‘Fear of authority is still with us’. The past stalks anti-Soviet dissidents 20 Gulag museum in Moscow / AP As Vilnius gears up for events on the 100th anniversary of Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov this May, Ukrainian psychiatrist Semyon Gluzman, who fought against political abuse of psychiatry by Soviet authorities, shares a story from his dissident years. And yet again about the past. About that distant and cruel past that defines our sad and unintelligent present. And, unfortunately, also our future. My mother had a friend. A general practitioner who worked with her in the same clinic. A middle-aged woman, but still beautiful and graceful. She had no family of her own so she often visited us. She read a lot and discussed literary novelties with my father. I don't remember any of her stories about her own past. Everything I knew about her unhappy life was related to me by my parents.