A BREAKTHROUGH TO FREEDOM (Mykola Rudenko on Petro Grigorenko)
(Ovsiienko, Vasyl. The Light of People: Memoirs and Journalism. In 2 vols. Vol. 2 / Compiled by the author; Art and design by B.Ye. Zakharov. – Kharkiv: Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group; Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2005. – 352 pp., photo illus. Grigorenko – pp. 173-176.)
October 16, 1997, marked the 90th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding human rights activist, General Petro Grigorenko, a founding member of the Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords. On this occasion, the Kyiv community organized an evening in his memory at the Teacher’s House, which was attended by his son Andriy, who had come from the United States to receive his father's posthumous award—the Order “For Courage,” 1st Class. This was the first time this order had been awarded in Ukraine, an effort initiated by the Republican Christian Party.
Petro Grigorenko was born in the Azov Sea region, held a higher military education, was deputy commander of the Far Eastern Front in 1939, and fought throughout the Second World War. Early in the war, he criticized Stalin for his military shortsightedness, which led to trouble with SMERSH, and he was only promoted to the rank of general in 1959. In 1961, he defended his doctoral dissertation. Immediately after, he spoke out against the creation of a new personality cult—that of Khrushchev. For this, Grigorenko, the head of the USSR’s first cybernetics department which he himself had established, was expelled from the Frunze Military Academy and sent to the Far East. There, in 1963, he founded the “Union for the Revival of Pure Leninism” and distributed leaflets, for which he was arrested on February 2, 1964, and thrown into a psychiatric hospital, where he was diagnosed with “psychopathy” and demoted to the rank of private. With Khrushchev’s removal, the diagnosis was annulled. P. Grigorenko wrote: “I saw only one way: back to Lenin. However, this was a mistake. Irreversible changes have taken place in our lives, and no one can turn the clock back to 1924 or even 1953… Now there is an open struggle within the law for the democratization of our society…”
Herein lie the origins of the non-violent human rights movement, which, in conjunction with political and economic pressure from the West, ultimately led to the collapse of the USSR.
P. Grigorenko wrote the historical and journalistic pamphlet “Concealing Historical Truth is a Crime Against the People,” in which he pointed out the reasons for the USSR's colossal losses in the war. He spoke out against the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia. He supported the Crimean Tatars in their struggle to return to their historical homeland.
On May 7, 1969, P. Grigorenko was again confined to a psychiatric hospital, where he spent five years. Based on case materials, Kyiv psychiatrist Semyon Gluzman determined that Grigorenko had never had a mental illness. For this, Gluzman himself paid with ten years of imprisonment. After traveling to the West in 1977, Grigorenko demanded an examination himself, which concluded: “All features of his personality were distorted by the Soviet diagnosticians. Where they found obsessive ideas, we saw steadfastness. Where they saw delusion, we found common sense. Where they perceived irrationality, we found clear consistency. And where they diagnosed pathology, we encountered sincere health.”
In connection with the anniversary of the distinguished human rights activist, I approached Mykola Danylovych Rudenko, the head of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, with some questions.
V.O. Mykolo Danylovych, although you came into this world 13 years later than he, in the minds of us younger ones, you both belonged to the elite of Soviet society. Great prospects lay before both of you, yet you both renounced them. For what reason? You knew Petro Grigorenko well, so could you explain how his and your realization came about that one could not be complicit in the criminal communist ideology and practice?
M.R. Indeed, there is much in common between us. I followed almost the same path—from a devout Leninist and Stalinist to a dissident and political prisoner who completely rejects Marxism-Leninism and perceives what happened in Stalin's time with a tragic sense. Petro Grigorenko died prematurely at the age I am now.
I would not want to speak in clichés about Petro Grigorenko, to say that he was an outstanding, kind man, a man of great conscience, and so on. That is self-evident. I would like to say this about Grigorenko. There have been several people in my life whom I consider the most eminent representatives of humanity. Knowing such people, you begin to respect earthly man in general, to believe that man was created for high deeds and high thinking.
The Grigorenkos and we were family friends; I would stay with him in Moscow, and he with us in Kyiv. I knew him very well. What was it about him that gladdened and even surprised me? A certain childlike purity of soul, a childlike innocence. Only an extraordinary person can preserve such purity of soul, because purity of soul always arouses hatred in demonic natures, in people who cannot live by the truth. I knew Andrei Sakharov, though not as well as Grigorenko. They stood side by side on the dissident firmament. For Sakharov was also a man of extraordinary openness. This means not a single word of falsehood, not a single lie, no posturing… That is why it was very easy to be friends with Grigorenko. He was a person you didn't have to figure out. Even in the features of his face in old age, there remained something childlike, especially when a smile appeared—that indicator of childlike innocence. As it is in Christ's words: “Be like children.” Not with experience or intellect, but with the immaculate purity of the soul. That is how he lived: as he thought, so he acted. For this I loved him, as did other people. He was a man of great Christian virtues.
V.O. Since when did you know Grigorenko?
