Vladimir Gershuni
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Vladimir Lvovich Gershuni | |
|---|---|
| Владимир Львович Гершуни | |
| Born | 18 March 1930 |
| Died | 17 September 1994 (aged 64) |
| Citizenship | Soviet Union (1930–1991) → Russia (1991–1994) |
| Occupations | writing poetry, publishing samizdat |
| Known for | human rights activism |
| Movement | dissident movement in the Soviet Union |
Vladimir Lvovich Gershuni (Russian: Влади́мир Льво́вич Гершу́ни, 18 March 1930, Moscow – 17 September 1994, Moscow) was a Soviet dissident and poet. He was a nephew of Grigory Gershuni, a founder of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. He grew up in Soviet children's homes.[1]
In 1949, during his first year at university, Gershuni was arrested on charges of creating an underground youth organization and was sentenced to 10 years in the camps. Released in 1954, he worked as a bricklayer.
Dissident activities and forced psychiatric treatment
In the 1960s, he joined the human rights movement in the Soviet Union, signed a number of collective letters, and participated in collecting materials for Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, being himself one of the 255 witnesses consulted by the author. In 1969, he was re-arrested, declared insane and sent for compulsory treatment in the Orel special psychiatric hospital. He was released in 1974.
In 1978, a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists Dr. Gerard Low-Beer visited Moscow and examined nine Soviet political dissidents, including Gershuni, and came to the conclusion that they have no signs of mental illness, which would require mandatory treatment currently or in the past.[2]
