“My dears! A sixth sense tells me that ‘Mr. Arrest’ is walking somewhere nearby. You all know very well that I have done nothing that could be defined as a crime, even by our state laws. Everything I did was done openly and with honest intentions…”
The Grigorenko family
Thus began Petro Grigorenko’s address “To My Family and Friends,” dated April 6, 1968. His “sixth sense” did not deceive him—thirteen months later, he was arrested…
From Petro Grigorenko’s address “To My Family and Friends”
1968 was a time of fruitful collaboration between the human rights activist and activists of the Crimean Tatar national movement. The Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of September 5, 1967 had already been adopted, which Grigorenko accurately called “the most mendacious and most hypocritical decree of all those issued concerning the Crimean Tatars”; the general’s famous speech in support of the Crimean Tatars, delivered at a banquet in honor of another defender of the rights of peoples repressed by Stalin—the writer Aleksei Kosterin—had already taken place...
Documents from this period allow us to assert that in 1968, Grigorenko was completely absorbed by the fate of the Crimean Tatars. The archive of the Moscow “Memorial” society holds the charter of the Crimean Tatar fellowship, developed by Petro Grigorenko, the general’s correspondence with participants of the national movement, applications and complaints from Crimean Tatars to various authorities, Mustafa Dzhemilev’s autobiography, and much more.
Very soon, Grigorenko’s human rights activities in defense of the Crimean Tatars began to irritate the authorities. From a report by the chairman of the USSR KGB, Yuri Andropov, to the Central Committee of the CPSU dated April 7, 1969, we learn that the head of the Soviet secret police proposed once again to bring criminal charges against Grigorenko—for numerous manifestations of anti-Soviet activity.
Among these, he names “active participation in the preparation and dissemination of inflammatory materials on the so-called Crimean-Tatar issue, which put forward demands to intensify the struggle of small peoples in the USSR against their supposedly rightless situation,” as well as the fact that “under the ‘Appeal of the Crimean-Tatar People to People of Goodwill, Democrats, and Communists,’ Grigorenko intends to collect a large number of signatures and submit it to the United Nations. In March of this year, he began to distribute provocative documents he had drafted, ‘On the Deportation of the Crimean Tatars and Its Consequences.’”
A month after this Andropov document, Grigorenko was arrested in Tashkent, where he had arrived to participate in the defense of arrested activists of the Crimean Tatar movement. The trial was postponed and took place in Tashkent several months later, but without Petro Grigorenko’s participation…
The address “to family and friends,” which we quoted above, ended with the words: “I ask all of you, on the very day after my arrest, to begin the fight against my being sent for psychiatric evaluation. Make this inhuman method of dealing with dissent a matter of public knowledge for both the Soviet and world communities.”
From Petro Grigorenko’s address “To My Family and Friends”
The response of human rights activists to Grigorenko’s arrest was the formation a few days later, on May 20, 1969, of the first human rights association in the USSR, the “Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR.” By an investigator’s order of August 5, 1969, he was ordered to undergo a forensic psychiatric examination, which took place in Tashkent on August 18.
The members of the commission came to a unanimous conclusion: “Grigorenko P.G. shows no signs of mental illness at the present time, nor did he show them during the period of the commission (2nd half of 1965 – to April 1969) of the crimes incriminated to him, when he was in full control of his actions and could direct them. He is deemed sane with respect to his actions.”
However, the results of the Tashkent examination did not satisfy the investigative bodies, which on October 13, 1969, ordered a new forensic psychiatric examination, this time at the Central Serbsky Research Institute. The commission of Moscow experts disagreed with the conclusions of their Tashkent colleagues, and on December 30, 1969, the criminal case against Petro Grigoryevich Grigorenko was sent to court “for the application of measures of a medical nature.”
In February 1970, after two psychiatric examinations, the Tashkent City Court ruled: “The judicial panel considers the actions of Grigorenko P.G. to be criminal and dangerous to society, as they are aimed at undermining and weakening Soviet power… contribute to the incitement and creation of national enmity between certain—individual persons of Crimean-Tatar nationality and peoples of other nationalities living in the USSR… To assign Grigorenko P.G. compulsory treatment with his placement in a special-type psychiatric hospital of the MVD of the RSFSR… Since the actions of Grigorenko P.G. represent a particular danger to society, he is to be kept in conditions that exclude the possibility of committing a new socially dangerous act.”
Grigorenko in the psychiatric hospital
On the basis of the court’s decision, Grigorenko was placed in a “special-type psychiatric hospital” in Chernyakhovsk, Kaliningrad Oblast, on May 26, 1970.
Chernyakhovsk special psychiatric hospital
And the result of an absentee psychiatric examination, conducted in 1971-1972 by the young psychiatrist Semyon Gluzman, which found that Grigorenko “does not suffer from a mental illness,” was the arrest of the doctor himself. The trial, which took place in October 1972, found Gluzman guilty of “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” and sentenced him to 7 years in prison and 3 years of exile. Interestingly, Semyon Gluzman was one of the experts in Petro Grigorenko’s final psychiatric examination in 1990, which delivered the final diagnosis: the human rights activist was mentally healthy.
Semyon Gluzman
Truly titanic efforts were made by Grigorenko’s wife, Zinaida, to snatch her husband from the Chernyakhovsk special psychiatric hospital. Her telegrams and letters to high Soviet authorities have been preserved, with the single request to save her husband. Here, for example, is a note full of despair, addressed to an adviser at the CPSU Central Committee: “I ask you to report this letter to Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev. This letter is written in heart’s blood, about a human life. If it is impossible, throw it in the trash, as there has been no answer to other requests. Zinaida Grigorenko”…
Zinaida and Petro Grigorenko
In 1974, under the pressure of a broad campaign of protests around the world, Petro Grigorenko was finally released. A medical commission on May 12, 1974, concluded that “Grigorenko P.G. no longer requires compulsory treatment and may be discharged under the systematic observation of a district psychiatrist and the care of his relatives.”
And as early as January 30, 1976, according to a report from KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, Grigorenko was subjected to a “preventive-prophylactic conversation.” In May 1976, he became a founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group, and in the autumn of the same year, he participated in the creation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.
In November 1977, Grigorenko received a six-month visa to the United States with his wife for an operation and a visit with their son Andrei, who had previously emigrated. And on February 13, 1978, by a Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and thereby the right to return to the USSR. The justification: “Taking into account that Grigorenko P.G. systematically commits acts incompatible with USSR citizenship and damages the prestige of the USSR with his behavior.”
Petro Grigorenko died in 1987 in the USA. He was never able to return to his homeland… He is buried on foreign soil.
“Grigorenko P.G. became a victim of the arbitrariness of the totalitarian state, was subjected to repression for his political beliefs on a fabricated charge, was deprived of his freedom, unjustifiably placed for compulsory treatment in a psychiatric medical institution, and stripped of his citizenship… Rehabilitated”—thus ends the supervisory file of Petro Grigorenko with an entry from a Russian military prosecutor.
From a certificate of rehabilitation for Petro Grigorenko from the Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office of Russia
In 1999, in Simferopol, on Soviet Square, a monument to General Grigorenko was solemnly unveiled at the initiative of the representative body of the Crimean Tatars—the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People—and with the assistance of the People’s Movement of Ukraine…