Léonide Pliouchtch died in Bessèges (Gard) on June 4, 2015 at the age of 76.

For the general public, he is best known for having been one of the most famous Soviet "refuseniks" during the Brezhnev Ice Age of the 1970s. But with his wife Tatiana, they were also the translators into Russian and Ukrainian of Talking with Angelsand joined Adda, the association that publishes this blog.

Born in 1939 into a Ukrainian family exiled in Kyrgyzstan, then repatriated to Ukraine after the Second World War, Léonide Pliouchtch studied mathematics brilliantly at the universities of Odessa and kyiv. At that time, he was a convinced communist, an active member of the Komsomol: he even went so far as to apply to the KGB, which refused it because the after-effects of bone tuberculosis caught in childhood made him limp.

De-Stalinisation and the corruption of the Odessa academic community soon made him lose his illusions and "his desire to be honest with himself" led him to seek another path. Léonide Pliouchtch gradually drew closer to Soviet dissident circles, which did not escape the attention of the KGB, who initially had him sacked - he was a researcher in mathematics at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences - and made him unemployed.

Arrested in 1972, he was sentenced a year later to a psychiatric asylum for "anti-Soviet activities" and the distribution of "typed texts". His living conditions in the two hospitals where he will stay and which he recounts in his book of memoirs In the carnival of history, are appalling . But his case became the subject of an intense international campaign led by French mathematicians Laurent Schwartz, Henri Cartan and Michel Broué with the support of numerous organizations fighting for human rights. He was expelled to France in 1976, where he remained until his death. He then engages in the defense of the persecuted and of human rights.

It is his wife who is the first interested in Talking with Angels. His encounter with the book takes place on a small sailboat, in the open sea, with the cry of seagulls. Back in town, she has no trouble convincing her husband of the importance of this book and the need to translate it into their language. This work will take them ten years, during which they will strive "to reduce (their) interference in the text to a minimum", relying mainly on the French and German versions, a task which will raise many questions that Léonide will record in the tasty preface by Dialogi co Angelom, published in 2006 in Kyiv.

FM