17 February 2026
by Robert van Voren
Republished by kind permission of the author; photos © the author
Source: Facebook
Some thirty-eight years ago, being a courier to the human rights movement, I visited one of my main dissident addresses in Moscow. As usual, Ira Yakir opened the door and whisked me in. But this time she added “go to the kitchen, you will see a face well known to you”. So I went to the kitchen and indeed, I saw the live version of a photo I so much internalized in my head during years of campaigning for this person’s release.
Semyon Gluzman, Slava for friends, was in Moscow to try to have articles published that he had written about the political abuse of psychiatry. The articles were remarkable. Having spent ten years in camp and exile for having written a diagnosis in absentia on General Petro Grigorenko, concluding that the latter had been sent to a Special Psychiatric Hospital twice for purely political reasons, he had now tried to analyze the origins of this Soviet system of using psychiatry as a means to incarcerate and break dissidents and to which roughly one-third of the political prisoners fell victim. We discussed how to use his articles in the campaign to end the political abuse of psychiatry, and this was the beginning of a long and deep friendship. The articles appeared in our book On Totalitarian Soviet Psychiatry, published in 1989.
At first our approach was very different. Slava was 13 years older, having survived ten years of camp and exile, and he was very much a philosopher. I was an Western activist with still a black and white image of things, and hence our understanding of the reality and tactical approaches very much differed. When in October 1989 the World Psychiatric Association held its World Congress in Athens and the issue of Soviet political abuse of psychiatry was the main item on the agenda, Slava made his first trip outside the USSR, coincidentally on the same plane as the Soviet delegation that consisted mainly of the architects of the system of political abuse of psychiatry. Our campaign team had an office in a hotel suite close to the conference site, and every morning Slava would come in around nine in the morning and sit on a chair next to the entrance for hours, watching me work. He had never seen a campaign office, and it intrigued him. But it also convinced him that although our approaches were different, we could form a team and join forces.
And so it happened. In the fall of 1990 he told me to stop traveling to Moscow and come to Kyiv instead. “Nobody comes to Kyiv, you can do anything there, much more interesting!” And indeed, Kyiv was amazing. I didn’t go to Moscow for fifteen years and instead came to Kyiv at least once a month. Slava’s flat became the headquarters of the campaign to reform psychiatry in the – soon former – USSR, sitting around his kitchen table with two friends from Russia, Svitlana Polubinskaya, who authored the first normal law on psychiatric help in the USSR, and Yuri Nuller, a psychiatrist from St. Petersburg who survived nine years of Kolyma.
What followed were decades of working in trying to pull psychiatry out of the Soviet marsh. In January 1991 Gluzman established the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association, again with a unique approach. He refused to set up a dissident organization, realizing that it would never become effective. So he invited the Chief Psychiatrist of Ukraine, the Chief Psychiatrist of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Chief Psychiatrist of Kyiv to join the board. I never forget the first board meeting. To me all Soviet psychiatrists were still torturers of political prisoners, and to them I was a CIA agent – they never met a foreigner before, let alone a very active anti-Soviet activist. Trust grew only step by step, and I never forget the first time I went down into the psychogeriatric cellars of the Pavlov Psychiatric Hospital in Kyiv, where I saw and smelled Dante’s Hell on earth. If I close my eyes now I still see (and smell!) the horrors of what transpired before my eyes, and when we left the cellars the Chief Psychiatrist of Kyiv, Oleg Nasynnik, wept. He was in total shock.
People no longer remember where we came from, what the horrors of Soviet psychiatry looked like. Step by step, project after project, we started the long road to bring about change. Hundreds of projects were implemented. We opened the first Psycho-Social Rehabilitation Center in Ukraine, the first Protected Living Environment. We set up the first family organization, the first consumer organization, developed the first training for psychiatric nurses. We even opened our own printing press and publishing house, Sphera, and published translations of 139 manuals and books on psychiatry, human rights, law and other subjects, including the first edition of Anne Frank’s diary in Ukrainian. When I now go through my computer I am stunned how much we did.
Slava became my brother in arms, not only my close friend but also my educator. He taught me to look beyond the obvious, to try to understand the second, third and fourth layer, the human factor and the complexity of mankind. His memoirs, published a decade ago, are unique, because the book is not about heroism but about mankind, about the fear that is with us all the time but should not keep us from following our conscience and do what is right. I am eternally indebted to him, and had the honor and immense pleasure to work with him side by side for almost forty years. Slava was not easy, as many great people are at times, but never in selfish pursuit. He lived for the cause, and dedicated his whole life to the humanization and ethics of psychiatry, not only in Ukraine but on a global scale. And humor was our constant companion – which kept us going when facing injustice, opposition or total lack of interest.
The full-scale invasion in 2022 changed everything. Slava lived on the fifteenth floor in a suburb in the north of Kyiv, and at one moment the Russians were only several kilometers away. He stubbornly refused to leave his apartment, and when I called him to say that we had found a refuge for him he was very direct: “if you ask me to leave my apartment once again I won’t pick up. This is my home, my freedom.” And I understood he was ready to die right there, in his fifteenth floor apartment, in his space of freedom.
Age started taking a toll, as well as the consequences of ten years imprisonment. In the Netherlands we call this “tropical years”, which related to the work of civil servants in the colonies: each year counting for two. The repeated and prolonged absence of electricity made him a prisoner in his apartment, his “freedom”, and gradually he faded out of the public eye. But every time I was in Kyiv we would sit around the kitchen table, reminiscing about the past, talking about who had died, watching the whole generation of dissidents slowly disappearing. We remained optimistic, we were the “young kids on the block”, we told ourselves. He a bit less than me but still – we had still a lot of years to come. When in 1989 Petro Grigorenko was rehabilitated, Slava was called to Moscow to the office of the General Procurator. “Oh, you are still so young!”, the latter exclaimed. “Yes,” Slava said with his typical irony, “you arrested me very young.”
But alas it turned out that we didn’t have these many years, at least not together. The “tropical years” took their toll, and the hardship of living in a country at war being destroyed by Russia did the rest. Slava left us, but only in flesh. He is still with us, in spirit, and we will continue the work he started in 1971 when he was arrested, being 24 years old. And I will write down all that he did and all that he accomplished, because the younger generations need to know, and need to know where Ukrainian psychiatry is coming from. They need to know their hero, who was so often ignored by Ukrainian authorities who could not stand his criticism and was void of any political gain.
Ukrainian psychiatrist and human rights activist Semyon Gluzman, born on 10 September 1946, died on 16 February 2026
