Andriy Slyusarchuk

awards = 2011 Ukraine State Prize for scientific achievement in education is a Ukrainian mnemonist who has claimed to be a general aviation pilot, psychotherapist, Doctor of Science in medicine, psychiatrist, psychologist and neurosurgeon. He has performed brain surgery throughout Ukraine the Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture, and worked for the government of Ukraine as an adviser to Oleksandr Turchynov.

Slyusarchuk claimed to have set several world records in mnemonics by memorizing data and figures (such as pi) and performing complex calculations in his mind. Because of this, he came to be known as "Doctor Pi". The Verkhovna Rada (the Ukrainian Parliament) referred to his activities as "the largest-scale fraud in Ukraine's 20 years of independence". On 14 February 2014, the Sykhiv Raion Court sentenced Slyusarchuk to eight years in prison.

Education and career Slyusarchuk's education began in an institutional school for intellectually-disabled infant orphans in the village of Hryshkivtsi (Berdychiv Raion of Zhytomyr Oblast). oligophrenia, cerebral palsy, hepatitis and nephropathy. Slyusarchuk claimed he obtained a Doctor of Science degree, which allowed him to go into medical practice, performing neurosurgery, appearing on radio and television, granting interviews and publicly demonstrating his mnemonic skills. He met a Ukrainian president who authorized him to establish the National Institute of Brain, attended private clubs and meetings of Ukrainian nomenklatura, befriended ministers and received a State Prize. Slyusarchuk forged documents, cheated the public at chess matches and memory demonstrations and practiced medicine without a license.

Biography The details of Andriy Slyusarchuk's life were uncovered through investigative journalism. Slyusarchuk was born in Zhytomyr, Ukraine on 10 May 1971. Nearly all the documents pertaining to his education at the school were later destroyed; his birth date became 19 May 1974 on some documents, yielding negative results for official inquiries about his time at the school.

From 1987 to 1989, Slyusarchuk studied in the 208th group at the inter-regional Higher Vocational School of Railway Transport in Kozyatyn, Vinnytsia Oblast, to become a plasterer-tiler-facing worker.

On 27 July 1996, the first criminal complaint was filed against Slyusarchuk. The Zhydachiv Raion police in Lviv Oblast accused him of fraud, investigating the case for eight years. According to the complaint, Slyusarchuk diagnosed a woman with a terminal illness, promised to cure her with expensive drugs, stole $665 from her and disappeared; it indicated that he had a diploma from the M. I. Pirogov Vinnytsia Medical Institute.

In 1999, Slyusarchuk taught at the Departments of Engineering and Pedagogical Training at Lviv Polytechnic for about six months. According to his colleagues, Slyusarchuk lectured on the psychology of managing people. His lectures were popular, with students cutting classes to listen to him, and were also attended by other teachers.

On 17 July 2000, a second criminal complaint was brought against Slyusarchuk in Lviv. According to complainants Oleg and Bogdana Gamalii, they paid him $1,500 to treat their two young children; the children's health worsened following his treatment. After five years, the complaint was dropped.

On 28 February 2006, Slyusarchuk claimed to have set a record by memorizing the numbers which make up pi. Journalists from Ekspres and Moskovskij Komsomolets noted that at his public performances, he was attended by a nearby assistant with a computer (and, perhaps, a small earphone). In March 2006, Slyusarchuk began work as an associate professor at the Chornovil Lviv State Institute of Modern Technology and Management and became a professor in the general-law department that year.

From June 2008 to February 2010, Slyusarchuk was a professor of neurosurgery at the P.L. Shupyk National Medical Academy of Postgraduate Education. Slyusarchuk lectured on the subject of memory, in the Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers.

On 22 December 2009, Slyusarchuk discussed an Institute of the Brain with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko; Yushchenko issued a decree establishing it that same day. On 26 December, the Mirror Weekly published an interview with Slyusarchuk where he claimed that he had been offered the position of head of the institute and hoped to implement his plans.

In 2010 the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, headed by Dmytro Tabachnyk, reportedly gave Slyusarchuk a document appointing him a professor at the department of neurosurgery of the A. P. Romodanov Institute of Neurosurgery. A newspaper article about the devices called them part of a prototypical psychotropic weapon. Anatoly Kashpirovsky, whom Slysarchuk called "my idol in the profession",

On 9 June 2011 he was first criticized in the press, by the weekly 2000. On 30 September 2011, Slysarchuk received the 2011 State Prize of Ukraine for "scientific achievements in the field of education": for the series of works The Complex of Educational Information Technologies for Presenting, Memorizing and Processing Superlarge Information Objects in the Learning Process.

