The Right Books

Petro G. Grigorenko’s Memoirs (Norton, $19.95) are best described as what Grigorenko—a former career officer in the Red Army and the only Soviet general ever to be exiled — himself might call the record of a “living out,” as when he describes “how it was with us former Communists. We had to outlive our Communism inside ourselves.” And, though Grigorenko considers the Soviet government wholly unprogressed since the days of Lenin and Stalin, he declares himself guardedly optimistic about the ability of the Soviet people to outlive the Communism inside themselves as well. In fact, he suggests that this has already happened, and that it is merely a question of what will fill the psychic void. Here he is more pessimistic; and yet his portrait of life and events in the USSR over a period of seventy years is wonderfully moving not only as a memoir of a truly heroic life but as a fragment of an epic that, like Wagner’s Ring, evokes a spectacle of a world moving from the most primitive darkness into fully human consciousness.

Grigorenko was born in 1907 into a desperately poor farm family in the Ukrainian province of Zaporozhe. In 1918, at the age of 11, he witnessed a massacre by White Guards of innocent villagers, carried out with particularized antisemitic venom; this experience, added to his family’s fervently pro-Red sympathies, confirmed him as a “fanatical” Bolshevik. He worked as a locomotive engineer, learned carpentry, bricklaying, and engineering, and became a member of the Communist Party and a plenipotentiary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol of the Ukraine. He then entered the Military Technical Academy of Leningrad, studied construction superintendency, and became a military career officer, in which capacity he built fortifications and demolished churches with dynamite charges.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Petro G. Grigorenko’s Memoirs (Norton, $19.95) are best described as what Grigorenko—a former career officer in the Red Army and the only Soviet general ever to be exiled — himself might call the record of a “living out,” as when he describes “how it was with us former Communists. We had to outlive our Communism inside ourselves.” And, though Grigorenko considers the Soviet government wholly unprogressed since the days of Lenin and Stalin, he declares himself guardedly optimistic about the ability of the Soviet people to outlive the Communism inside themselves as well. In fact, he suggests that this has already happened, and that it is merely a question of what will fill the psychic void. Here he is more pessimistic; and yet his portrait of life and events in the USSR over a period of seventy years is wonderfully moving not only as a memoir of a truly heroic life but as a fragment of an epic that, like Wagner’s Ring, evokes a spectacle of a world moving from the most primitive darkness into fully human consciousness.

Grigorenko was born in 1907 into a desperately poor farm family in the Ukrainian province of Zaporozhe. In 1918, at the age of 11, he witnessed a massacre by White Guards of innocent villagers, carried out with particularized antisemitic venom; this experience, added to his family’s fervently pro-Red sympathies, confirmed him as a “fanatical” Bolshevik. He worked as a locomotive engineer, learned carpentry, bricklaying, and engineering, and became a member of the Communist Party and a plenipotentiary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol of the Ukraine. He then entered the Military Technical Academy of Leningrad, studied construction superintendency, and became a military career officer, in which capacity he built fortifications and demolished churches with dynamite charges.