M.R. In late 1975, I was renewing my disability pension (as I had been demobilized as a disabled war veteran), and the KGB took advantage of this to lock me up in a psychiatric hospital. A woman came to me, introducing herself as Oksana Yakivna Meshko, with a letter from Grigorenko. He had read my “Economic Monologues,” which were circulating in samizdat, and was fascinated by my critique of Marx from a perspective that was very unexpected for him—that of the solar nature of surplus value. The letter was in not-very-literate Ukrainian, but then he had left Ukraine at the age of fourteen and had used only Russian his entire life. Even this level of knowledge of Ukrainian was surprising, and more importantly, he never stopped thinking about Ukraine and living by the interests of the Ukrainian nation. He wrote that he wanted to meet me and invited me to his place. I was in Moscow often then, as I had already become involved in the dissident movement. His wife, Zinaida Mykhaylivna, took me to the hospital where he was staying at the time. We talked for two hours, until he was taken away for procedures. The impression was extraordinary: it was as if we had known each other all our lives. He undertook to write a preface to my “Economic Monologues,” and wrote a very good one.
I went through the same stages as he did—from a righteous Marxist-Leninist to a Ukrainian patriot—so I know how it happened. When the illusion of the Marxist doctrine, for which we had given our lives, dissipated, the question arose: whose children are we? Of which people? We realized that nations did not arise by chance; it was God's design. When the apostles were to go and preach the Holy Gospel to the peoples, they were given the knowledge of different languages. God created man, and God also created the nation. And what is created by God is worthy of reverence and of giving one’s life for it. At the time of our acquaintance, Grigorenko was precisely in this period of national awakening. I remember, we were watching the film “Triumph Over Violence,” and Grigorenko, reflecting, said: “Yes, Bohdan Khmelnytsky made a great mistake in uniting Ukraine with Russia. That mistake distorted the historical path of the Ukrainian people.”
He visited us in Kyiv. Even then, Raisa and I were surrounded by a whole swarm of KGB agents, and when Grigorenko arrived in September 1976, he brought with him a whole retinue of Moscow agents. He stayed with me for about a month in Koncha-Zaspa. There was a movie theater opposite our house; they closed it down and set up a surveillance post there with night-vision equipment. That's how tight the surveillance was…
V.O. And how did the idea to create the Ukrainian Helsinki Group come about?
M.R. Immediately after the formation of the Moscow Group, in conversations between the two of us. Oksana Meshko, Oles Berdnyk, and Levko Lukianenko supported the idea. Since there were no foreign representations or journalists in Kyiv, P. Grigorenko took on the role of our “liaison” with the Moscow Group, of which he was a member, and with the whole world. He immediately broadcast all our materials. By the way, at first, there was information that a branch of the Moscow Group had been created in Ukraine. This stemmed from the Western stereotype of our being secondary. But the Moscow Group immediately refuted this misunderstanding. We immediately acted as an independent force, with future independence in mind.
V.O. When I was released in March 1977, I wrote two copies of an informational report on the situation in the Mordovian concentration camps. I passed them on to the Ukrainian and Moscow groups. And very quickly, I received a reply—a postcard from Petro Grigorenko, written in Ukrainian. I remember the phrase: “It is good that you have declared your position at once.” On November 30, 1977, he went to the US for surgery. He had a firm intention of returning, so he refrained from political statements. Radio Liberty tried to get an interview with him about the arrest of you and Oleksa Tykhy. He responded with a single sentence: “My heart aches for my close friends.” But on February 13, 1978, by a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Grigorenko was stripped of his citizenship. He called a press conference and said it was the saddest day of his life: “They have deprived me of the right to die in my Homeland.” That’s when he went on the offensive! The authorities thought that by letting a Soviet dissident go, they had rid themselves of a nuisance: it would have been awkward to imprison a world-famous person for a third time. And he turned out to be a conscious Ukrainian as well. The same Radio Liberty asked: “So you were a Russian general…” – “I was never a Russian general. I was a Soviet general, and I am a Ukrainian by birth. And I came here to represent the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.”
It must be said that, at that time, Ukrainians were, as a matter of principle, not allowed to go abroad. Moscow dissidents were sometimes given a choice: leave or be jailed. For Ukrainians, there was only one path: to prison. The KGB made a mistake: Grigorenko created the Foreign Representation of the UHG, which became the pickaxe that constantly chipped away at the Russian communist empire. Leonid Plyushch and Nadiya Svitlychna were active in it. (Their departures abroad were also something of a miracle.)
M.R. When my wife Raisa and I, after serving our sentences, arrived in America in January 1988, Grigorenko was no longer alive. We took up his creation. It was a respected civic organization. The White House supported us. Petro Grigorenko had such authority that he effectively stood at the head of the democratic forces of the Ukrainian diaspora.
V.O. It was in the 1970s that the Lord Himself enabled the best Ukrainian minds to place the Ukrainian national question on an international legal footing, and this path proved to be the right one: it led to victory.
Narodna Gazeta. – 1997. – No. 42 (322). – October.
On the KHPG website since February 26, 2008.
