Once Too Often

Among the small group of Russian protesters who continually brave beatings, labor camps and exile by publicly opposing the policies of the regime, the most unlikely rebel is a truculent bear of a man named Pyotr Grigorenko. The demonstrators are typically youthful intellectuals; Grigorenko is a limping elder of 63 who until five years ago held a major general's commission in the Red Army and before that taught cybernetics at the elite Frunze Military Academy in Moscow. Others may wear a beard as an ensign of protest. The clean-shaven Grigorenko's emblem is a cane that he carries because of war wounds. With it, he has been known to fight off policemen and young Communists dispatched to bait him when he appears.

Despite his age, Grigorenko cedes nothing to his associates in his distaste for autarchy or disdain for government attempts to muzzle dissent. When his old army comrades were about to invade Czechoslovakia, Grigorenko paid a call at the Czechoslovak embassy to advertise his approval of the Dubcek liberalization program. At the funeral of Writer Aleksei Kosterin (TIME, Nov. 22), a longtime friend, he turned his eulogy at Moscow's crematory hall into an eloquent attack on "totalitarianism that hides behind the master of so-called Soviet democracy."

Trip to Tashkent. Since then, Grigorenko has taken over one of Koste-rin's favorite causes, the return of the Tartars to the Crimea, their ancestral home on the Black Sea. Because some Tartars may have collaborated with the Nazis, Stalin in 1945 abolished their republic, uprooted more than 200,000, and shipped them off to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in Central Asia. The Tartars were rehabilitated in 1967 but, despite persistent pleas, have never been allowed to return to their homeland. Grigorenko loudly decries this policy as a kind of geographic genocide.

Last week such exploits finally caught up with the aging warrior. Grigorenko had been warned that he faced jail if he carried out his latest crusade, a trip to Tashkent to act as counsel for ten Tartars about to stand trial for anti-Soviet activities. Nevertheless, he went. He had hardly reached Tashkent last week when he was arrested for anti-Soviet agitation.

Grigorenko's first outburst in 1961 --a criticism of the "Khrushchev cult" --eventually resulted in his discharge from the army followed by his commitment to a mental hospital for 14 months as a schizophrenic. This is a favorite Soviet punishment for dissenting intellectuals, short of shipment to a labor camp. Since then, because of his age, disability and service record--he had risen from private to general in 34 years and was a distinguished division commander in World War II--the government has merely admonished him for his outspokenness. Anti-Soviet agitation, however, is a serious charge. The possible sentence: seven years at hard labor.

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