A hero of our time
John Jolliffe
Memoirs Petro G. Grigorenko Translated by Thomas P. Whitney (Harvill Press £15) In the years between 1967 and 1977
General Grigorenko was the most for- nudable champion of human and national rights in the USSR, by reason of his military rank (even after it was removed) and his long first-hand experience of the inner Workings of the regime. These are Memoirs in the strictest sense, i.e. what he can remember at the age of 70, after five years in psychiatric prisons, and without access to documents.
In 1914 he was left, aged seven, with his 11 Year old brother, in charge of the family farm in Ukraine, while his father and uncle went to the war. His schoolmaster was shot by a White Guard, and his education was further interrupted (to put it mildly) by the civil war, but school life began again in 1921, though the teachers, who were starv- ing, could only manage two classes a day. Ukrainian stories, poems, plays and history fired his imagination, and although christened Pyotr he adopted the Ukrainian form of his name, Petro. A true Ukrainian, he enjoys being called Russian as much as the average Irishman likes being described as English. Burning with zeal for universal Justice and happiness (although 'to this day I am astonished by the fascination we had for dictatorship') he became the chief pro- Pagans of his village Komsomol, but soon became aware of the intense hostility bet- ween Party and peasant, i.e. between theorists and those who actually grew corn ancl.bred cattle of the famine created by Stalin in Ukraine he says '1 do not accept the justification of ignorance. We were deceived because we wanted to be deceived.' Any crime was permissible 'if it was glossed over with the least catch-phrase of communism.' In 1931 he joined the Military Technical Academy at Leningrad, and one of his subsequent tasks was to blow UP the cathedral at Vitebsk, where all who took part received a bonus from the city authorities 'for the excellent quality of the explosion'. The falsest charge of espionage or sabotage could dispose of the instruc- tors, and most of those at the General Staff Academy, which he joined in 1937, were wiped out in the purges and replaced by mediocrities, hence the dismally un- prepared state of the army, and the total destruction of the Soviet Air Force by the Germans, in June 1941. Having served in Mongolia and been wounded in Lithuania, he became a divi- sional chief of staff on the Ukrainian front, where a large fragment of mortar shell lodg- ed in his helmet. (Soviet soldiers at first refused to wear helmets, which they regard- ed as showing off, whereas any German who failed to do so was punished as for sell- mutilation.) Brezhnev, then chief of the political branch of the army, borrowed the fragment as a propaganda showpiece. He promised to return it, but Grigorenko never saw it again. All who failed to join the ad- vancing Soviet Army in the 'liberated' areas were arrested, and over each military opera- tion lay the shadow of Stalin's mind. 'Each was carried out under his inhuman stan- dard: Don't spare the men!' When the war ended, instead of taking command of a division, which would have involved him in suppressing a political rebellion in Ukraine, burning the homes of anyone even accused of supporting it, and sending many women and children to Siberia, Grigorenko spent the next few years in charge of scientific research at the Frunze Military Academy, 'in an intellectually stimulating professional collective, communicating freely with or- dinary workers', instead of in the isolated and privileged world of generals.
His first political offence was a speech connecting the Cult of Personality not with an individual (by now permissible in the case of Stalin) but, unforgivably, with the system itself. Demoted to a subordinate post near Vladivostok, he brooded on the sharp contradictions in Lenin's works and formed a striking, somewhat Mug,geridgian conclusion: 'Every party ensures the death of the cause it stands for. A party is only a struggle for power, replacing communica- tions with intrigues.' After rejoining the General Staff in Moscow he composed seven political Pamphlets, and by bravely refusing to recant brought endless dangers on his family and himself. Like some strange, Ukrainian Socrates, he told his in- terrogators 'You will become confused: you are already in a blind alley.' And he gives an unforgettable sketch of his prison 'doctor', Margarita Feliksovna Tultse, 'a peroxide blonde, with a long, dry face, nasty eyes and thin lips. She reminded me of a skinned cat.'
On release from prison, stripped of his rank and pension, he obtained work, with the greatest difficulty, as a porter in a greengrocer's store. After the arrest of his allies, Ginzburg and Bukovsky, he became fully immersed in the Human Rights Move- ment, joining the Crimean Tatars (who had been officially declared not to exist) at a mass protest meeting in 1967 when a large wreath was deposited M Red Square with the ironic inscription 'To the great Lenin from the Crimean Tatars.' He next spent four years in special psychiatric 'hospitals', where perfectly sane political prisoners were locked in with a mass of seriously ill pa- tients, under the Nazi principle of fusing a doctor and a SS man in one person, answerable to nobody.
On his eventual release he was allowed to go to New York for an operation, with his wife Zenaida (who plays an important part in the whole story) and their retarded son Oleg. Suddenly, his Soviet citizenship was removed, and the family still live there. Special tribute is paid to Peter Reddaway of the London School of Economics 'who ac- complished a great deal in bringing the criminal actions of Soviet psychiatry to light'. But the name of one of his colleagues in this magnificent work, the distinguished psychiatrist Gerard Low-Beer, is given (I swear) as 'Harry Lauber'. This is an ex- cellent example of the truly abysmal level of editing by the American publishers, Nor- ton, whose edition has ironically been im- ported by Harvill, a publisher formerly peerless in this field. The contents of chapters 1, 14, 25 and 26 are so vivid that they survive their dismal presentation, but alas, the whole book reads like a rough, disconnected first draft, crying out for editorial work on every page. The translator, Thomas P. Whitney, is a com- plete dud, and his attempts at colloquial dialogue are always grotesquely jarring, and often more or less illiterate. The general abundance of loose ends, of characters named but not identified, of all kinds of obscurities not explained, the great lack of dates or of any attempt to give coherence to the narrative — all this is an unforgivable insult to the courage and dignity of a great man, who insists that standing up for legal rights, cost what it may, is the highest task that the 'prisoners in the prison of nations' must undertake.
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