Human rights activist, dissident Leonid Plyushch died] (in Ukrainian). RFE/RL. 4 June 2015. Retrieved 4 June 2015.
  29. ^ "Famous Soviet dissident Leonid Plyushch dies aged 77". Ukraine Today. 4 June 2015. Retrieved 4 June 2015.
  30. ^ "Prominent Soviet dissident Leonid Plyushch dies". Business Insider. 4 June 2015. Retrieved 4 June 2015.

Bibliography

Books

Articles and interviews

Further reading

External links

Audiovisual material

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