Semen Hluzman

Semen Hluzman: The Diagnosis That Cost Ten Years

In 1971 a young Kyiv psychiatrist wrote a report on a patient he had never examined and was never going to be allowed to examine. His conclusion was that General Petro Hryhorenko was mentally sane, and that he had been placed in mental hospitals for political reasons. It is, on its face, an unremarkable clinical judgement. In the Soviet Union of 1971 it was, according to his biographers, the first time a psychiatrist had openly opposed the use of psychiatry against dissenters — and it cost Semen Hluzman seven years in labour camps followed by three years of Siberian exile.

A Doctor's Son in Kyiv

Hluzman — also transliterated Semyon Gluzman — was born on 10 September 1946 in Kyiv, in the Ukrainian SSR, into a Jewish family. His father, Fischel Gluzman (1904–1987), was a doctor of medical sciences. He graduated from the Kyiv Medical Institute in 1968 and went to work in Ukrainian psychiatric hospitals, later accepting a position at the Dnipropetrovsk Special Psychiatric Hospital.

That last posting matters for understanding what followed. The special psychiatric hospitals were not ordinary clinics; they were run under the authority of the security apparatus, and they were where the system placed the people it had decided were mad for saying the wrong things. Hluzman had seen the machinery from the inside before he decided to write against it.

The Hryhorenko Report

Petro Hryhorenko was a Soviet general who had become a human rights advocate, notably on behalf of the Crimean Tatars, and who had been committed to psychiatric institutions rather than tried. In 1971 Hluzman produced an in-absentia psychiatric assessment of him. As his biographical accounts state it, he concluded that Hryhorenko was mentally sane and had been taken to mental hospitals for political reasons.

The method — assessment without access to the patient — was forced by circumstance rather than chosen. The available material was the official record itself: the documents produced by the state's own psychiatrists. Hluzman's report worked by reading those documents against themselves, showing that the case files did not support the diagnoses they concluded with. It was an argument about evidence, delivered in the technical language of the profession that had been asked to supply the state with a verdict.

This is the act on which his standing rests. Accounts of his life describe him as the first psychiatrist in the Soviet Union to openly oppose the Soviet abuse of psychiatry against dissenters.

Arrest and Sentence

He was arrested and faced charges of anti-Soviet agitation. He was sentenced to seven years in a labour camp followed by three years of exile in Siberia — ten years in total, imposed on a man in his mid-twenties for a professional opinion.

On 28 November 1977, Amnesty International listed Hluzman among ninety-two members of the medical profession then imprisoned for their political beliefs.

The Manual Written in a Camp

In the camp, Hluzman met Vladimir Bukovsky, and the two of them wrote *A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents*.

The conception is extraordinary. The Manual was a practical document written for people who might one day face a Soviet psychiatric commission — an attempt to explain how such examinations worked, what the diagnostic categories were being made to do, and how a person might respond. It was, in effect, an attempt to redistribute professional knowledge to the people it was being used against, composed by two prisoners inside the institution that had produced them both as prisoners.

It reached the West and was published in Russian, English, French, Italian, German and Danish between 1975 and 1979 — while its co-author was still serving his sentence.

Recognition from Abroad

The international psychiatric profession responded. In 1980 Hluzman was made a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and an Honorary Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. In 2008 he received the Geneva Prize for Human Rights in Psychiatry.

These honours are part of the historical record of the period in another sense as well: the question of Soviet psychiatric abuse split the world profession for two decades, and honouring an imprisoned Soviet psychiatrist was itself a position in that argument.

Rebuilding a Profession

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Hluzman did something more difficult than dissent. He stayed in the field and tried to rebuild it. In 1991 he founded the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association and served as its president. Accounts of his work describe the aim as breaking up the Soviet legacy of dehumanising the most vulnerable.

He also founded the American-Ukrainian Bureau for Human Rights, directed the International Medical Rehabilitation Center for Victims of War and Totalitarian Regimes, and served as a co-chairperson of the Babi Yar Committee. He co-authored numerous papers on Ukrainian psychiatry, on the health consequences of Chernobyl, and on suicide, alcohol use, nicotine dependence and intimate partner aggression — the unglamorous epidemiology of a damaged society.

The Last Years

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Hluzman refused to evacuate. He remained in Kyiv through the attacks on the city's infrastructure. He died in a Kyiv hospital on 16 February 2026, at seventy-nine; accounts of his death describe him as exhausted both by the effects of the labour camps and by wartime deprivation.

Why Semen Is Called a Genius

The quality at issue is not scientific originality, and it would be dishonest to claim it. Hluzman did not advance the theory of psychiatry. What he demonstrated was a rare and specific form of intellectual clarity: the ability to hold a professional standard steady when the entire institutional weight of a state was applied to bending it, and to recognise that a diagnostic category was being used as an instrument of imprisonment at a moment when nearly every colleague found reasons not to see it.

The cognitive work was real, not merely moral. Assessing Hryhorenko meant reasoning from the adversary's own documents and showing they did not cohere — the same skill a good clinician uses on a confused case file, turned on the profession itself. The *Manual* extended this: it took specialist knowledge and rewrote it as usable instruction for the non-specialists that knowledge was being used against, which is a genuinely difficult act of translation.

The counter-case is straightforward. His scientific publication record is that of a competent working psychiatrist and epidemiologist, not a major researcher. His reputation rests overwhelmingly on a single document written at twenty-five and on the courage to sign it. Some would call that conscience rather than genius, and the distinction is fair. What can be said without inflation is that the international profession honoured him repeatedly and specifically — the American Psychiatric Association and the Royal College of Psychiatrists in the same year, the Geneva Prize decades later — and that the Soviet state's own estimate of the document's power was ten years of a man's life.

Legacy

Hluzman's career forms an unusually complete arc: he identified the abuse, was punished for identifying it, wrote a manual against it from inside the punishment, and then spent his post-Soviet decades building the professional body that would prevent its return. The Ukrainian Psychiatric Association he founded in 1991 remains his most concrete monument. He died in the city he was born in, during a war he refused to leave, having spent fifty-five years insisting that a diagnosis is a medical statement and cannot be made into anything else.

Achievements

• Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists
• Fields: psychiatry