Леонід Плющ

Activity: Science and Education, Human Rights Advocacy
Date of Birth: February 26, 1933
Date of Death: June 4, 2015
Navigator: Postwar USSR

Ukrainian mathematician, publicist, literary scholar, human rights activist, and dissident. Member of the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights and of the Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. Born in Naryn, Kyrgyz SSR, USSR. Graduate of Odesa University (1959) and Kyiv University (1962). Researcher at the Institute of Cybernetics of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. Beginning in 1968, he was persecuted by the Soviet authorities. From 1973 to 1976, he was confined in institutions of Soviet punitive psychiatry. Released in 1976 under pressure from the international community, he emigrated to France and obtained French citizenship. Abroad, he was primarily engaged in literary scholarship. He belonged to the anti-Soviet socialist movement.

Leonid Ivanovych Plyushch was a deeply and sincerely religious man. Only the direction of his faith was unusual — he was a Marxist. In the Soviet Union, overflowing with cynicism, the teachings of Karl Marx had been repeatedly distorted and then declared fundamental doctrine. In their primitive, corrupted form, they were taught in every secondary school and university. Leonid Ivanovych knew Marx’s works not from Soviet textbooks. He had read the original writings of the classic thinker.
We were introduced in 1969 by Viktor Platonovych Nekrasov. At that time, Lyonya represented a rare variety of Soviet citizen — an unemployed man. A talented professional mathematician, he had been deprived of any opportunity for employment because he had repeatedly signed protest letters and maintained friendships with Moscow dissidents and activists of the Crimean Tatar movement. He earned a living — a very meager one — by serving as secretary to a blind Kyiv philosopher who dictated articles of pitiful “scientific communist” content to him. And near the entrance to the building there always stood, for years, a car — I believe it was a Zaporozhets — serving the KGB as a relay station. Somewhere in Plyushch’s apartment there were listening devices… That car disappeared on January 15, 1972, immediately after Plyushch’s arrest. Lyonya was arrested under the charge of “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.”
Sincere and incapable of ideological compromise, Plyushch did not betray himself even in the internal prison of the KGB. He categorically refused to answer any specific questions from the investigator. He repeated like a refrain the same phrase: “I consider the KGB an anti-Soviet, fascist organization, and therefore I do not wish to answer your questions.”
In earlier Stalinist times, he would have been shot directly in the interrogation room, but during the milder Brezhnev-era repressions the investigators needed to compile a many-volumed criminal case. How could they do this with someone so fearless and stubborn? A solution was found. The stubborn dissident was transferred to Moscow, to the Serbsky Institute for Forensic Psychiatric Examinations. To the fourth, “political,” department. There, of course, schizophrenia was diagnosed. And for four long years he was intensively “treated” in the Dnipropetrovsk psychiatric hospital of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs. As a result of this treatment, he ceased recognizing his wife during visits. A mentally healthy man became a “vegetable,” a person without qualities, without memory, without a future. Tanya, his wife, pulled him out of that impenetrable hell. Through incredible efforts, with the support of the French Communist Party and the French teachers’ union… Before that there had been numerous interviews, letters, and statements. There was also a meeting with the chief executioner himself, the psychiatrist-academician Snezhnevsky, who personally signed Plyushch’s psychiatric sentence. The entire family eventually departed for France.
In the West, Lyonya never felt entirely comfortable. Because he remained the same independent, reflective intellectual. The Ukrainian diaspora in the United States and Canada welcomed him warmly. Yet there were also quiet scandals — he continued there as well to call himself a Marxist. Over time, Plyushch stopped shocking Western audiences with his entirely civilized views and sat down to write books. Then Western intellectuals accepted him into their virtual club of the highest intellectual elite. The French intellectual elite loved him not for his past suffering, but for his lucid and sober mind. Universities in Canada, the United States, and Europe invited him to lecture. Meanwhile, here in the dying USSR, he remained the same “anti-Soviet agitator” and Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist.
Later, during the years of our independence, he often came here. He did not stay in hotels; there was no money for that. Together with Tanya, he lived with friends. I loved this family of my old friends from before the arrests. Here, this intellectual and philosopher recognized in the Western world remained a stranger, interesting only to students but not at all to the leadership of the Ukrainian state, which had read few books in its lifetime. Former Soviet writers who had suddenly become patriots also avoided him. To them, primitive in their thinking, he was a Diogenes living in a barrel. He lectured at several universities and loved meeting students. He wrote books, and they remain with us. Wise, astonishing texts by a man utterly distant from conventional patterns of thought, a man who even in mature age preserved the liberated freedom to see the surrounding world as something far from dull.
My glorious and profoundly honest friend Lyonya… He lived a difficult life. And he died painfully. There, in France, which had become his second homeland.

Author: Semen Gluzman

Brief Conclusions

Cultural figure and reformer — although not a “cultural figure” in the strict sense, he became better known as a cyberneticist, mathematician, dissident, and human rights defender.
Public activist — actively participated in the national-democratic movement of the Sixtiers. Because of his human rights activities, he was arrested and forcibly confined in a psychiatric hospital.
Scientific and literary scholarship — worked at the Institute of Cybernetics of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, specializing in biological and psychological cybernetics. Later he became interested in cultural studies and literary criticism and wrote the autobiographical book In the Carnival of History.
Legacy — became a symbol of the struggle for freedom and human dignity and had a significant influence on the development of the consciousness of the Ukrainian intelligentsia.

Portal Editorial Team