Redeeming Helsinki

The Waldorf Astoria’s Starlight Roof is a long way from the mental “hospitals” of the Soviet Union, and Pyotr Grigorenko cuts a strange figure under its chandeliers. He is a stocky man with a pink, egg-bald, bumpy head and a face like forty miles of bad tundra. His grin exposes a row of evenly broken-off teeth, and makes you very glad he is grinning.

I met Grigorenko’s grin at a press reception before a dinner given by Ben Wattenberg’s Coalition for a Democratic Majority. I had only the vaguest notion of the heroism of the man whose hand I was shaking. He spoke through an interpreter, and I didn’t try to converse with him. Besides, he was in demand at the time: a New York TV crew was setting up lights and camera for an interview with him.

JS

About the Author

Joseph Sobran

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Nobel Peace Prize

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The Waldorf Astoria’s Starlight Roof is a long way from the mental “hospitals” of the Soviet Union, and Pyotr Grigorenko cuts a strange figure under its chandeliers. He is a stocky man with a pink, egg-bald, bumpy head and a face like forty miles of bad tundra. His grin exposes a row of evenly broken-off teeth, and makes you very glad he is grinning.

I met Grigorenko’s grin at a press reception before a dinner given by Ben Wattenberg’s Coalition for a Democratic Majority. I had only the vaguest notion of the heroism of the man whose hand I was shaking. He spoke through an interpreter, and I didn’t try to converse with him. Besides, he was in demand at the time: a New York TV crew was setting up lights and camera for an interview with him.