Leonid Pliushch

Naryn, 1939 – Bessèges, 2015

Photo by S. Matsko, Kiev, 1988. Source: https://www.photo.net/gallery/image/4156589-leonid-plusch-kyiv-1988/.

Leonid Ivanovich Pliushch was born in Naryn, in Kyrghyzistan, on the 26^th April 1939. His father, a railway worker was killed at the front in 1941. At the end of the Second World War Leonid, together with his mother and sister, moved from Frunze to Borzna, in the Ukraine, to live with his paternal grandfather.  When at the age of eight, he was diagnosed with osteoarticular tuberculosis his mother wrote to Nikita Khrushchëv, who at the time was the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party[1], to request that Leonid be admitted to a sanatorium as the local doctors were unable to treat him.  Her request was granted and Leonid’s mother remained grateful to Khrushchëv for the rest of her life.  As an adult, Pliushch himself, however, did not recall Krushchëv’s intervention so favourably; he commented that a sick person’s admission to a sanatorium ought to be the norm in a country where healthcare was free rather than the result of a political favour (cf. Plyushch 1979: 4).
Pliushch considered the education he received to be completely inadequate due to the “incredible stupidity” of the majority of his teachers (Pljušč 1978: 21) and as a child and adolescent, he dreamed of “revolutionising mathematics and philosophy” (ibidem). This and other reflections written in his diary were discovered by the KGB and in 1972 used as evidence of a “Messiah complex” (ibidem), caused according to Soviet psychiatrists by a “slow progressive schizophrenia” (maloprogredientnaia shizofreniia).  In 1956, Pliushch had made an application of admission to the KGB school, which had been rejected, at least officially on health grounds.
Pliushch spent much of his time reading and studying.  He was also very involved in activities organised by the Komsomol. His innate curiosity and eclecticism made him naturally critical of Soviet society.  In a debate with a Communist Party history professor over the recently held 13th Congress of the Komsomol he commented that the event was a  “Congress of Charlatans”, because its participants had refused to take into consideration suggestions that Leonid and other students had proposed in a letter  (Pljušč 1978: 30). The professor reminded him that such comments were risky, to which Pliushch replied: “the age of Stalin is over, everyone has the right to say what they want” (ibidem). In 1959, having completed three years at the university of Odessa, Pliushch applied to become a schoolteacher in a rural area to “raise the level of knowledge among farmers” (Pljušč 1978: 36): his application was accepted and he worked as a teacher for a year before moving to Kiev, disappointed by the experience, where he married Tatiana Zhitnikova and enrolled in the fourth year of university.
At the end of the 1950s Pliushch met Irina D. Avdeeva, who helped him “break more quickly the chains of a flat, sterile naturalism” (Pljušč 1978: 98) and recognise that in constructing a functional society, human conscience was as important as the laws of economics and economic policy.  In the Italian edition of his memoirs, Pliushch chose to omit a number of names including that of Avdeeva, who he refers to by the initials I. D. A, to avoid the possibility of persecution (cf. Pljušč 1978: 97). At the beginning of the 1970s, Pliushch wrote Letters to a friend (Pis’ma k drugu), his first samizdat Loza. The work sets out to criticise the Soviet state in ten points, describing its economic system as state capitalism and its politics as “ideocracy that has degenerated into idolocracy”, led by overpaid bureaucrats in complete opposition to the theories of Lenin (cf. Pljušč 1978: 114). In 1965, in Moscow, Pliushch met Viktor Krasin, who introduced him to the city’s dissident circles, supplied him with samizdat material and made known to him details of Andrei Siniavskii and Julii Daniėl’s trial. In 1968, during the Prague Spring, Pliushch openly took an anti CPSU and in the same year he signed a petition in support of Iurii Galanskov and Aleksandr Ginzburg. In this period, he was first invited to resign from his job and then expelled from the Institute of Cybernetics of the Ukrainian Academy of Science.  At that time, Pliushch wrote, “I had only one way out: to become a professional political opponent.  I was more likely to earn myself a prison sentence rather than a salary, but it was a job like any other, except it was much more important than any other!” (Pljušč 1978: 251). Pliushch was called as a witness in several trials in Moscow, Char’kov and Kiev, which he dared to define as “Kafkaesque”, a description which also underlines the Czech writer’s increasing influence on Russian dissidents.  In May 1969, invited by Pëtr Iakir, Pliushch became part of the Group for the Defence of Human Rights in the USSR (Initsiativnaja gruppa po zashchite prav cheloveka v SSSR) and began to make increasingly frequent trips between Kiev and Moscow to take part in trials and protests, support companions who had been victims of oppression and persecution and to aid the exchange of non-official information and samizdat material between the two cities.  It was at this time that Pliushch met Semën Gluzman, the young psychiatrist and dissident, with whom he discussed the role of gameplaying in treating infantilism and neurosis (cf. Pljušč 1978: 393), This was a subject dear to Pliushch, who spent a great deal of time in researching it, assisted by his wife who was also an expert in the field.   In October 1971, Pliushch was subjected to the first of many acts of persecution when his typewriter and several documents were seized and he was interrogated by the KGB (Sakharovskii Tsentr). This was a difficult year for Pliushch, not only politically, but also due to family, professional and psychological problems which led him to withdraw into a more private sphere.  He would later write that without this temporary ‘truce’ in 1971 he would have found the years between 1972 and 1976 far less bearable (Pljušč 1978: 418).