The Lviv newspaper Ekspres published the first of a series of articles criticizing him, "The Sensational Exposure of Pseudo-professor Pi", on 6 October 2011. It was followed by "The First Victims of Pseudo-professor Pi", "Pseudo-doctor Slyusarchuk is in a Trap", "Pseudo-doctor Slyusarchuk Buried His Mother Alive", "The Pi Record is Cancelled", "The Pi Record is Falsified," "The Secret Protectors of Doctor Pi", "The Perverts of Minister Tabachnyk", "The Pseudo-Doctor, Sex and Drugs", "The Grave Sin of Minister Tabachnyk", "Three More New Victims of the Pseudo-Doctor" (a video), "The New Attitude of Doctor Pi", "The Computer Operator of Doctor Pi Speaks Out", "New Actions Brought Against the Pseudo-Doctor", "A New Death in the Case of Doctor Pi", "The Millions of Doctor Pi Against Ekspres", "The Inquest Breaks the Action Brought Against Doctor Pi", "Doctor Pi is Ignorant of Even Arithmetic", "Doctor Pi Took Up to Tens of Thousands". After the Ekspres articles were published, criminal complaints were again brought against Slyusarchuk.

On 14 November 2011 he was charged with fraud by the Berkut, Between 2 February and 1 March 2012, Slyusarchuk underwent a medical and psychiatric examination at the Lviv Oblast Psychiatric Hospital. The examination found him partially sane, authorizing a psychiatrist to supervise and treat him in a prison if and when needed. Between 2 July and fall 2012, Slyusarchuk received a second psychiatric examination at the Pavlov Psychiatric Hospital in Kyiv. On 14 February 2014 the Sykhiv Raion Court sentenced him to eight years in prison,

Biography based on Slyusarchuk's own interviews According to a birth certificate shown by him to journalists, Slyusarchuk was born in the village of Tuğ in the Hadrut Rayon of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. His father was Mushegyan Vartan Aramovich, an ethnic Armenian. His mother, a Ukrainian, was Ruslana Tykhonovna Slyusarchuk. The Hadrut Rayon civil registry reportedly changed his birth details to his mother's by request in 1984, and he became Andriy Tykhonovych Slyusarchuk.

During the 1980s he was subjected to punitive psychiatry, physically abused and sent to a psychiatric hospital where he was tied to a bed, given psychoactive drugs and injected with sulfozin. When the psychiatrists asked him which books he was reading, Slyusarchuk said that he was reading medical literature and works by Ivan Pavlov and Vladimir Lenin. He was sent to an institution for the mentally-ill children.

Slyusarchuk was placed in a Soviet orphanage where he was misunderstood by his teachers and encouraged to conform. When he tried to retrieve his secondary-school certification to enter a higher educational institution, he was labeled mentally ill and punished. At age 11, Slyusarchuk ran away from the orphanage. When Slyusarchuk arrived in Moscow he found a Gypsy camp, where he was accepted, fed and taught to beg for money. At the time, he felt the environment was what he needed; he learned about Gypsy hypnotism and its use.

After living with the Gypsies for about a year, Slyusarchuk met an employee of the Russian National Research Medical University. They became friends, and through him Slyusarchuk received an appointment with Soviet Minister of Health Yevgeniy Chazov.

With Chazov's help, at age 12 Slyusarchuk was admitted for studies at the general-therapy department of the Russian State Medical University. He specialized in neurosurgery under Professor E. I. Gusev (Гусев Е.И.), and his teachers included neurologists V. A. Karlov (Карлов В. А.), A. N. Konovalov and A. M. Vein (Вейн А.М.). A December 22 press release from the President of Ukraine reported that Yushchenko and Slyusarchuk had discussed an Institute of Brain Studies to prevent and treat neurological disorders, focusing on social problems such as drug and alcohol abuse. Yushchenko issued a decree providing for the Institute of Brain Studies, for research in neurology, psychiatry, psychology and neurorehabilitation, to be established within one month.

Slyusarchuk claimed that his memorization skills were based on mental associations between figures, images, words, numbers (mnemonics) and a photographic memory of everything on which he concentrates. According to the scientists verifying Slyusarchuk's records, "The mnemonic technique can be used by any person". In April 2011, he defeated the chess program Rybka in an exhibition match in Kyiv while blindfolded. On 26 May, Slyusarchuk said that he memorized 2,600 books on chess in preparation for the game with Rybka.

