In recent weeks, Vladimir Putin has resumed his bombardments in the Odessa and Mikolaiv region. It is clear that the control of southern Ukraine and the Black Sea is still in its sights, including Odessa, this strategic seaside city that the Kremlin has always considered as a port of Russia automatically due to it.
Posted at 1:00 p.m.
However, Odessa was the city of residence of the famous opponent Léonide Pliouchtch, where his family had decided to settle after the Second World War. He studied mathematics and physics there, a specialization he enriched in Kyiv to become an engineer. Politically, Pliushch finally swelled the camp of opponents, denouncing the repression in the USSR under the regime of Leonid Brezhnev and revealing himself to be an ardent defender of the Ukrainian national cause. This commitment earned him imprisonment and infernal torture.
If Leonide Pliouchtch were still alive, if he saw the barbarism perpetrated by Moscow, especially the savage bombardments of the Ukraine and Odessa, he would no doubt be struck down and terrorized again.
Leonide Pliouchtch’s Calvary
During the 1960s, Leonid Plyushch gradually broke with the Soviet heritage after the publication of Khrushchev’s report (in the XXe Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) exposing Stalin’s crimes. After condemning the crushing of the Hungarian revolution by Russian tanks (1956), he attacked the arrest and imprisonment of Ukrainian nationalist militants who demanded the foundation of an independent Ukrainian socialist state (1961-1965 ). These militants who had associated themselves with the Samizdat (voice of the opposition in the USSR) maintained that the Ukraine had become an “appendage” of Russia, a “colony” of Moscow.
Their program declared that in all aspects of the existence of Ukraine, “weighs the chauvinistic and imperialist policy of Russia”.
Tenacious, Pliouchtch also came to the defense of democratic intellectuals, such as Alexander Guinzburg and Yuri Galanskov, condemned and outrageously imprisoned in 1968. In this affair, he described the leaders of the USSR as “bastard and Thermidorian heirs of ‘october “. At the same time, he denounced the crushing of the “Prague Spring” by the Russian army. All this prompted him to found the “Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR”. He was finally arrested in 1972 for “anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation”.
Imprisoned in the Dniepropetrovsk psychiatric hospital (where political prisoners were piled up), he was the victim of the worst abuse: brutal injections of neuroleptic drugs (“chemical straitjacket”), physical violence, ice baths locked with iron bars, etc. . It was in January 1976 that he was released, thanks to a hard-hitting global campaign led in particular by the International Committee of Mathematicians.
Impacts in Montreal
Three months later, on April 7, 1976, a large assembly of solidarity with Léonide Pliouchtch was held in Montreal. The famous mathematician was there in person, devastated, swollen, weakened to the highest degree, but it was a moment of remarkable solidarity. More than 1,200 people took part, including 400 to 500 people from the Ukrainian community. I was there myself, as a member of the event’s organizing committee. Several entities were associated with the event, including major trade unions, democratic associations and part of the left-wing movements, while the “Marxist-Leninist” movements of the time paraded in abject silence.
After his release, the famous Ukrainian opponent took refuge in France. From 1993 (“Ukraine: Ours to Europe”), he associated himself even more strongly with the Ukrainian cause. In 2014, a year before his death, he denounced the annexation of Crimea while supporting the Maidan revolt with a view to integrating Ukraine into Europe.
The work of the Kremlin, nothing else
It was the despotic Catherine II of Russia who first instituted the colonization and vassalization of Ukraine. During her reign (1762 to 1796), the Tsarina sent her troops to conquer Kherson, Mariupol, Simferopol (in Crimea), Sevastopol and Odessa; then eastern Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. After the brutal reign of Ivan the Terrible, Catherine II therefore definitively established Great Russian imperialism, Russification, while Stalin and the current master of the Kremlin simply perpetuated it by suffocating the surrounding nations, gagging and killing opponents. From the Pliouchtch torture to the current situation, the same recipe is used.
Consequently, in the West, the rantings of the radical and communitarian left are still astonishing, in Quebec as elsewhere. Essentially, we denounce the “war” in the abstract, but we refuse to denounce the Putin regime directly, as Québec solidaire demonstrated recently; worse still, we are openly complicit in it, like Jean-Luc Mélenchon and LFI in France. Very recently, Amnesty International even made its odious contribution.
What about the fable that the current war in Ukraine is the result of a NATO provocation? This claim also turns out to be sweet music to Putin’s ears, but it hides a despicable connivance with this KGB-trained oppressor.