Turning the pages back... October 16, 1907 (10/19/97)

Turning the pages back...

October 16, 1907

Had he lived, Petro Grigorenko would have celebrated his 90th birthday last week. The former Red Army general and Helsinki monitoring group member was born on October 16, 1907, in Borysivka, a village north of Nogaiske (now Prymorske) just off the Azov Sea coast.

He endured a difficult childhood. His mother died of typhoid when he was 3, his stepmother fled from poverty and hardship when he was 7, and then the famine of 1921 hit.

But the young man's imagination was fired by the newfound national conciousness - "I learned that I belonged to the same nationality as the great Shevchenko" he wrote in his memoirs - and then by his membership in the Komsomol.

After working for some years in the Selidovka District Committee's rail transport department (and surviving a near-fatal accident), he enrolled in the Kharkiv Polytechnical Institute, graduating with a degree in engineering (1929-1931).

As the man-made famine loomed in late 1932, he raged against Ukrainian Communist Party Secretary Stanislav Kossior, whom he held responsible for it, and having being dissuaded from writing protests to Stalin about it, no doubt avoided an early demise yet again.

He travelled to Moscow to study at the Military Engineering Academy (graduating in 1934) and the General Staff Academy (1939). Serving in the Far East after 1939, he was reprimanded in 1941 for criticizing Stalin's purge of the Red Army and weakening of fortifications in Western Ukraine. A decorated division commander on the German front during the war (where he encountered his "servile" future tormentor, Leonid Brezhnev), he returned to Moscow to teach at the Frunze Military Academy, became the head of its faculty of military cybernetics, and was promoted to the rank of general in 1956, then to major general in 1959.

The turning point came on September 7, 1961, in Moscow, at a local party conference. Gen. Grigorenko warned of the potential of a reversion to Stalinism, criticized the party's bureaucratization and corruption, and advocated a thoroughgoing democratization of the party's organizational structure. He was deprived of his credentials on the spot. Removal from his academic posts followed soon after, then a transfer back to the Far East, and then a removal from active service.

In November 1963, he founded the League of Struggle for the Revival of Leninism and publicly championed the right of the Crimean Tatars, a people smeared as collaborators by Stalin, to return to their homeland. Arrested in February 1964, he was sent to the notorious Serbsky Institute in Moscow and examined by the infamous political abusers of psychiatry Andrei Snezhnevsky and Daniil Lunts.

Gen. Grigorenko was committed to psychiatric prisons in 1964-1965 and 1969-1974, where he was tortured by the likes of the anti-Hippocratic pseudo-clinician Margarita Taltse.

His health destroyed, he nevertheless maintained close contacts with the leading lights of the Soviet dissident movement, including Academician Andrei Sakharov and Yuri Orlov, who conceived of the tactic of holding the Soviet leadership accountable to the human rights provisions of the 1975 Helsinki Accords. Gen. Grigorenko was among the 11 signatories of the first declaration of what became known as the Moscow Helsinki Monitoring Group.

On November 9, 1976, together with Oles Berdnyk, Ivan Kandyba, Levko Lukianenko, Myroslav Marynovych, Mykola Matusevych, Oksana Meshko, Mykola Rudenko, Nina Strokata and Oleksa Tykhy, he co-founded the Ukrainian group in Kyiv.

Almost exactly a year later, Gen. Grigorenko departed with his wife for the U.S. to seek treatment for various ailments. During his travels, on March 9, 1978, he was deprived of Soviet citizenship for "doing harm to the prestige of the USSR" and, to his chagrin, deprived of his right to return.

For the remaining nine years of his life, Gen. Grigorenko remained an indefatigable champion of human rights within the Soviet Union and around the world, leading the External Representation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. Unfortunately, he did not live even to see his 80th birthday, passing away in New York City on February 21, 1987, nor the release of Danylo Shumuk a scant three months later. Nor did he witness the fall of the USSR he had come to oppose with such dedication, nobility and wisdom, and therefore, which he helped cause.

Sources: "Grigorenko, Petro," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988); "Memoirs," translated by Thomas Whitney (New York, W.W. Norton and Co., 1982).

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