According to Slyusarchuk's friend, journalist Igor Yurchenko, no one argued that Slyusarchuk played chess better than a world champion or a grandmaster; at the time, Slyusarchuk stressed that it was not a chess event but a demonstration of memory. Sponsors bought Slyusarchuk a heavy-duty computer which played many games daily with another comparable computer, and he memorized the strategy of these games. Memorizing thousands of chess games reportedly helped him defeat the Rybka-4; according to Yurchenko, Slyusarchuk just recalled memorized games.

Mnemonics and hypnosis Slyusarchuk claimed to have set records for memorizing large amounts of digital data, sequences of geometric figures, words and other information, including one million digits of the figure pi. By 2008, he claimed to have memorized two million decimal places of pi and about 7,000 volumes of text; by the following year, his claim had increased to 15,000 volumes. He claimed to have memorized 200 million decimal places of pi by October 2010. None of the claimed pi records appear on the Pi World Ranking list.

Slyusarchuk was known for his hypnotic skill; he claimed the ability to hypnotize people to feel no pain when burned. On a TV show, he hypnotized students of the L'viv University of Modern Technology (Львівський державний інститут новітніх технологій та управління ім. В. Чорновола) into believing that the onions they ate were apples. and a New York Times article called Slyusarchuk "an illusionist".

Forgery and fraud

On 6 October 2011 the Lviv newspaper Ekspres published its first article critical of Slyusarchuk, "The Sensational Exposure of Pseudo-Professor Pi", On 14 November 2011, the Ukrainian police detained him on suspicion of forgery and fraud.

During the investigation, senior officials of the Ministry of Education and Science, Youth and Sport of Ukraine (including department heads and the vice-minister) had told the press that Slyusarchuk's documents and scientific titles were valid according to Ukrainian law and protocol. Large portions of Slyusarchuk's scientific works were considered classified, with state secrets privilege in Ukraine and Russia. At Slyusarchuk's trial people who admired him and invited him to work for them testified that although they were aware that he was not a doctor, they did not report him; he continued to practice neurosurgery in hospitals.

From 2 February to 1 March 2012, Slyusarchuk underwent a psychiatric examination at Lviv Oblast Psychiatric Hospital. Slyusarchuk's first attorneys had based their strategy on a finding of mental incompetence, a strategy with which he disagreed. According to investigators, he did not graduate from a university; his background consisted of an institutional school, a sewing vocational school in Chervonohrad and treatment at the Zhytomyr psychiatric hospital. With his forged credentials, he worked as a neurosurgeon and held senior positions for long periods.

Slyusarchuk maintained that his case was fabricated by the Prosecutor General and the Security Service of Ukraine. In 2005, he reportedly accidentally damaged his original diploma from the Russian National Research Medical University; a month later he received a duplicate, and denied any forgery. In 2003 Slyusarchuk reportedly met with Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) agents, agreeing in writing not to disclose the results of his scientific works and advising the Ukrainian government. In 2011, he traveled to Moscow and asked the former FSB curator for help. When Slyusarchuk was told that the FSB would confirm his education and academic degrees if he cooperated with them, he refused.

Conviction and sentencing In the Verkhovna Rada, Slyusarchuk's activities were called "the largest-scale fraud in the 20 years of Ukrainian independence". In 2012, Ukrainsky Medychny Chasopys (Ukrainian Medical Journal) published the outcome of his case entitled, "Head doctors who let the person without medical training into operating room should be held criminally responsible." In September 2014, Slyusarchuk dismissed his attorneys, telling them that for what he paid for their services he could have bought ten more diplomas. He distrusts defense attorneys, feeling that they do their job poorly, and hoped to appeal his conviction at the regular session of the Lviv Oblast Appeal Court scheduled for 1 October 2014.

State award On 30 September 2011, Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych issued Decree No 960/2011 awarding Slyusarchuk the 2011 State Prize of Ukraine for "scientific achievements in the field of education" for a series of works: "The complex of educational information technologies for presenting, memorizing and processing superlarge information objects in the learning process". His research was nominated by the academic administration of Lviv Polytechnic for the State Prize, describing his credentials as a professor of Information Systems and Networks at Lviv Polytechnic and a Doctor of Sciences in medicine. including a 2008 BBC documentary. On 26 December 2012 the ТСН channel broadcast a documentary, Ukrainskiе Sensatsyi: Rascryli Vse Tainy "Doktora Pi" (Ukrainian Sensation: The Secrets of Doctor Pi).