Word: grigorenko
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Dates: during 1968-1968
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...rising cries of dissent from their country's intellectuals. The Voice of America, for example, has broadcast full versions of Physicist Andrei Sakharov's extraordinary outline for an East-West detente (which is critical of both U.S. and Soviet current policy) and Major General Pyotr Grigorenko's recent anti-Kremlin statements...
...trials of dissidents and the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Though that alone might have accounted for the brusqueness of his funeral, Soviet authorities were actually far more concerned with the living than with the dead in the crematorium. For Kosterin's eulogist was his old friend, Major General Pyotr Grigorenko, one of the most outspoken of Russia's dissenters. For his forthrightness he was once locked up in an insane asylum, a standard Soviet form of dealing with political troublemakers...
...farewells, it is usually said, 'Sleep quietly, dear Comrade.' We will not say this," began Grigorenko, glancing down at the visage of his friend. "In the first place, he will not listen to me. He will continue to fight, anyway. In the second place, it is impossible for me without you, Alyosha. You sit inside me, and you will stay there. Therefore, do not sleep, Alyosha! Fight, Alyosha! Burn all the abominable meanness with which they want to keep turning eternally that damned machine against which you fought all your life...
...Kosterin's funeral, he was the very symbol of uncompromising Leninism that was crushed mercilessly in Stalin's era-and is now imperiled again. Some brought wreaths bearing ribbons that read, "For his fight against Stalinism" and "From his comrades and friends in the prisons and camps." Grigorenko, an engineer whose libertarian views cost him his army rank in 1964, urged the mourners to work for "the persistent development of genuine Leninist democracy," and scathingly dismissed the current "totalitarianism that hides behind the mask of so-called Soviet democracy" as its antithesis...
...Thinking Being. Kosterin's recent dismissal from the Soviet Writers Union, said Grigorenko, placed him in the admirable company of Boris Pasternak. Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn was almost kicked out, he added, "although it is Solzhenitsyn who confers honor on the Union of Writers by being its member, while the union adds nothing to Solzhenitsyn." Then, returning to the hard life of his friend, he paid final tribute to a valiant spirit and, in the process, movingly described the source of intellectual discontent in today's Russia. "A person, in Kosterin's idea, is a thinking being. Therefore...