A general who was treated for dissent.

Pyotr Grigorenko fought in the war, rose to the rank of major general, and taught at the Frunze Military Academy. In 1961, at a district party conference, he openly stated what he thought: the cult of personality had not disappeared; it had merely changed its name. A few days later, he was stripped of his mandate, then his position and Moscow; he was sent to serve in the Far East.

There, he did not remain silent. In 1963, the "Union for the Struggle for the Revival of Leninism" emerged - a few like-minded individuals and a typewriter. In February 1964, Grigorenko was arrested. And here came into play the main invention of the late Soviet punitive system: instead of a trial - an examination.

The Serbsky Institute declared the general insane, diagnosing him with paranoid personality development with reformist ideas. His conviction in his own correctness was declared a symptom of the illness.

The calculation was subtle. The convicted becomes a figure, a martyr, a reason for letters and signatures. The sick person becomes nobody: they do not argue with him, they treat him. The sentence has no term because recovery is determined by the same doctors.
Grigorenko was stripped of his rank and pension, placed in a special psychiatric hospital in Leningrad. He was released in 1965, after Khrushchev's fall. He worked as a loader, wrote, and defended the Crimean Tatars. In 1969, he was arrested again in Tashkent - and local experts declared him healthy. The case was sent to Moscow, where the conclusion was rewritten as needed. Then - five years in the Chernyakhovsk special hospital.

He was released in 1974, joined the Moscow and Ukrainian Helsinki groups, and in 1977 went to the USA for treatment - and was stripped of his citizenship. In New York, independent psychiatrists examined him and found no illness. Their conclusion became a document of the era: the diagnosis was a sentence, not medicine.
Grigorenko died in New York in 1987 and was buried in St. Andrew's Cemetery in South Bound Brook. His rank was restored posthumously in 1991. He titled his memoirs "In the Underground, You Can Only Meet Rats."