Upon graduating from a medical school where he earned his M.D. qualifications as a psychiatrist, Gluzman became the first Soviet medic to openly oppose the use of psychiatry for political purposes. In 1971, he wrote an absentia report on General Piotr Grigorenko, declaring him sane. Grigorenko was committed to a psychiatric hospital for urging Crimean Tatars to fight to reverse the consequences of Stalin’s ethnical cleansing. In response to this direct challenge to the Soviet regime, Gluzman was arrested, charged with anti-Soviet agitation and sentenced to seven years in labor camps for defending Grigorenko. Amnesty International then recognized him as a medic imprisoned for his political beliefs.
In 1991, upon disintegration of the USSR, Gluzman founded the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association, setting out to break up the Soviet legacy of dehumanizing the most vulnerable and bringing rehabilitation and modern healthcare to Ukrainian hospitals.
Gluzman’s exceptional courage and adherence to ideals of humanism, renunciation of using psychiatry against political dissidents as well as for dissemination of ethical principles during the reform of mental health service in Ukraine earned him many awards and recognitions from international organizations, including the Geneva Prize for Human Rights in Psychiatry from the World Psychiatric Organization.
Gluzman refused to evacuate from Kiyv, his birthplace, when the full-scale Russian aggression against Ukraine began four years ago. He remained living on the 15th floor of a tower block in the suburb of Kyiv, with increasingly frequent blackouts caused by Russia’s incessant targeting of civilian infrastructure, which often kept him unable to leave the building. At the end, the combined toll of his labor camp past and deprivations caused by the war were too much. On February 16th, Gluzman died in a hospital in his beloved Kiyv.
Please read a beautiful tribute to the man “whose only currency was truth”, written by his long-term comrade-in-arms Robert van Voren. Robert is a distinguished human rights activist who frequently visited Gluzman in Kyiv and carries out important work supporting mental health of Ukrainians affected by the war.