Columbia University hosts fourth annual Grigorenko Reading (03/27/05)

Columbia University hosts fourth annual Grigorenko Reading

by Adrianna Melnyk
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

NEW YORK - To observers of and participants in the Orange Revolution, recent events in Ukraine appeared to be a sign of the times, part of a larger international trend of democracy and respect for rule of law triumphing over autocracy and corruption.

However, to understand fully the roots and origins of Ukraine's recent peaceful civil resistance, one must look to the past and pay tribute to those historical figures who left a lasting legacy and whose lives and works directly or indirectly influenced today's human rights activists and civic leaders. One such man was Gen. Petro Grigorenko.

Best known among Ukrainians as an ambassador for a democratic Ukraine in Moscow, and later in the West, Gen. Grigorenko was a founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group and its representative to the Moscow Helsinki Group. He fought tirelessly for the rights of national minorities, and particularly took on the cause of Crimean Tatars, who had been brutally expelled from their homeland in Crimea under Stalin, and had lost their national political autonomy, cultural institutions and large numbers of their population.

On February 16, the Harriman Institute and the Ukrainian Studies Program at Columbia University honored Gen. Grigorenko's memory by hosting the fourth annual Grigorenko Reading. The panel discussion was moderated by Prof. Mark von Hagen, director of the Ukrainian Studies Program at Columbia University. Panelists included Nadia Svitlychna, president, Human Rights in the 20th Century; Andrew Grigorenko, president, Gen. Grigorenko Foundation; Adrian Hewryk, president, East-West Management Institute; and Dr. Pavel Litvinov, physicist and human rights activist. This year's reading was titled "From the Ukrainian Human Rights Movement of the 1970s to the Orange Revolution."

Gen. Grigorenko was born in 1907 in a Ukrainian village near the industrial areas of Donbas. In 1931 he entered the Military Technical Academy in Moscow and from then on embarked on an illustrious military career. His human rights activism began only later in his life: it was in the Khruschev era that he began his dissent against the government. The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and Nikita Khruschev's 1956 speech denouncing Stalin and the "cult of personality" surrounding him was a pivotal moment in the history of the Soviet Union and in Grigorenko's life.

Rebellions throughout Eastern Europe and growing disillusionment of Soviet workers led to a calculated retreat on the part of the Soviet bureaucracy, which included assigning personal blame to Stalin for the terror and mistakes of the last 20 years. In Gen. Grigorenko's words: "These [Khruschev] years were very strained, in both my service and civilian lives. My attitude toward the actions of the leaders became increasingly critical. It was more and more difficult for me not to react to the illegalities and pompous trivialities of the rulers of my country."

In 1961, Gen. Grigorenko decided to speak up at an upcoming local district Communist party activists' conference in Moscow. He talked of the need for democratization and checks and balances within the Party and throughout the country, of the lingering effects of "cult of personality." He was applauded, and the conference leaders had difficulty silencing subsequent open discussions of these issues. At the time, Gen. Grigorenko held a teaching position in the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow, from which he was promptly removed and sent with a decrease in responsibility to serve on the staff of the Fifth Army in Siberia.

In the coming years, Gen. Grigorenko studied Lenin's works and came to the conclusion that Lenin contradicted himself on the problems of democracy, freedom of the press, freedom of association, and that Lenin himself had sowed the seeds of dictatorship. He set up a study circle with his son Georgy, who was studying at the Artillery Engineering Academy at the time, calling it the "Alliance for Struggle for the Rebirth of Leninism," writing and distributing leaflets among students and workers. The position of the Alliance was that the Soviet Union had deviated from Leninist norms, that workers and peasants were oppressed by the privileged bureaucrats, and that the people should struggle for free elections and for democratic rule.

Grigorenko was arrested on March 12, 1964, and, when he refused to renounce his cause, was placed in a psychiatric hospital. His speech of 1961 was still so memorable that the party chiefs were reluctant to try him as a criminal. He spent more than a year being moved between prisons and mental hospitals. He was expelled from the party, and his military rank and pension were taken from him by a special decision of Khruschev and the Politburo.

In the fall of 1964, when Khruschev was removed from power, bureaucratic confusion ensued and Gen. Grigorenko's wife, Zinaida, was able to secure his release. On April 14, 1965, she finally took him home from the hospital. Gen. Grigorenko was free, but after 33 years of service in the Red Army, two wounds at the front and many decorations, he was deprived of his pension and was blacklisted from any permanent jobs. For the next year, he worked as a janitor, tour guide and warehouseman at a grocery store. He was finally granted a pension of 120 rubles a month, which permitted him and his wife to stop working, but left them in poverty.

