Leonid Plyushch

Leonid Ivanovich Plyushch (Ukrainian Леонід Іванович Плющ, Russian Леонид Иванович Плющ, English transcription Plyushch, French transcription Pliouchtch; born April 26, 1939 in Naryn, Kyrgyzstan) is a former Soviet ( Ukrainian ) dissident and mathematician.

Life

Plyushch was the son of a railroad worker who died in 1941 at the front in World War II. As a child he had bone tuberculosis. He studied at the University of Kiev mathematics with the conclusion of 1962. He dealt with mathematical modeling of biological systems and their control mechanisms ( cybernetics ) and 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 Ginzburg and Yuri Galanskow and against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 - with sixteen other Soviet dissidents, he signed a letter of solidarity with the Czechoslovak democracy movement. He joined a human rights committee in the Soviet Union, wrote a letter to the UN Human Rights Commission to investigate human rights violations in the Soviet Union.

He was dismissed in 1968 from his job at the Institute of Cybernetics, interrogated by the KGB and arrested in 1972. In the subsequent trial, he was declared without consultation of psychiatric experts insane and committed to a psychiatric institution. There he was given high doses of psychotropic drugs ( such as haloperidol ) and insulin injections, so that he could at times neither read nor write. The data written by him to Tatjana Chodorowitsch letters formed the basis of a book that was published in Russian in Amsterdam in 1974 and was also translated into English. The abuse of psychiatry for political purposes, which was apparently in his case attracted international protests. 650 American mathematician signed a letter of protest and France, among others, Henri Cartan began for him in 1974 brought the case before the International Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver. In 1976, he was able to leave with his family. His case led to a condemnation of Soviet practices at the 6th International Congress of Psychiatry.

Plyushch settled in France and in 1979 published his autobiography. In 2006, he addressed a public appeal to Yulia Tymoshenko, the ideals of the Orange Revolution not to disclose.