Our young people often lack the vivid examples of lives of people who were ready to defend (at any price, up to sacrificing their health, career, freedom, and life itself) the values they held dearest, including freedom, human dignity, national liberation, and the truth as the alternative to the deathly, suffocating lie. It was these people who were, in fact, truly “successful” and “ambitious.” Such were the lives of Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, Lesia Ukrainka, and in the Soviet time, of Vasyl Stus, Anatolii Marchenko, Oleksa Tykhy, Yevhen Hrytsiak... And such was the life of Petro Hryhorenko...
He departed this world forever exactly three decades ago. He died in New York and rests in the Ukrainian cemetery in South Bound Brook, New Jersey. The man had a long life which lasted almost 80 years and was impressively dramatic and incredibly spiritually rich. He was absolutely uncompromising in his quest for truth, never put up with falsehoods and pretenses, even if they were “decent” or “moderate,” and always was in it to the end, consciously subjecting himself to the merciless blows of fate. Starting as a true believer Komsomol member and “builder of socialism” in his youth (Hryhorenko participated in collectivization, which he described with the utmost frankness in his main work, confessional autobiography called Memoirs), he then joined the military and served in the World War Two (as a divisional commanding officer), taught at the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow in 1945-61, and became major general of the Soviet army. It was quite a successful career, was not it?
And then suddenly, he made an abrupt break with it all (as can be seen from the autobiography, it was not so abrupt actually, since his resentment of the government’s lies and tyranny had grown for years). In a speech at a party conference in Moscow in September 1961, the general attacked dictatorial, effectively Stalinist system of the Communist Party governance; having been fired from his job, he created the clandestine Union for the Revival of Leninism (such were his beliefs at the time, but Hryhorenko worked intensively to improve himself, constantly “outgrowing” his own past views); after two years, he was arrested for the first time and then subjected to forcible psychiatric treatment. Released soon, the general became an even more uncompromising fighter against the repressive regime (despite having been warned that “should you resume your activities, we will punish you much harsher”); he then made bloody deportation of the Crimean Tatar people under Joseph Stalin and its subsequent tragic fate public knowledge internationally; for it, the dissident was subjected to barbaric 5-year imprisonment in a special psychiatric hospital; he fearlessly raised a voice in defense of peoples, individuals, organizations which fell victims of the KGB’s repressive mechanism. He became, along with Andrei Sakharov, one of the internationally universally recognized leaders of the Soviet dissident movement. Through his close friend Mykola Rudenko, he contributed to the formation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group in 1976. Hryhorenko always remembered that he was Ukrainian, a native of the village of Borysivka, Zaporizhia oblast.
Having been forcibly exiled from the USSR (ostensibly for treatment) in 1977, the general settled in the US. He created the famous autobiography Memoirs (its original Russian title V Podpolye Mozhno Vstretit Tolko Krys… means “In Underground One Can Meet Only Rats” and reflects Hryhorenko’s lifelong advocacy and practice of public, open human rights struggle). A selection from these memoirs (for example, the pages dealing with the impact of the break with the Soviet system on the 54-year-old successful general) should probably be studied in Ukrainian schools, since they are really impressive. Importantly, Hryhorenko’s classic journalistic works of the 1970s and 1980s (“Hiding the Historical Truth,” “Our Everyday Reality,” “On the Question of State Independence and Relations between the Peoples of the USSR”) have been republished in the “Armor-Piercing Political Writing” series of Den’s Library and enjoyed steady demand from our readers.
His whole life was a brutal, ruthless answer to the question: “Is fighting for the truth easy?” Yet it was happy. Hryhorenko himself wrote about it.
