Psychiatric Bulletin (2004) 28: 269. doi: 10.1192/pb.28.7.269
© 2004 The Royal College of Psychiatrists
Psychiatric Bulletin (2004) 28: 269
© 2004 The Royal College of Psychiatrists
Yuri L. Nuller
St Petersburg
Robert van Voren
If I sought professional help, Yuri Nuller would have been my choice. This
is the best way I can describe Yuri Lvovich Nuller as a person. All other
descriptions fall short. To our deep regret, Yuri passed away in his sleep
during the early hours of 10 November, 2003, after battling a long and
distressing illness.
Yuri Nuller was a kind man. Even when upset about an injustice, he would
continue to radiate kindness, while carefully and with a slice of ironic
humour trying to explain what in his view was wrong or unjust. Humour was
undoubtedly a very important trait that helped him through an interesting yet
difficult life. His father, then posted as a senior diplomat at the Soviet
Embassy in Paris, was called back to the homeland in 1938 and subsequently
executed by the NKVD. The family moved back to their flat in Leningrad. Yuri
often told me stories about these years, when the Great Terror swept over the
Soviet Union and one neighbour after the others were taken away in the dark of
the night, disappearing in the seemingly endless Gulag. These events marked
Yuri and, maybe paradoxically, in my view contributed to his gentleness and
kindness.
After the war Yuri followed the fate of his father: he was arrested and
accused of having been recruited by the French secret service at the age of
three, while living in Paris. He was sentenced to a long camp term and sent to
the death camps of Kolyma, from which he returned only after the death of
Stalin.
I met Yuri for the first time at the end of the 1980s, in Kiev at the house
of a common dissident friend. It turned out that we had many friends in
common, people connected to the dissident movement in Moscow. Yuri belonged to
the ‘second layer’, those who supported the movement and helped
political prisoners and their families, but did not sign statements
themselves. Yuri was afraid to do so; the 8 years in the Gulag had made him
uncertain whether he would be able to survive KGB interrogation or another
prison or camp term.
Indeed, Yuri was not only a kind man and a former political prisoner, and a
real friend to the people he loved and respected, but also a professor of
psychiatry with an excellent international reputation. He was the opposite of
a Soviet psychiatrist, with superb clinical skills in which he took the person
behind the illness as the focal point of attention and not the diagnosis. In a
way he was, again paradoxically, not only the son of a senior Soviet official
but also a rare example of the Russian intelligentsia, the same Soviets had
tried to exterminate. It was the complete absence of any Sovietism in his
nature that made Nuller unique as a Russian psychiatrist and kept him from
becoming a leader in his country, which he actually never regretted.
When Yuri fell ill, it was a shock not only to him and his family, but to
all who loved him dearly. Years of hope and setbacks followed, but somehow he
managed to give his illness a place in his life. Yuri remained the kind,
gentle, intellectual but also down-to-earth person he always was. It was an
honour to have known him, and it is very hard to lose him as a friend.