Pliushch was arrested in Kiev on 15^th January 1972 with other dissidents, and accused of anti-Soviet activities under article 70 of the Penal code of the  RSFSR. He had been expecting the arrest and had burned much of his samizdat material to avoid incriminating other dissidents. Nevertheless, his possession of several editions of the Chronicle of Current Events (Khronika tekushchikh sobytii) and the “Ukrainian Courier” (Ukrainskii Vestnik) together with texts he had written outlining how his belief that Lenin’s ideology was being betrayed were considered sufficient proof of his anti-Sovietism.  In the KGB prison in Kiev, he was interrogated on numerous occasions and twice examined by doctors from the Pavlov psychiatric hospital.  In May he was transferred to the Serbskii Institute in Moscow, but only for a few hours and it was eventually in Lefortovo that he was subjected to an official psychiatric evaluation (Pliushch’s request to be assessed in Kiev where many of his witnesses lived was denied). He was interviewed many times by a psychiatrist from the Serbskii Institute, at times refusing to answer her questions. Pliushch recalled that during one interview he was summoned by Doctor Daniėl’ Lunts, who “began to interrogate me, firing questions rapidly, I don’t know what his tactics were, he was logical, but he didn’t make known the system he was using.  I replied laconically, dryly – I knew that any imprecise statement would be distorted […]. He pointed out any imprecise answers straight away, as well as contradictions or refusals to express an opinion that made my answers obscure … After a quarter of an hour, he interrupted the interview” (Pljušč 1978: 469).
On the 17th of September 1972 Pliushch was summoned by the office of Procurator- General of the Soviet Union headed by Roman Rudenko to be subjected to further psychiatric assessment. Among those present were D. Lunts, the psychiatrist from the Serbskii Institute and A. Snezhnevskii who had all been appointed members of this second commission by the Ministry for Health.  The next day Pliushch was moved to a prison in Kiev (cf. Pljušč 1978: 452-482) where, between the 25^th and the 29^th of January he was tried behind closed doors. He was deemed to be of diminished capacity caused by “latent schizophrenia” (vialotekushchaia shizofreniia), which in the opinion of the psychiatrists had led to a misplaced conviction in “reformist ideas”, paranoia and erroneous reasoning (cf. Clementi 2007: 168). Material from Pliushch’s private life was used to support the psychiatrists’ conclusions. Evidence of his “reformist ideas” was found not only in his letters and anti-Soviet publications but also in the diaries he had written as a young man and which had been sequestered by the KGB. Even his interest in gameplaying and psychology was used against him. Snezhnevskii stated that the “reformist ideas” which had come to light in Pliushch’s first psychiatric evaluation had now transformed into fantastical ideas about the discipline of psychology (Pljušč 1978: 476). Although the second commission concluded that Pliushch could be cared for in an ordinary hospital, in July 1973 he was transferred to a special prison in Dnepropetrovsk. From August of that year, he was given the neuroleptic drug haloperidol, which can cause tremors and psychomotor disturbances. During this time Pliushch’s wife, Tatiana Zhitnikova, noted a significant deterioration in her husband’s mental and physical wellbeing.  In March 1974, the haloperidol was suspended only to be replaced with injections of insulin and sulphur.  Growing international pressure led to a cessation of ‘treatment’ and by the end of the summer Pliushch’s condition had improved. However, by November 1973, high doses of Triftazin, a drug used to treat schizophrenia, were being administrated. In December 1974 Tatiana wrote to the Regional Procurator of Dnepropetrovsk asking him to stop the medical abuse her husband was being subjected to. According to a report by Amnesty International in 1975 Pliushch’s psychological and physical stare had by now been severely compromised (cf. Amnesty Report 1975). While Pliushch’s wife continued to denounce her husband’s doctors, in the United States, Tatiana Khodorovich and Iurii Orlov circulated the article Stanno facendo impazzire Leonid Pljušč, perché?, as well as the samizdat publication, The Case Of Leonid Plyushch[2] (cf. Clementi 2007: 170). Leonid himself recalled that during this time he was so physically and psychologically weak that he was unable to interact with his doctors who interpreted his lack of communication as a sign of medical deterioration which justified further increases in his medication.
