KHARKIV, Ukraine – Leonid Plyushch, an active member of the Soviet and Ukrainian human rights movements and a victim of punitive psychiatry died in France on June 4. He was 76.
Mr. Plyushch had lived in France since being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1976, following a major campaign for his release from incarceration in a KGB psychiatric “hospital.” Although he concentrated mainly on literary issues in recent years, Mr. Plyushch followed events in Ukraine and always responded when voices were needed against injustice.
Mr. Plyushch was a mathematician by profession, though he became known for his publicistic writings and literary analyses, as well as for his autobiography “History’s Carnival: A Dissident’s Autobiography” (1979).
He was born into a Ukrainian family in Kyrgyzstan on April 26, 1939; he spent his childhood and the years until his exile in Ukraine. His professional career as mathematician in the USSR largely ended in 1968 due to his human rights activities.
Mr. Plyushch was a vital link between Ukrainian and Russian dissidents. In 1964 he wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) proposing democratization of the Soviet system. That letter and other writings were published in the samvydav. At the time Mr. Plyushch remained a committed Marxist, still believing in “socialism with a human face.”
In 1968 he was dismissed from the Cybernetics Institute of the Academy of Sciences for a letter he sent to the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda in support of Alexander Ginsburg, who was then on trial. Around that time he began passing information to the Chronicle of Current Events (Khronika Tekushchikh Sobitii), a samizdat publication that was vital in informing of Soviet repression. [He also disseminated issues of the samvydav Ukrainian Herald (Ukrayinskyi Visnyk)
He signed many appeals during years when each signature could result in arrest and persecution. These included a letter in 1971 to the Fifth International Congress of Psychiatrists, calling on the profession to fight punitive psychiatry in the USSR, as well as letters in support of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and Vladimir Bukovsky.
In 1969 he became a member of the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR, the first such rights group in the Soviet Union. Together with other members, including Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev, he signed a letter to the United Nations asking that the Soviet Union’s violation of the fundamental right to hold and circulate independent views be formally discussed.
In 1974, on the 30th anniversary of the Deportation of the Crimean Tatar People, the Initiative Group sent a letter to the U.N. secretary general asking him to help enable the return of the Crimean Tatars to their homeland.
He was arrested on January 15, 1972 (during the second wave of mass arrests in Ukraine) and was charged with “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” In July 1973 he was forcibly incarcerated in the notorious Dnipropetrovsk Special Psychiatric Hospital and held there until January 1976. The “diagnosis” was “sluggish schizophrenia,” the standard gobbledygook used against victims of punitive psychiatry.
His case attracted a lot of attention abroad and there were many protests over his effective imprisonment. This resulted in his being expelled from the Soviet Union, along with his wife, Tatiana, and two children, in January 1976. Probably needless to say, he was found to be mentally fit and well by psychiatrists in the West.
Ika Koznarska Casanova
Leonid Plyushch and his wife, Tatyana, in 1980 in Lexington, N.Y.
In recent years, Mr. Plyushch concentrated mainly on literary criticism, but also followed events in Ukraine and Russia. He had a wonderful sense of humor, witty though gentle, and his analysis was always clear-headed and free of any jargon or stereotypes. He was always ready to add his voice in defense of those facing repression.
Вічна пам’ять – Eternal memory!
With information from The New York Times and The Ukrainian Weekly’s archives.
Halya Coynash is a member of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.