Lev Ubozhko, 70; Anti-Communist Party Founder

Lev Ubozhko 70, a former political prisoner and a founder of the Soviet Union’s first anti-Communist party, died Tuesday in Moscow after a long illness, family members announced.

Trained as an electronics engineer, Ubozhko graduated from the Moscow Physics Engineering Institute and served in the Soviet army for three years. He joined the dissident movement in the late 1960s and spoke out for democratic reforms in the Soviet Union.

He spent 17 years in jails, prison camps and mental hospitals after a panel of Soviet psychiatrists declared him a “paranoid schizophrenic.” After the fall of communism, an independent commission of psychiatrists said there had been no basis for the diagnosis.

Ubozhko helped found the Democratic Union, the first anti-Communist party, in 1988.