Soviet General, Soviet Dissident – a Guide to Primary, Secondary, Archival and Related Materials.

P.G. Grigorenko: Soviet general, Soviet dissident – A guide to primary, secondary, archival and related materials.

Mikhail Koulikov

May 2, 2007

Introduction.

Among the “dissidents,” those who, starting in the mid and late 1950’s, began to speak up against the Soviet government and work to organize a viable civil society, P. G. Grigorenko quickly rose to prominence, and then to a nearly legendary status. Older than many of his comrades, he came from a thoroughly different background. Born and reared in a small Ukrainian village in 1907, he rose through the ranks of the Soviet Army to a position of relative privelege as a department head at the USSR’s premier post-graduate military educational institution, the Frunze Military Academy. He was a decorated World War II veteran (who at one point served under Brezhnev), a respected and prolific author of works on military theory and tactics, and, as of 1959, held the rank of major general.

On September 7, 1961, he made a major step towards throwing all of that away, by stepping up at a district Party conference and openly criticising senior party leaders for “violating Leninist principles and norms.” (Grigorenko, 1981). Retribution was swift, and Grigorenko was promptly exiled to a relatively insignificant post in the Soviet Far East. There, he founded an underground group, the Union of Struggle for the Revival of Leninism; its main activity was printing and covertly distributing flyers calling for, among other things, free and open elections.

On February 1, 1964, Grigorenko was arrested, stripped of rank and all decorations, and placed in a psychiatric hospital. Following his release (after Khruschev was removed from power), Grigorenko became one of the founders of the organized Soviet dissident movement, until being arrested in 1969 and again confined to psychiatric care. Released in 1974, he was allowed to visit the US for medical care in 1977, and while abroad, was stripped of Soviet citizenship.

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