The first who prophesied Europe for them

In memory of Leonid Plyushch

Heavy news. My old friend, Ukrainian human rights activist and intellectual Leonid Plyushch, has died. A man who lived a difficult life, but possessed extraordinary strength and charisma. Much is known about his fate in the Soviet Union - bone tuberculosis, mathematics, human rights activities, four years in a psychiatric hospital with the most difficult "treatment" - those who watched "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" should know that it happened here more abruptly. You can read about this part of Ivy's life in his wonderful book At the Carnival of History.

In 1976 he was able to emigrate with his family and settled in France. The royalties from his book, translated into various languages, allowed him to buy a very modest house in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre, which became the center of both dissident and Ukrainian life. Lenya and his wife Tanya lived, frankly, not richly, but they shared a piece of bread with everyone who appeared in their hospice - for the evening, for several days, for a long time.

I met him immediately upon arrival in Paris, in 1985. Contributed to our rapprochement and the fact that my husband is a native of Transcarpathia, an artist. The threads of the friendship that have bound us since then were immediately woven. Leonid was a leftist, socialist-idealist, which made him stand out among the dissident brethren who had settled in Paris. For most of us, the word "socialism" automatically triggered a gag reflex. But Ivy was perhaps more far-sighted. After all, the main thing for us, immigrants from the USSR, is the attitude of this or that party to the Soviet Union, and today - to Putin's Russia. And the socialists turned out to be much more perspicacious in this sense than the French right.

Even before our arrival, Plyushch entered the French intellectual circle, which condemned the Soviet regime as totalitarian and helped dissidents. Here is one of the now forgotten episodes. When Leonid Brezhnev arrived in Paris in 1977, a number of intellectuals - Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, André Glucksman, Bernard-Henri Levy and others arranged an evening at the Recamier Theater, inviting famous Soviet and Eastern European dissidents and including Plyushch to denounce the communist regime and the persecution of dissidents. This evening received much more publicity in the media than the visit of the Secretary General.

This action was by no means isolated. Ivy, in particular, was one of those who actively participated in mobilizing public opinion to help the unfortunate Vietnamese, the so-called boatpeople, who were fleeing on miserable boats from the Viet Cong who had captured South Vietnam. In 1978, Ivy was on a par with such prominent French public figures as Sartre, Reymond Aron, Eugene Ionesco, Glucksman, Lionel Jospin, Jean Lacouture and others. Their position helped raise funds in order to deliver a large number of boatpeople to Malaysia on ship Ile de Lumière ("Island of Light"), equipped as a hospital, thereby saving them from almost certain death at sea.

In the wake of this condemnation of communist regimes and assistance to dissidents, the Resistance International was born in 1983 under the leadership of Vladimir Bukovsky and Vladimir Maksimov, editor-in-chief of the Continent magazine. I worked for this organization for three years, from January 1986 to the end of 1988. Leonid Plyushch was then a frequent visitor to our office.

Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I suggested to Leonid that he write a book about Ukraine and its culture. It was called in Russian - "Ukraine: give Europe!" and was published in France in 1993. The annotation on the back cover of the French edition has not lost its relevance: “This book contains two important theses: the modern problems of the former USSR do not go back to Lenin, but to Ivan the Terrible; The most dangerous variety of contemporary nationalism is Russian supra-nationalism. The USSR collapsed, but the Russian Empire survived and threatens us.” His book is a passionate call for Ukraine to find its place in the Europe of nations.

In the last 20 years, Leonid plunged into cultural studies, wrote wonderful books about Shevchenko, Gogol and others, which were published in Ukraine. He did not want to return there, but enjoyed love and recognition there. With his death, we lost a bright, kind, talented and extremely honest man. Our era is not generous with such people.

Galina AKKERMAN,
journalist, translator