Semyon Gluzman, 79, Dies; Doctor Dared to Criticize Soviet Psychiatry

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Semyon Gluzman, 79, Dies; Doctor Dared to Criticize Soviet Psychiatry

He was imprisoned for calling attention to the practice of declaring dissidents mentally ill. He later led efforts to confront his field’s dark past.

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Semyon Gluzman in 1979. “Psychiatry is a branch of medicine and not of penal law,” he wrote in his indictment of the Soviet psychiatric system, a seemingly reasonable stance that earned him seven years of hard labor and three years of exile in Siberia.

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via Houghton Library, Harvard University.

By

Clay Risen

April 25, 2026,

1:32 p.m. ET

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On May 11, 1972, Soviet police arrived at the Kyiv apartment of a young psychiatrist named Semyon Gluzman.

Officially, he was charged with spreading “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” But his real crime, the one officials did not want publicized, was questioning the Soviet Union’s widespread use of psychiatry as a tool of oppression — and being the first doctor to do so.

A year earlier, the dissident physicist

Andrei Sakharov

had asked Dr. Gluzman to evaluate Gen. Petro G. Grigorenko, who had been declared insane after he protested the Soviet Union’s deportation of Tatars to Central Asia from Crimea.

Like thousands of others who spoke out against the government, General Grigorenko (who was of Ukrainian descent and whose surname could also be transliterated as Hryhorenko) was diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia,” a condition invented by psychiatrists in Moscow in the 1950s. It was bunk science, but politically useful: The disorder was said to be slow-acting and undetectable by the layperson, manifesting in antisocial outbursts like criticizing the Communist regime.

General Grigorenko was confined to a mental hospital, so Dr. Gluzman had to rely on interviews with colleagues, military evaluations and a leaked copy of the official diagnosis in making his assessment.

He declared General Grigorenko sane, a judgment that was confirmed years later when the general was allowed to immigrate to the United States.

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