COURAGE

connecting collections

Petro Hryhovorych Grigorenko was born in the village of Borysivka in 1907 (now located in the Prymorsk district of Zaporizhia oblast) and died in New York City in 1987. He was a general major in the Soviet Army and also received his doctorate of military science in 1961. Grigorenko was a founding member of both the Ukrainian and Moscow Helsinki groups in 1976, despite being sent twice to psychiatric clinics in 1964-1965 and in 1969-1974.

He was a Komsomol activist of the 1920s, who was swallowed by the Soviet penal system due to its intolerance of dissenting opinions. Grigorenko's views were ideologically consistent with the foundational principles of the Soviet Union, but at odds with the politics of retrenchment that followed Khrushchev's removal as general secretary. Grigorenko had joined the military, studied at the Military Engineering Academy named after Kuybishev and even held leadership positions in Belarus in the years 1934-1937. His military service during Word War II was in the Far East, where he participated in the battle of Khalkhin-Holi in 1939. Grigorenko was wounded twice. After the war, he taught at the military academy from 1945-1961, receiving his doctorate and authoring 83 texts on military strategy, history, theory and cybernetics.  

After the Twentieth Party Congress, Grigorenko began critically evaluating the Soviet Union’s political system and the degree to which it had deviated from Leninist ideals. He openly shared his ideas in the military academy and also at party conferences in Moscow, calling for democratization of the political process. He was almost immediately stripped of his mandate to speak at party conference, as “politically immature,” banned from teaching at the academy, issued a serious reprimand from the party and sent to the Far East Military District to serve in the city of Ussuriysk. While on vacation in Moscow in 1962, he founded an underground organization called “The Union for the Fight to Restore Leninism,” under the aegis of which he published a number of criticisms of bureaucratism and the Soviet penal system, as well as violent crackdowns of protests in Novo-Cherkassk, Temirtau and Tbilisi. It was only a matter time before he was detained (at the Khabarovsk airport on February 1, 1964). He was taken back to Moscow, and thrown in a cell at the KGB prison. He refused KGB chief Vladimir Semichastnyi’s offer to repent during his interrogation, which meant he was arrested, tried and sentenced for breaking Article 70 of the RSFSR’s Criminal Codex. After a court issued medical examination, he was diagnosed as suffering from paranoia (“paranoialnyi rozvytok osobystosti”—Rukh Oporu 188), a verdict Grigorenko believes was politically motivated and sanctioned by members of the Moscow Politburo.  He was sentenced to mandatory medical treatment in Leningradsk.

In April 22, 1965 he was released following Khrushchev’s ouster, as a person who had recovered from mental illness. He held a variety of odd jobs—as a guard, tour guide, driver, builder.  In 1966, he joined Moscow dissident circles, began reading samvydav materials, and even joined the campaign to help Crimean Tatars return to their native lands. In 1967, he wrote a critique of the Red Army’s crimes during World War II in a pamphlet which circulated in samvydav circles. He wrote another piece directed at communists in which he stated Stalinism was a deadly illness for communism. He supported the democratizing movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968, agitated for the removal of Soviet troops from the country, wrote a critique of special psychiatric clinics used to punish dissident and political adversaries and even tried to give the dissident movement more concrete organizational form. That same year he participated in demonstrations of Crimean Tatars outside the Central Committee’s office building, also gathering statistics and other useful information for foreign correspondents about the violation of Crimean Tatar rights after their attempted return from exile. In November 1968, his apartment was searched and his entire archive confiscated. Ignoring KGB threats, Grigorenko flew to Tashkent as a “people’s defender”, where he was arrested again and held for 5 months by the KGB in Uzbekistan, before being sentenced again to mandatory medical treatment for psychiatric conditions. His prison diary documented the hunger strike he initiated in protest of his treatment. His illegal arrest, and other indecencies was published in the Chronical of Current Events («Хро́ника теку́щих собы́тий»), a Russian language samizdat journal published irregularly in 1968-1983 and documented the human rights struggle, political repressions, and the Soviet penal system.

