No one was surprised when last A photo of Pyotr Grigorenko taken some years ago. Since 1969 he has been incarcerated in a 'mental hospital". His revolutionary opposition to the Soviet bureaucracy was demonstrated in 1968 when he called on 'the true communists of the world... to sever all relations with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and declare clearly and unequivocally that they do not consider that party to be communist.. [or]. the country it rules to be socialist."
reserved the skilled, better paid jobs The voice of revolutionary socialism is not often heard in the Soviet Union any more. However, in one place it is still possible to hear it-in the special wards of the 'mental bospitals' run by the KGB.
It is in one such hospital -at Stolbovaya, near Moscow-that Pyotr Grigorenko is held. Arrested experts of the infamous Serbski Institute, however, were quickly able to discover paranoid disorders atric clinic orenko to withstand five years of other real disorders have developed, to leave him completely blind. But Tor this the torturers of the KGB have no treatment.
peasants, Grigorenko became active he was sent by the Party to the MilitFar East.
USSR and today called the KGB is such an organisation.
the people, and I will fight by all means possible for its early liquidation.* (Letter to the Prosecutor-Genera/ of the USSR, December 1968)
in Novocherkassk. in Tashkent six montis after writing his Letter to the Prosecutor-General of the USSR in December 1968, he was declared to be perfectly sane by local psychiatrists. The more reliable of a permanent nature ... requiring forcible treatment in a special psychiIt is only his unbreakable devotion to communism that has enabled Grig such treatment. Meanwhile, however. its positions, resulting in two heart attacks and the formation of cataracts that threaten LENINISM Born in 1907 in a family of poor otherwire." in the organisations of the Bolshevik Party from his carliest youth. In 1931 ary Academy and later fought in the After the Nazi Invasion he was was penalised hy the Party for criticIn 1963, after further sanctions pamphlets dealing with workers" struggles in particular, the riots In February 1964 he was arrested and spent over a year in an asylum for criminals. On his release he quick- active in defence of the national ly became one of the leading figures of the opposition to the regime.
BUREAUCRACY
During the next four years, Grigorenko came to see more and DOC LISTEN IL TASE DI sickness of Soviet society lay in a fundamental bureaucratic degeneration of the Party and State.
ITS THUS GEET TONIC conference of Communist Parties held in Budapest in 1968 (printed in full in Interconzimental Press, Vol 12 No 8), he traces the historical process whereby the Soviet bureaucracy freed itself from the control of the masses and erected a massive apparatus of lies and terror to defend Unlike many Soviet oppositionists, he knows that this has nothing in common with socialism: According to he smashed and broken up and replaced by a State that is "withering Crimean Tartars, themselves under away", that "will begin to wither away immediately and cannot do ..Instead, a State was set up that had an unprecedented degree of totalitarian control."
Replying to chose Stalinist demagogues who appeal for a closing of is 'no less than completely eliminaLing from communist ideology the stench of Stalinisen, He calls on the true communists of the world .. to sever all relations with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and declare clearly and unequivocally that they do not consider that party to be communist and do not recognise the country that it rules to be socialist' Extremely valuable during this Bolshevik who, Grigorenko says, turned him from a rebel into a fighter'. They were particularly rights of the Crimcan Tartars, who were deported en masse to Uzbekistan by Stalin Kosterin died in November 1968, and ltis tuneral became a political demonstration of a kind not seen for decades. Watched closely by the secret police, over 400 people gathered at the cemetery to listen to 18 speakers, including several from the Tartars and other opprcased nationalities.
The reaction of the KGB was not alow in coming. Grigorenko's own flat was searched and many documents, including the funeral speeches, were seized. In Uzbekistan a group of Tartars celebrating the anniversary of Lenin's birth were attacked by the police, It was these two incidents that formed the backaround to be notest lettet to thi Prosecutor-General.
Grigorenko was finally arrested on 7 May, 1969, whilst organising the defence of leaders of the arrest. The Brezhnev regime had decided that it could no longer tolerate the slightest open opposittom, which it saw as threatening the stability of the whole bureaucratic apparatus SOLIDARITY The bourgeois media that applaud Solzhenitsyn so vigorously have no interest in defending a communist militant such as Grigorenko. The broadest solidarity action by the left internationally, including the Western Communist Parties, is needed to tear Grigorenko out of the hands of Brezhnev's "doctors".
That is why the IMG welcomes the designation of next Tuesday, 7 May, as Grigorenko Day, and will be supporting the activities organised around this occasion.
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based on a caste. The organisation created by Stalin on the advice of ministers of the I do not conceal from anyone my hatred of this organisation, which 1 consider hostile to
to Marxist-Leninist theory the old mechanism for governing i supposed
period was Grigorenko's friend- ship with Alexei Kosterin, an Old