Notes from a Soviet Asylum

Among the brave band of Russians who campaign openly for greater civil liberties in the Soviet Union, there is no more vivid personality than former Major General Pyotr Grigorenko. The 62-year-old war hero is an outspoken defender of the sovereignty of Czechoslovakia, the rights of the U.S.S.R.'s Crimean Tartar minority and other causes. His distinguished war record, which won him an Order of Lenin, and the fact that he taught cybernetics at the Frunze Academy, the Russian equivalent of West Point, made him a particular embarrassment to Soviet authorities. They cashiered him from the army, and in 1964 confined him in a lunatic asylum for 14 months. Last May, he was arrested in Tashkent and, without trial, was sent for an indefinite period to another asylum as a "paranoid." Copies of Grigorenko's own notes on his treatment are now circulating from hand to hand in Moscow. Following are excerpts that describe his experience in the cellar of the KGB headquarters in Tashkent:

June 15: [After Grigorenko began a hunger strike] they started to force-feed me. They put me in a straitjacket, beat me and choked me. Then they began the painful procedure by putting a clamp in my mouth to keep it open.

June 16-19: Force-fed every day. I resisted as much as I could. They twisted my arms, hit my crippled leg [wounded in the war]. On June 19 the bullies increased in number from five to twelve. After each struggle I suffered pains in my heart. I continued to resist but I felt my heart would stop. I wanted to die because I thought my death would expose their abuses of power.

June 24: Received a letter saying that my family would no longer receive a pension. I understood this to be moral torture. My elderly, sick wife and my son, who has been an invalid since childhood, were deprived of any means of support.

Oct. 16: On this, our birthday (they come on the same day), my wife managed to cover 1,900 miles to see me and was refused even a five-minute meeting with me. It's only now that I really understand the dreadful feelings of those who were jailed under Stalin. It was not the physical torture. One can stand that. But to be deprived of any hope whatever--this cannot be endured.

Grigorenko describes his examination by self-styled psychiatrists in Moscow last Nov. 19. He was asked why he had behaved "normally" for a time after psychiatric treatment in 1964, and had then resumed his old activities. Excerpts from Grigorenko's replies:

The psychiatrists had nothing to do with my so-called "normal" behavior. I did not write anything for distribution in 1965 and 1966, first because I had no time. I worked as a loader for twelve hours a day with no days off. When I came home I had only enough strength to get into bed. Secondly, I thought I would start writing a history of World War II. But experience showed me that cases of repression are increasing all the time, rather than diminishing. The time had not yet come when I could climb into an ivory tower and engage in "pure scholarship." Until a real stop is put to the abuse of power in our country, every honest person must take part in the fight against it. Of course, if the only "normal" Soviet citizen is one who bows his head to every bureaucrat who exceeds his power, then I am certainly "abnormal."

Circulating with Grigorenko's notes were copies of an open letter from his wife Zinaida to "the freedom-loving people of the world." Excerpts:

It was from behind bars that a letter from my husband finally reached me. It is a chronology of what happened to him during ten months of solitary confinement in Tashkent and in a cell of the Criminal Psychiatry Institute. All those who know my husband and who have read his writings know his lucidity and his common sense, combined with a rare ability to think logically and consistently, with absolute honesty. It is for these abilities that my husband was pronounced insane and has been doomed to a life that might drive anyone mad. People! Pyotr Grigorenko is threatened with death. I appeal to all democratic organizations that defend the rights of man, and to all free citizens of the world. Help save my husband. The freedom of one man is the freedom of every man.

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