Grigorenko’s case attracted the attention of the larger human rights community — Tatars picketed outside the prison in Tashkent where he was being held, hundreds of signatures were gathered in Moscow, protest actions took place in Norway, Italy and Belgium. But to no avail, he was released only on the eve of President Nixon to the USSR on June 24, 1974. After his release, he continued his support for other human rights defenders (Mustafa Dzhemilev), he was a founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group and the Ukrainian Helsinki Group in 1976 and the following year wrote a brochure documenting the struggle of both groups with the KGB. In 1977, he was given permission to travel to the US for medical treatment, where he lived out the rest of his days, where he continued his human rights work.

Ion Grigorescu (b. 15 March 1945, Bucharest) is a complex artist, who is continually experimenting and innovating in his art. Painter, draughtsman, photographer, and essayist, he is in known in the first place as one of the few multimedia artists in Romania. According to his own testimony, he chose art because he believed that it was a less ideological field, only to discover already as a student how much he had been mistaken. A graduate of the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of Visual Arts in Bucharest in 1969, he became like all artists in communist Romania a member of the Union of Visual Artists in 1971, but he preferred to do what he liked rather than what was requested of him. According to the critic Erwin Kessler, Ion Grigorescu “is the Romanian artist who contributed most to the transformation of painting from a traditional practice to a conceptual artistic medium.” The fact that during communism he was an absolutely marginal figure gave him an extraordinary advantage, because it meant that he could experiment as he pleased. At the same time, he had to deal with the immense disadvantage of working completely outside the official network, without exhibitions, living from the sale of his works through the informal channels by which Sorin Costina came to him. In fact, Ion Grigorescu concentrated more on art forms such as photography and short films, at a time when these had an inferior status in relation to the traditional plastic arts and found no place in exhibition galleries.

Consequently, his experimental works only had a limited public under communism, and were generally presented only to his friends. Among them is Dialogue with Ceauşescu, a short film of 1978, presenting an imaginary and impossible conversation between the artist and the dictator. Ion Grigorescu plays both roles, wearing a mask to play Ceauşescu. The film is silent, with the conversation appearing written on the screen, starting with a sentence that has become famous: “If the people cannot lead, then it ought at least to criticise!” By the continuous rolling of the texts belonging to the two roles in two separate columns, the film subtly suggests the non-existence of dialogue between the dictator who leads according to his own wishes and the people whose criticism is ignored. Asked to what extent we can speak of an art of protest in works of Ion Grigorescu that became very well known only after the fall of communism, such as Dialogue with Ceauşescu, Sorin Costina emphasises that it was precisely the artist’s marginality that helped him to survive in a peripheral network: “Back then, no one saw him, His films were seen by approximately twenty people in Timişoara. And that was in the 1980s.”

It is interesting to note the episode concerning the portrait of Ceauşescu that was ordered from Ion Grigorescu in 1980, on the occasion of the dictator’s birthday. Instead of painting something conventional by pastiching official photographs, as was the usual practice, he painted a triple portrait, with three different views of Ceauşescu during his so-called “working visits” to various construction sites. When the painting was refused as being out of conformity with the official canons, Ion Grigorescu remade it, keeping only one of the three images but making the hands with which Ceauşescu was indicating  what was to be done on the site exaggeratedly small in relation to his height. Obviously this second version was not accepted either. Basically, the artist’s great achievement was to suggest, albeit through paintings that did not include any taboo elements as such, a critical reflection on the Ceauşescu regime.

After 1989, Ion Grigorescu became one of the most famous Romanian artists not only nationally but also internationally. His artistic creation is multi-faceted, but he is best known as a performance artist, a maker of film and video art, a photographer, and less as a painter, although his portfolio also includes paintings (including church paintings and icons). He is also the author of a number of essayistic and theoretical texts published in specialised journals. He has had over forty solo exhibitions and taken part in over 300 group exhibitions, and his works are to be found in the most famous art galleries in the world, including MOMA in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris.

Saulius Grybkauskas is a senior research fellow at the Lithuanian Institute of History. He defended his PhD ‘Industrial Management in Soviet Lithuania. Tensions and Conflicts, 1965-1985’ in 2007. Grybkauskas is the author of two books and a number of research articles. His main research interests include the Soviet nomenklatura, KGB activity, Soviet economic policy, and the Soviet regime's control of society.