Leonid Plyushch
| Leonid Ivanovych Plyushch | |
|---|---|
| Native name | Леонід Іванович Плющ (Леонид Иванович Плющ) |
| Born |
26 April 1938 Naryn, Kirghiz SSR |
| Died | 4 June 2015 (aged 77) Bessèges, France |
| Nationality | Ukrainian |
| Citizenship |
 Soviet Union,  France
|
| Alma mater | Odessa University, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv |
| Occupation | mathematics |
| Known for | human rights activism with participation in the Ukrainian Helsinki Group |
| Movement | dissident movement in the Soviet Union |
| Spouse(s) | Tatyana Ilinichna Zhitnikova |
| Awards |
 Antonovych prize (1987) |
Leonid Ivanovych Plyushch (Ukrainian: Леоні́д Іва́нович Плющ, Russian: Леони́д Ива́нович Плющ, 26 April 1938, Naryn, Kirghiz SSR – 4 June 2015, Bessèges, France) was a Ukrainian mathematician and Soviet dissident.
Leonid Plyushch was born into a Ukrainian working-class family in 1938 in Naryn, Kirghizia. His father worked as railway foreman, and died on the front in 1941. Leonid's childhood was marked by tuberculosis of the bone, which he contracted at the age of 8.
Plyushch graduated from Kiev University in 1962 with a degree in mathematics. In his last year of studies he became interested in the mathematical modeling of biological systems, in particular mental illness, which he sought to model with the help of a computer. This proved too difficult a task, but Plyushch published papers on modeling and regulating simpler biological systems like the blood sugar level. He was eventually hired by the Institute of Cybernetics of the USSR Academy of Sciences, which was often tasked with solving various problems for the Soviet space program.
Plyushch became a dissident by taking a public stance on political hot topics of the time. In 1968 he protested against the misconduct of the Galanskov–Ginzburg trial by sending a letter to Komsomolskaya Pravda, which was not published. When Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, Plyushch jointly signed with 16 other Soviet dissident a declaration of solidarity with the democratic movement in Czechoslovakia. In the same year he joined the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR, which sent a letter to the UN Human Rights Commission asking it to investigate the violations by the USSR of the right to hold independent beliefs and to propagate them by legal means. Plyushch was one of the fifteen signatories to An Appeal to The UN Committee for Human Rights. Due to blowback from his political stances, he was dismissed from the Cybernetics Institute in 1968, and the KGB confiscated a number of his manuscripts and interrogated him several times.
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