“Little children see miracles:/Talking lions,/ Two-headed birds,/ And kind people./ But I’ve already grown up.”
This evocative poem was composed by the psychiatrist, poet and publisher Semyon Gluzman after his release from the Soviet gulag. He was lauded in the free world for his courage and tenacity in exposing the Soviet Union’s policy of falsely declaring its opponents insane and committing them indefinitely to psychiatric hospitals. Guzman, who has died aged 79, paid for his courage with seven years in the gulag.
But he remained undeterred. He was one of the few Soviet citizens with the psychiatric experience, courage and humanity to challenge a policy which ruined the lives of many. It had developed in the 1950s from the Moscow School of psychiatry, founded by Andrei Snezhnevsky, which promoted the dogma of “sluggish schizophrenia,” which could be diagnosed without any symptoms and was weaponised throughout the USSR and its satellites against political dissidents. It was a trap which could ensnare anyone. Perfectly sane individuals were often incarcerated in wards with violent lunatics and force-fed anti-psychotic drugs.
The turning point for Gluzman came in the early 1970s, when the highly decorated Red Army veteran, General Pyotr Grigorenko was arrested for what the Soviet Union diagnosed as “reformist ideas” and sent to a hospital for the criminally insane. Gluzman, then newly qualified, studied the case, decided Grigorenko was perfectly sane, and aided by the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov published an article in an underground journal, condemning the bogus diagnosis. He recalled meeting Sakharov at a railway station where they were suddenly “surrounded by ten KGB men all pretending to read newspapers.”
He was arrested in 1972 and charged with “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”. The sentence was seven years in Labour Colony Perm 35 in the Ural Mountains, followed by three years of internal exile. Food consisted of dry bread, greasy soup and a few bits of rotten fish. Life involved forced labour, exercising naked in skimpy prison clothes during winter temperatures of minus 50 deg C and lengthy spells of solitary confinement. Guzman wrote to his parents; “They are murdering me as a person and as a living creature.”
Given his uncompromising nature, Gluzman was often sent to the cooler, a tiny cell with water running down the walls, and was refused visitors – a singular glimmer of hope for those in such dire circumstances. It was enough to curb the dissident tendencies of anybody. But he refused to allow the inhuman conditions to demoralise him. “I didn’t follow the rules of how we’re supposed to behave. I didn’t want to change my ways,” he said later.
He used his professional experience to psycho-analyse the conditions of his fellow prisoners and guards. His wit and energy made him their spokesman. He attempted to get their messages to the outside world, but finding
the paper to write on was no easy matter. It helped when he worked in the shop and managed to write carefully and neatly on thin strips of paper which he secreted into newly sewn bags made for chain-saws. Through helpful contacts who ensured their protests reached the free world,
Gluzman and his colleagues produced about 200 pieces of samizdat a year before the operation was discovered and finally closed.
He also began working with the writer Vladimir Bukovsky on a manual to help fellow dissidents facing imprisonment in mental hospitals, which was also smuggled out. The Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents advised anyone facing hostile psychiatrists to reply politely and straightforwardly, and to describe their backgrounds as boringly normal. “If you are injected with sodium amytal to make you babble secrets like a drunk, stay firm,” Gluzman advised. “It wears off quite fast.”
He had scant sympathy for professional colleagues who compromised with the regime. “There are no grounds for hope in the conscience of doctors”, he and Bukovsky declared. As word of his troubles reached the west, international pressure began to build against the Soviet persecution of dissidents. So successful was Gluzman’s samizdat campaign that while still exercising naked in Perm and eating rotten fish, the first international committee to oppose the political use of psychiatry was set up in Geneva.In 1980 he was elected an honorary member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, but when offered work as a psychiatrist in Kyiv eight years later, the KGB vetoed the offer.
Amnesty International and the British Royal College of Psychiatrists rose to the challenge, the latter offering him membership in 1981 while he was still exiled in Siberia and forbidden to practise as a doctor. Two years later, the Soviet Union was expelled from the World Psychiatric Association.
Semyon Fishelevich Gluzman was born to Jewish parents in Kyiv in 1946. His father Fischel was a doctor. So tense was the atmosphere at the time, that after Stalin’s death, the young Semyon recalled his father saying Stalin should have died a long time before, while his mother urging caution “in front of the child.” Semyon followed in his father’s footsteps, training at medical school and working in psychiatric hospitals in Ukraine. However, he rejected an offer to attend a hospital developed for political dissidents. He was already disturbed by the state’s invention of psychiatric categories with which to curb opponents.
Finally released from exile in 1982 he was reunited with his Kyiv family, his wife Irina, who also worked in psychiatry, and their daughter, Julia. In Perm he had relinquished his Russian citizenship, wanting no more of “exhausted totalitarianism.” He applied for an exit visa and considered moving to Israel with his family. Representatives of American Jewish organisations came calling, with the tacit support of the Soviet authorities, who wanted to be rid of him. “You are a difficulty for us,” he was told. “No. You are a difficulty for me,” Gluzman retorted. Despite the problems of living under Soviet rule, he decided to remain in his home town.
Later, during the Gorbachev era, Gluzman co-authored a book, On Totalitarian Soviet Psychiatry (1989) with Robert van Voren. He worried about old, entrenched attitudes seeping into the now independent Ukraine, and gathered around him a coterie of campaigners and enlightened psychiatrists devoted to reforming the entrenched attitudes of the Moscow School. He created the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association and launched a publishing house. Concerned at rising antisemitism in his country, he published the first Ukrainian edition of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, as well as his own poetry, written during imprisonment. He was only officially rehabilitated in 1992 on Ukraine’s independence. He was disappointed that – “The Ukraine prosecutor sent me a piece of paper that said ‘You are rehabilitated. Nothing else. Not even, ‘Sorry about those ten years.’”
Gluzman was rewarded in 2008 with the Prize for Human Rights at the World Psychiatric Association Congress. In 2012 he intervened to secure the release of a protester, Anatoly Ilchenko from the Pavlov Psychiatry Hospital in Kyiv. But as recently as 2024 The Lancet reported that a resurgence of such practices in the Russian Federation.
While “sluggish schizophrenia” is no longer listed, it has resurfaced as “schizotypal disorder,”
Too old to fight when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Guzman replied from his 15th floor apartment in Kiev, that if Russian troops arrived: “I will go to the street to protest. Of course I will be arrested.” Putin, he replied to a questioner on the Russian leader’s mental health, “is not mad. He is very bad.”
Gluzman is survived by his daughter Julia Pievskaya, a director of the Federation Global Initiative on Psychiatry.
GLORIA TESSLER
Semyon Gluzman: born September 10, 1946. Died February 16, 2026.
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