Petro Grigorenko

Petro Grigorenko or Petro Hryhorovych Hryhorenko (Петро́ Григо́рович Григоре́нко, 16 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.

For 16 years, he was a professor of cybernetics at the Frunze Military Academy and chairman of its cybernetic section before joining the ranks of the early dissidents.

In 1939, he graduated with honors from the Kuybyshev Military Engineering Academy and the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia.

He took part in the battles of Khalkhin Gol, against the Japanese on the Manchurian border in 1939, and in the Second World War.

He commanded troops in initial battles following 22 June 1941.

During the war, he also commanded an infantry division in the Baltic for three years.

He went on a military career and reached high ranks during World War II.

After the war, being a decorated veteran, he left active career and taught at the Frunze Military Academy, reaching the rank of a Major General.

In 1949, Grigorenko defended his Ph.D. thesis on the theme "Features of the organization and conduct of combined offensive battle in the mountains."

In 1960, he completed work on his doctoral thesis.

Over 70 of his scientific works on military science were published.

In 1961, Petro Grigorenko started to openly criticize what he considered the excesses of the Khrushchev regime.

He maintained that the special privileges of the political elite did not comply with the principles laid down by Lenin.

Grigorenko formed a dissident group—The Group for the Struggle to Revive Leninism.

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".

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.

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.

When arrested, Grigorenko was sent to Moscow's Lubyanka prison, and from there for psychiatric examination to the Serbsky Institute 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.

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."

Grigorenko was not responsible for his actions and was thereby forcibly committed to a special psychiatric hospital.

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.

After six months, Grigorenko was found to be in remission and was released for outpatient follow-up.

He required that his pension be restored.

Although he began to draw pension again, it was severely reduced.

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.

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.

In the words of Joseph Alsop, Grigorenko publicly denounced the "totalitarianism that hides behind the mask of so-called Soviet democracy."

Petro Grigorenko was born in Borysivka village in Taurida Governorate, Russian Empire (in present-day Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Ukraine).

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 until being freed on 26 June 1974 after 5 years of detention.

As Grigorenko had followers in Moscow, he was lured to the far-away Tashkent.

While there, he was again arrested and examined by a psychiatric team.

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.

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."

The psychiatrists reported that he was not mentally sick, but responsible for his actions.

He had firm convictions which were shared by many of his colleagues and were not delusional.

Having evaluated the records of his preceding hospitalization, they concluded that he had not been sick at that time either.

The KGB brought Grigorenko back to Moscow and, three months later, arranged a second examination at the Serbsky Institute.

Once again, these psychiatrists found that he had "a paranoid development of the personality" manifested by reformist ideas.

The commission, which included Lunts and was chaired by Morozov, recommended that he be recommitted to a special psychiatric hospital for the socially dangerous.