Human rights activist Leonid Poyshch died

In France, at the age of 77, a mathematician, publicist, participant in the human rights movement in the USSR, Leonid Poyshch, died.

This was reported in Facebook by journalist Zoya Svetova.

Leonid Ivanovich Poyshch was born in Kyrgyzstan in 1938, later his family moved to Ukraine. In 1962 he graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Kyiv University, until 1968 he worked at the Institute of Cybernetics of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

Actively engaged in human rights activities, was a link between Moscow and Ukrainian dissidents. In 1964, he wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU with proposals on the democratization of the Soviet system, since 1965 he was published in Samizdat.

After in 1968, Leonid Poyshch sent a letter to Komsomolskaya Pravda with a sharp protest against the inaccurate coverage of the process over Alexander Ginzburg and Yuri Galanskov, he was dismissed from the Cybernetics Institute.

Since 1969, he collaborated with an improper human rights information ballot "Chronic for current events", in the same year he became a member of the initiative for the protection of human rights in the USSR.

In 1972, Leonid Poyshch was arrested on charges of anti -Soviet agitation and propaganda in order to undermine the existing system. At the Central Institute of Judicial Psychiatry named after Serbian, he was twice recognized as patients with "sluggish schizophrenia." In the summer of 1973, the human rights activist was forcibly placed in a special psychic hospital in Dnepropetrovsk.

As a result of the international campaign in support of Leonid Poyshch, he was released and left the USSR in 1976. He lived in France, since 1977 he was a foreign representative of the Ukrainian Helsinki group. The author of the book “On the Carnival of History”, monographs about Taras Shevchenko, a documentary and analytical video “From Little Russia to Ukraine” and a series of articles on the formation and prospects of Ukrainian culture.