Soviet Ukrainian military official, writer, and human rights activist
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Petro Grigorenko or Petro Hryhorovych Hryhorenko (Ukrainian: Петро́ Григо́рович Григоре́нко, 16 October [O.S. 3 October] 1907 – 21 February 1987) was a high-ranking Soviet Army commander of Ukrainian descent, who in his fifties became a dissident and a writer, one of the founders of the human rights movement in the Soviet Union.[1]
For 16 years, he was a professor of cybernetics at the Frunze Military Academy[2] and chairman of its cybernetic section[3][4] before joining the ranks of the early dissidents. In the mid-1970s Grigorenko helped to found the Moscow Helsinki Group and the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, before leaving the USSR for medical treatment in the United States. The Soviet government barred his return, and he never again returned to the Soviet Union.[5][6] In the words of Joseph Alsop, Grigorenko publicly denounced the "totalitarianism that hides behind the mask of so-called Soviet democracy."[7]
In 1949, Grigorenko defended his Ph.D. thesis on the theme "Features of the organization and conduct of combined offensive battle in the mountains."[13]
In 1960, he completed work on his doctoral thesis.[14] Over 70 of his scientific works on military science were published.[15]
Dissident activities
In 1961, Petro Grigorenko started to openly criticize what he considered the excesses of the Khrushchev regime.[16]: 151 He maintained that the special privileges of the political elite did not comply with the principles laid down by Lenin.[16]: 151 Grigorenko formed a dissident group—The Group for the Struggle to Revive Leninism.[16]: 151 Soviet psychiatrists sitting as legally constituted commissions to inquire into his sanity diagnosed him at least three times—in April 1964, August 1969, and November 1969.[17]: 11 When arrested, Grigorenko was sent to Moscow's Lubyanka prison, and from there for psychiatric examination to the Serbsky Institute[16] where the first commission, which included Snezhnevsky and Lunts, diagnosed him as suffering from the mental disease in the form of a paranoid delusional development of his personality, accompanied by early signs of cerebral arteriosclerosis.[17]: 11 Lunts, reporting later on this diagnosis, mentioned that the symptoms of paranoid development were "an overestimation of his own personality reaching messianic proportions" and "reformist ideas."[17]: 11 Grigorenko was not responsible for his actions and was thereby forcibly committed to a special psychiatric hospital.[16]: 151 While there, the government deprived him of his pension despite the fact that, by law, a mentally sick military officer was entitled to a pension.[16]: 152 After six months, Grigorenko was found to be in remission and was released for outpatient follow-up.[16]: 152 He required that his pension be restored.[16]: 152 Although he began to draw pension again, it was severely reduced.[16]: 152
Grigorenko took part in the defense of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel and sharply protested against the arrests of young writers Alexander Ginzburg, Yuri Galanskov, Alexey Dobrovolsky, and others.[18] During the closed political trials of 1965–1969, he was often present at the courthouses, demanding to open the doors of the courtrooms for everyone, explained to the people gathered around the goals of the defendants, expressed his dissatisfaction with the distortions in the internal political life of the country, a demanded a return to "true Leninism".[19]
He became much more active in his dissidence, stirred other people to protest some of the State's actions and received several warnings from the KGB.[16]: 152 In 1968, after Grigorenko protested the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, he was expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, arrested and ultimately committed to a mental hospital[20] until being freed on 26 June 1974 after 5 years of detention.[21][22] As Grigorenko had followers in Moscow, he was lured to the far-away Tashkent.[16]: 151 While there, he was again arrested and examined by a psychiatric team.[17]: 12 None of the manifestations or symptoms cited by the Lunts commission were found there by the second examination conducted under the chairmanship of Fyodor Detengof.[17]: 12 The diagnosis and evaluation made by the commission was that "Grigorenko's [criminal] activity had a purposeful character, it was related to concrete events and facts... It did not reveal any signs of illness or delusions."[17]: 11 The psychiatrists reported that he was not mentally sick, but responsible for his actions.[16]: 152 He had firm convictions which were shared by many of his colleagues and were not delusional.[16]: 152 Having evaluated the records of his preceding hospitalization, they concluded that he had not been sick at that time either.[16]: 152 The KGB brought Grigorenko back to Moscow and, three months later, arranged a second examination at the Serbsky Institute.[16]: 152 Once again, these psychiatrists found that he had "a paranoid development of the personality" manifested by reformist ideas.[16]: 152 The commission, which included Lunts and was chaired by Morozov, recommended that he be recommitted to a special psychiatric hospital for the socially dangerous.[17]: 12 Eventually, after almost four years, he was transferred to a regular mental hospital.[16]: 152 On 17 January 1971 Grigorenko was asked whether he had changed his convictions and replied that "Convictions are not like gloves, one cannot easily change them".[23]