In 1964 the first of many now-famous demonstrations took place in Pushkin Square in Moscow. It was at those demonstrations, says Gen. Grigorenko's son Andrei, that the Soviet human rights movement was born. In the years that followed, Gen. Grigorenko would build strong ties with the "Shestydesiatnyky," or Ukrainian human rights activists, as they were known. In the words of one of the Grigorenko Reading panelists, the connection of the Russian human rights movement to that of Ukraine was a simple one: we all went to prison together. According to the panelist, Pavel Litvinov, the connections between the families of political prisoners were very strong, and spurred the development of working relationships. As Andrei Grigorenko noted at the reading, repression in Ukraine was always much stronger than it was elsewhere throughout the Soviet Union; in the Khruschev era, the detainees of a typical prison population consisted 50 percent of Ukrainians and 50 percent of other nationalities. In 1968, Gen. Grigorenko brought Ivan Dzyiba's seminal work, "Internationalism or Russification?" to Moscow, where it played a major role in directly influencing the Moscow dissidents.

From 1966 until his arrest in May of 1969, Gen. Grigorenko tirelessly fought against bureaucratic oppression. He was particularly well-known for his defense of the civil and national rights of the Crimean Tatars, who were organizing to force the authorities to let them return to their homeland. Grigorenko maintained that the Crimean Tatars needed to take a more aggressive stand, that it was their legal right to repatriate, and that the crimes committed by the Soviet government against their people amounted to genocide under international law.

In his famous 1968 speech to the Crimean Tatars, he said, "Why have your people been so discriminated against? Section 123 of the Soviet Constitution reads: "'Any direct or indirect limitation on rights ... of citizens because of their racial or national membership... is punishable by law.' Thus the law is on your side...So begin to demand. And demand not just parts, pieces, but all that was taken from you unlawfully - demand the re-establishment of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic." His statement was met with wild applause and cries of "Hail the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic."

It was Gen. Grigorenko's defense of the Tatars that brought about his next arrest in 1969. After spending a year in prisons, he was once again sent to a mental hospital, and spent four years in different hospitals. His case was publicized both within the Soviet Union and in the West. His incarceration in a psychiatric hospital and diagnosis as mentally unstable was a scandal in the international human rights community and made him a cause for many outside the Soviet Union. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Richard Nixon demanded his release as part of the détente, and he was finally released in 1974.

After his release, Gen. Grigorenko became one of 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 Helsinki Group in Kyiv.

In 1977, Gen. Grigorenko departed with his wife for the U.S. to seek medical treatment. He was stripped of his Soviet citizenship, and spent the remaining nine years of his life in the United States. While in exile, he continued his work as a champion for human rights around the world, and led the External Representation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.

According to his son Andrei, Gen. Grigorenko always considered himself Ukrainian, spoke Ukrainian, and built lasting friendships and working relationships with Ukrainian dissidents of his time. He recalled that his father used "to walk a lot, and that [he] would always accompany him, and that [his father] would always speak Ukrainian during those walks."

After his exile to the United States in 1977, Gen. Grigorenko played a pivotal role in the international human rights arena, and, according to Ms. Svitlychna, another Grigorenko Reading panelist, insisted that the problem of Soviet nationalities be addressed through separate programs in initiatives. The situation in Ukraine was often a central message of his speeches, as it was at the 1982 Madrid Conference that reviewed the implementation of the Helsinki Accords.

Ms. Svitlychna went on to say that for today's champions of human rights in Ukraine, Gen. Grigorenko is a hero. "Petro Grigorenko didn't live to see the Orange Revolution or the collapse of the Soviet Union," she said, "for February 21 marks the 18th anniversary of his death. Yet his ideals and values of human rights shaped the Orange youth in Ukraine."

As Prof. Von Hagen stated, "the legacy of Grigorenko and his like-minded fighters was their respect for law and constitutionalism as the basis for a protest and reform movement that sought to change the Soviet Union into a democracy. Their influence was strongest in the late Gorbachev and early Yeltsin years, but the language and tactics of the recent Orange Revolution suggest that that legacy lived on beyond that period. The Orange Revolution, after all, insisted on transparent observance of Ukrainian law and institutions in the name of dignity and respect - a primary demand of the Soviet-era human rights activists."

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