Семен Глузман

Activity: Medicine and Healthcare, Human Rights Advocacy
Date of Birth: September 10, 1946, Kyiv
Date of Death: February 16, 2026, Kyiv
Navigator: Postwar USSR

Psychiatrist, human rights advocate, dissident, and political prisoner. President of the Association of Psychiatrists of Ukraine, director of the Ukrainian-American Bureau for Human Rights Protection, co-chairman of the Babyn Yar Committee, and one of the authors of the Law of Ukraine “On Psychiatric Care.”

Our first meeting took place in the kitchen of a mutual acquaintance — Iryna Yakir. We met entirely by chance; at the time I did not even know we had mutual friends.
It was 1988, perestroika was in full swing, and I had begun coming to the USSR mainly to understand how to help the young democratic movement create an open country and how to dispel the dense shadows stretching from the grim Soviet past.
There was no need to introduce Gluzman separately: I knew that face. I had been actively involved in the struggle against the political abuse of psychiatry since 1977 and had seen him in many photographs. The man sitting opposite me was one of our heroes. He had received a total sentence of ten years in labor camps and exile for speaking out against politically motivated abuses in psychiatry. Yet after returning from exile, Gluzman kept a low profile so as not to risk another arrest. And now here he was — sitting in the kitchen in person. We shook hands.
Gluzman showed me his texts, and I stepped out of the kitchen for a while to read them. I immediately sensed that this was something utterly extraordinary, unlike anything I had grown accustomed to: no revelations about corruption and human rights violations in Soviet psychiatry, no emotional appeals to Western psychiatrists. What I was reading embodied a philosophical approach to the problem, an attempt to understand why these abuses had occurred — a rather sophisticated, systematic analysis of the scholarly works of psychiatrists employed at the Serbsky Institute of General and Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow, the very place where dissidents were diagnosed with “mental illnesses.” Instinctively, I felt I was holding a bomb in my hands: this material could profoundly influence the struggle against abuses in Soviet psychiatry. As Gluzman later told me, I returned to the kitchen with flushed cheeks and the proposal to translate everything and publish it in the West.
He had a profoundly deep influence on my way of thinking. When we met, I was primarily a revolutionary accustomed to operating with the concepts of “black” and “white.” From then on, everything changed. What can you do when you think everything is perfectly clear, and your friend says: “Wait, I’m not sure about that — let’s think it over again.” Semen Gluzman always had his own standards.
He truly is unique. I have never met a person more caring, cautious, and devoted all at once. Whenever I come “home” to Kyiv, a bottle of Borjomi or Nabeglavi is already waiting on my table, and in the refrigerator there is a chilled bottle of white wine. We have been friends for thirty years, but he is more than a friend. He is one of my mentors. He taught me to look at things differently, to examine them from every angle, to understand one’s opponent and not be afraid to befriend them, to build bridges. Semen Gluzman is the living embodiment of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the kind of classic dissident who has almost disappeared.
He stands alongside such great figures as Andrei Sakharov and Sergei Kovalyov (both of whom were friends of Gluzman), and he was close to such remarkable personalities as Viktor Nekrasov, Ivan Svitlychnyi, and Valerii Marchenko. At the same time, he is equally open to ordinary people without famous names, people with unique and often tragic life stories.

Author: Robert van Voren