In 1971, Dr. Semen Hluzman wrote an in-absentia psychiatric report on Grigorenko.[9][24][25] Hluzman came to the conclusion that Grigorenko was mentally sane and had been taken to mental hospitals for political reasons.[24] In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Hluzman was forced to serve seven years in labor camp for defending Grigorenko against the charge of insanity.[25][26]Amnesty International declared Grigorenko a prisoner of conscience.[27]
Grigorenko became the key defender of Crimean Tatars deported to Soviet Central Asia.[28] He advised the Tatar activists not to confine their protests to the USSR, but to appeal also to international organizations including the United Nations.[29]
Grigorenko was one of the first who questioned the official Soviet version of World War II history. He pointed out that just prior to the German attack on June 22, 1941, vast Soviet troops were concentrated in the area west of Białystok, deep in occupied Poland, getting ready for a surprise offensive, which made them vulnerable to be encircled in case of surprise German attack. His ideas were later advanced by Viktor Suvorov.
After publishing Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov's book Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party: A Study in the Technology of Power, Grigorenko made and distributed its copies by photographing and typewriting.[30]: 596 In 1976, Grigorenko helped found the Moscow Helsinki Group and the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.[4]
In the United States
On 20 December 1977, Grigorenko was allowed to go abroad for medical treatment.[31] His health was ruined during forcible confinement in KGB-run mental hospitals.[32] On 30 November 1977, Grigorenko arrived in the United States[33] and was stripped of his Soviet citizenship.[34] In Grigorenko's words, Leonid Brezhnev signed the decree of depriving Grigorenko of Soviet citizenship on the ground that he was undermining the prestige of the Soviet Union.[35] The 1970s marked a peak in the use of external exile as a punitive measure by the Soviet Union (as opposed to the internal type, which was highest between the mid-1930s and early 1950s); often the pattern was that a trip abroad for work or medical treatment was transformed into permanent exile.[36] In the same year, Grigorenko became a U.S. citizen.[37]
In 1979 in New York, Grigorenko was examined by the team of psychologists and psychiatrists including Alan A. Stone, the then President of American Psychiatric Association.[40] The team could find no evidence of mental disease in Grigorenko and his history consistent with mental disease in the past.[40] Their findings were drawn up and publicized by Walter Reich.[41][42][43][44][45] Grigorenko's case confirmed accusations, Stone wrote, that psychiatry in the Soviet Union was at times a tool of political repression.[46]
In 1983, he said he considered the American political-economic system to be "the best that mankind has found to date."[53] In 1983, a stroke he suffered left him partially paralyzed.[54] Grigorenko died on 21 February 1987 in New York City.[4]
In 1991, a commission, composed of psychiatrists from all over the Soviet Union and led by Modest Kabanov, then director of the Bekhterev Psychoneurological Institute in St Petersburg, spent six months reviewing Grigorenko's patient files. They drew up 29 thick volumes of legal proceedings,[1] and in October 1991 reversed the official Soviet diagnosis of Grigorenko's psychiatric condition.[24]: 73 In 1992, an official post-mortem forensic psychiatric commission of experts met in Ukraine. They removed the stigma of being a mental patient and confirmed that there were no grounds for the debilitating treatment he underwent in high security psychiatric hospitals for many years.[55]: 23 The 1992 psychiatric examination of Grigorenko was described by the Nezavisimiy Psikhiatricheskiy Zhurnal in its numbers 1–4 of 1992.[56][57]
Family
Petro Grigorenko was married to Zinaida Mikhailovna Grigorenko[58] and they had five sons: Anatoliy, Heorhiy, Oleh, Viktor and Andrew.[12] Two of them died as children.[31]
In 1975, Andrew, an electrical engineer,[59] was declared to have inherited his father's insanity. He was expelled from the USSR to the US, two years before Petro and Zinaida Hryhorenko themselves travelled to the United States.[60] Andrew was repeatedly told that since his father was mentally ill, then he was also mad. If he did not stop speaking out in defense of human rights and his father, they told him, he would also be sent to the psikhushka.[15] Subsequently, Andrew Grigorenko became the founder and president of General Petro Grigorenko Foundation, dedicated to the study of his father's legacy.[61]
Name spelling versions
The different Latin spellings of Grigorenko's name exist due to the lack of uniform transliteration rules for the Ukrainian names in the middle of the 20th century, when he became internationally known. The correct modern transliteration would be Petro Hryhorenko. However, according to the American identification documents of the late general the official spelling of his name was established as Petro Grigorenko. The same spelling is engraved on his gravestone at the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of St. Andrew in South Bound Brook, New Jersey, USA. The same spelling is also retained by his surviving American descendants: son Andrew and granddaughters Tetiana and Olga.
