Leonid Pljuschtsch

Leonid Ivanovich Plyushch ( Ukrainian Леонід Іванович Плющ , Russian Леонид Иванович Плющ , English transcription Plyushch , French transcription Pliouchtch * 26. April 1938 in Naryn , Kyrgyz SSR ; † 4. June 2015 in Bessèges , France ) was a Soviet - Ukrainian dissident and Mathematician .

Life

Plyushch was the son of a railroad worker who died at the front in World War II in 1941. As a child he had bone tuberculosis . He studied mathematics at the University of Kiev with a degree in 1962. He dealt with mathematical modeling of biological systems and their control mechanisms ( cybernetics ) and was at the Institute of Cybernetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He also dealt with game theory .

In the late 1960s he became politically active as a dissident. He protested against the trial of Alexander Ginsburg and Yuri Galanskow and against the crackdown on the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968 - he and sixteen other Soviet dissidents signed a letter of solidarity with the Czechoslovak democracy movement. He joined a human rights committee in the Soviet Union that wrote a letter to the UN Human Rights Commission investigating human rights violations in the Soviet Union.

He was fired from his job at the Institute for Cybernetics in 1968, interrogated by the KGB and arrested in 1972. In the process that followed, he was declared insane by psychiatric experts without a hearing and was admitted to a mental institution. There he received high doses of psychotropic drugs (such as haloperidol ) and insulin injections, so that at times he could neither read nor write. The letters he wrote to Tatjana Sergejewna Chodorowitsch formed the basis of a book that was published in 1974 in Russian in Amsterdam and also translated into English. The political abuse of psychiatry revealed in his case sparked international protests. 650 American mathematicians signed a letter of protest and in France, among others, Henri Cartan stood up for him, who brought the case to the International Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver in 1974. In 1976 he was able to leave the country with his family. His case led to a condemnation of Soviet practices at the 6th International World Congress on Psychiatry.

Plyushch settled in France and published his autobiography in 1979. In 2006 he made a public appeal to Yulia Tymoshenko not to divulge the ideals of the “ Orange Revolution ”.

literature

• Tatiana Khodorovich: The Case of Leonid Plyushch , Boulder: Westview Press 1976, Review by AV Campbell, J. Med. Ethics, Volume 2, December 1976, p. 211 PMC 1154526 (free full text)
• Tania Mathon, Jean-Jacques Marie: L'affaire Pliouchtch , Éditions du Seuil 1976 (French, foreword Michel Broué , Henri Cartan , Laurent Schwartz )
• Leonid Plyushch: History's Carnival: A Dissident's Autobiography , Collins and Harvill Press 1979. ISBN 0-15-141614-1 .
  • German under the title: In the Carnival of History. A life as a dissident in Soviet reality. Fritz Molden, Vienna 1981

Web links

• Literature by and about Leonid Pljuschtsch in the catalog of the German National Library
• Плющ Леонид Иванович (Russian, accessed January 20, 2013)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Умер правозащитник, советский диссидент Леонид Плющ. June 4, 2015, Retrieved June 4, 2015 (Russian). 
2. ↑ Lettre ouverte de Tatiana Pliouchtch on Blog Mediapart from June 16, 2015; accessed on March 7, 2016 (French)
3. ↑ Leonid Plyushch: Open letter to the President of Ukraine. December 5, 2006, accessed January 20, 2013 .