Thanks to Pliushch’s international academic reputation and the tireless efforts of his wife and other activists, the mathematician’s detention, in obvious contravention of civil and human rights, attracted a great deal of attention in the West. On the 25^th of June 1973, the Committee for Human Rights requested UN intervention in support of Pliushch and Borisov, a fellow dissident.  In 1974 the French section of the international committee of mathematicians (comprising 54 scientific members) formed in defence of Leonid Pliushch and Iurii Sikhanovich, met the advisor to the Soviet ambassador, Valentin Dvinin, and Valerii Matisov, secretary of the office of culture, but failed to obtain any concrete results.  In February and March, a group formed by A. Sakharov, E. Bonner, T. Velikanova, S. Kovalëv, T. Khodorovich and A. Tvërdokhlebov asked the UN to intervene in Pliushch’s case, and wrote to Amnesty International and the Human Rights Committee. Amnesty International included Pliushch in their 1975 report on the condition of Soviet prisoners. Letters of condemnation were sent to the International Red Cross and an open letter, which also circulated in the United States, was addressed to the Director of the Dnepropetrovsk special hospital. In the summer of 1974, the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Vancouver demanded the liberation of their unjustly detained colleagues (cf. Clementi 2007: 170). Tatiana Pliushch continued to write letters to the Ukrainian Ministry for Internal Affairs, the Procurator of the Ukrainian Republic, the Chief Instructor of the Ukrainian KGB, the Committee for State Security of the Ukrainian Council of Ministers, the General Procurator of the USSR, as well as to N. Podgornyi, A. Kosygin, L. Brezhnev, Iu. Andropov (at that time president of the KGB), the Supreme Soviet, the President of the Ukrainian Supreme Court, Doctor A. Snezhnevskii, the head of the Medical Office of the Ukrainian Ministry for Internal Affairs, the Procurator of the Dnepropetrovsk region, the International Association of Jurists and the International Association of Psychiatrists (cf. Pljušč 1978: 529-585). In 1975 a number of protests were organised to highlight Pliushch’s case in New York and other cities in the West; on the 23^rd of April, a delegation of mathematicians entered the Soviet Embassy in Paris to ask to for Pliushch’s immediate liberation. The communist parties of Italy, France and England also appealed to the Central Committee of the CPSU (cf. Clementi 2007: 170-171). On 10^th January 1976, after four years of imprisonment, as international pressure continued to mount, Pliushch was permitted to leave the Soviet Union with his family. The dissident settled in France where he became a citizen. From 1977 he was the Ukrainian representative of the Helsinki Group which had been founded at the end of 1976 by Mykola Rudenko with the collaboration of Petro Grigorenko and Nadiia Svitlichna.
After he left the Soviet Union, Pliushch continued to promote human and civil rights. He was a committed defended of free speech and freedom of the press and on several occasions sought to underline evidence of Soviet censorship in the age of perestroika. In Italy he participated in many conferences and congresses and in 1989 was the Italian Democratic Socialist Party’s (PSDI) candidate for the European Elections. His candidacy was announced at the Radical Party Congress held in Budapest in April 1989 and attracted considerable controversy regarding its legitimacy.  The PSDI’s response, reiterated at a press conference in Rome on 4^th May 1989 in which Pliushch took part, was that Pliushch, a Ukrainian from the Soviet Union and French citizen, was an emblem of universal reformist ideas (cf. Radio Radicale 1989).
Pliushch’s candidacy was possible thanks to a law proposed by the Radial Party allowing citizens of any state in the European Union to stand for election in Italy.  A few years earlier at a meeting in Bergamo, Pliushch had clearly expressed his opinions of contemporary Soviet politics: “I would like, in conclusion, to touch on an argument that puts me in opposition to western journalists. Gorbachëv, they affirm, wants reform, but is obstructed by conservative forces […] Here we are not dealing with gradual reform, which is necessary in every process of change, but with duplicity. If we continue to follow this course, the much-anticipated reforms will never come, because his own propagandists will have made it impossible” (Pljušč 1987).
In 1987, Leonid Pliushch won the Antonovich prize. Throughout his life, although he continued to uphold the ideas and theoretical principles of Communism, he was prepared to criticise the unscrupulous and contradictory behaviour of governments and politicians.  Even though he was awarded the medal of the Ukrainian Order for Courage, he continued to contest the actions of the Ukrainian government (cf. KHPG 2006). Pliushch died on the 4^th June 2015 in Bessèges, a small town in Occitania.

Notes

[1] Between 1937 and 1949 at the behest of Stalin, Chrushchëv served as Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party: for a brief period in 1946-47 he was Vice Secretary.
[2] The volume is entitled The Case of Leonid Plyushch, by Tat’iana Khodorovich, published by Hurst & Blackett (London) and Westview Press (Boulder, USA) in 1976. The recent Routledge edition of the work (London 2018) contains previously unpublished documents relating to Pliushch’s case.

Antonio Cavaliere
[31^st December 2022]

Translation by Tammy Corkish

This article was produced as a result of the seminar “Civil Rights Movement in the USSR”, held by Ilaria Sicari (Course of Russian Literature, Master’s Degree in Euro-American Languages and Literatures, University of Florence, a.y. 2019-2020).

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