Grigorenko, Piotr; Janin, Michel (November 1969). "La foi suffit" [Enough faith]. Esprit (in French). 386 (11): 685–691. JSTOR24261436.
Nekritsch, Alexander; Grigorenko, Pjotr (1969). Genickschuß : Die Rote Armee am 22. Juni 1941 [Shot in the neck: the Red Army on 22 June 1941] (in German). Wien, Frankfurt am Main, Zürich: Europa Verlag. ASINB002PNH7C4.
Grigorenko, Pjotr (1969). Der sowjetische Zusammenbruch 1941 [The Soviet collapse in 1941] (in German). Frankfurt am Main: Possev-Verlag.
Grigorenko, Pjotr (1970). Aufzeichnungen aus Gefängnis und Irrenhaus [Notes from prison and madhouse] (in German). Bern: Kuratorium Geistige Freiheit.
Grigorenko, Pjotr (1980). "Kann das Kaninchen sich retten? Anmerkungen zur KSZE-Konferenz in Madrid" [Can the rabbit save itself? Comments on the CSCE Conference in Madrid]. Die Politische Meinung (in German). 25 (192): 55–62.
Каждый выбирает для себя. Памяти выдающегося правозащитника генерала П.Г. Григоренко / Составление: Андрей Григоренко и Игорь Рейф [Everyone chooses for oneself. In commemoration of outstanding human rights activist P.G. Grigorenko / Compiled by Andrew Grigorenko and Igor Reyf] (in Russian). Moscow: Политическая энциклопедия. 2014. ISBN978-5-8243-1848-7.
De Boer, S. P.; Driessen, Evert; Verhaar, Hendrik (1982). "Grigorenko, Petr Grigor'evič". Biographical dictionary of dissidents in the Soviet Union: 1956–1975. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. pp. 178–180. ISBN978-9024725380.
Sjöstrand, Lars (January–February 2014). "Petro Grigorenko. Sovjetisk general, människorättskämpe och mentalpatient" [Petro Grigorenko. Soviet general, human rights activist and mental patient]. Läkartidningen (in Swedish). 111 (5): 162–165. PMID24624772.
^"Григоренко Пётр Григорьевич (1907-1987)" (in Russian). The Sakharov Center. Retrieved 20 July 2011. (The biography of Grigorenko on the website of the Andrei Sakharov Museum and Public Center)
^ abТолстой, Иван; Гаврилов, Андрей (14 December 2014). "Генерал Григоренко" [General Grigorenko]. Радио Свобода (in Russian). Radio Liberty.
^Redlich, Shimon (1974). "Jewish appeals in the USSR: An expression of national revival". Soviet Jewish Affairs. 4 (2): 24–37. doi:10.1080/13501677408577192.
^Reich, Walter (November 1980). "The case of General Grigorenko: a psychiatric reexamination of a Soviet dissident". Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes. 43 (4): 303–323. doi:10.1080/00332747.1980.11024079. PMID6999519.
^Reich, Walter (1980). "The case of General Grigorenko: a second opinion". Encounter. 54 (4): 9–24. PMID11634905.
Пётр (Петро) Григорьевич ГРИГОРЕНКО (1907–1987) (in Russian). The Online Library of Alexander Belousenko. Retrieved 20 July 2011. (The biography of Grigorenko on the website of the Online Library of Alexander Belousenko)
Григоренко Пётр Григорьевич (1907–1987) (in Russian). The Sakharov Center. Retrieved 20 July 2011. (The biography of Grigorenko on the website of the Andrei Sakharov Museum and Public Center)
