page_title: Petro Grigorenko
section_title: In the United States
hierarchical_section_title: Petro Grigorenko / In the United States
caption_attribution_description: Monument at Petro Grigorenko's grave in South Bound Brook.
context_page_description: Petro Grigorenko or Petro Hryhorovych Hryhorenko was a high-ranking Soviet Army commander of Ukrainian descent, who in his fifties became a dissident and a writer, one of the founders of the human rights movement in the Soviet Union.
  For 16 years, he was a professor of cybernetics at the Frunze Military Academy and chairman of its cybernetic section before joining the ranks of the early dissidents. In the mid-1970s Grigorenko helped to found the Moscow Helsinki Group and the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, before leaving the USSR for medical treatment in the United States. The Soviet government barred his return, and he never again returned to the Soviet Union. In the words of Joseph Alsop, Grigorenko publicly denounced the "totalitarianism that hides behind the mask of so-called Soviet democracy."
context_section_description: On 20 December 1977, Grigorenko was allowed to go abroad for medical treatment. His health was ruined during forcible confinement in KGB-run mental hospitals. On 30 November 1977, Grigorenko arrived in the United States and was stripped of his Soviet citizenship. In Grigorenko's words, Leonid Brezhnev signed the decree of depriving Grigorenko of Soviet citizenship on the ground that he was undermining the prestige of the Soviet Union. The 1970s marked a peak in the use of external exile as a punitive measure by the Soviet Union (as opposed to the internal type, which was highest between the mid-1930s and early 1950s); often the pattern was that a trip abroad for work or medical treatment was transformed into permanent exile. In the same year, Grigorenko became a U.S. citizen.
  Being in USA since 1977, Grigorenko took an active part in the activities of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group foreign affiliate. On 23 July 1978, Grigorenko made a statement condemning the trials of Soviet dissidents Anatoly Shcharansky, Aleksandr Ginzburg and Viktoras Petkus.
  In 1979 in New York, Grigorenko was examined by the team of psychologists and psychiatrists including Alan A. Stone, the then President of American Psychiatric Association. The team could find no evidence of mental disease in Grigorenko and his history consistent with mental disease in the past. Their findings were drawn up and publicized by Walter Reich. Grigorenko's case confirmed accusations, Stone wrote, that psychiatry in the Soviet Union was at times a tool of political repression.
  Petro Grigorenko described his life and views, and his assessment by Soviet psychiatrists and periods of incarceration in prison hospitals in his 1981 memoirs V Podpolye Mozhno Vstretit Tolko Krys… (In the Underground One Can Meet Only Rats…). In 1982, the book was translated into English by Thomas P. Whitney under the title Memoirs and reviewed by Alexander J. Motyl, Raymond L. Garthoff, John C. Campbell, Adam Ulam, Raisa Orlova and Lev Kopelev.
  In 1983, he said he considered the American political-economic system to be "the best that mankind has found to date." In 1983, a stroke he suffered left him partially paralyzed. Grigorenko died on 21 February 1987 in New York City.
  In 1991, a commission, composed of psychiatrists from all over the Soviet Union and led by Modest Kabanov, then director of the Bekhterev Psychoneurological Institute in St Petersburg, spent six months reviewing Grigorenko's patient files. They drew up 29 thick volumes of legal proceedings, and in October 1991 reversed the official Soviet diagnosis of Grigorenko's psychiatric condition. In 1992, an official post-mortem forensic psychiatric commission of experts met in Ukraine. They removed the stigma of being a mental patient and confirmed that there were no grounds for the debilitating treatment he underwent in high security psychiatric hospitals for many years. The 1992 psychiatric examination of Grigorenko was described by the Nezavisimiy Psikhiatricheskiy Zhurnal in its numbers 1–4 of 1992.
caption: Monument at Petro Grigorenko's grave. Cemetery of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of St. Andrew in South Bound Brook, New Jersey
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