Having believed in the ideals of the revolution in his youth, he served the regime faithfully. And he served honestly: the ups and downs in his career were always the result of internal convictions, and not an opportunistic movement. Flesh of the system, he became one of the brightest and most courageous figures in the human rights movement of the 60s and 70s in the USSR. It is the shock of the authorities that such a person suddenly breaks out of their midst that apparently explains why Grigorenko is sent not to prison, but to a psychiatric hospital. He probably really seemed crazy... The memoirs of a dissident general are one of the most interesting documents of an irretrievably bygone era. The first versions of the manuscript of General P. Grigorenko’s memoirs disappeared: doctors in the “psychiatric hospital” confiscated them, copies disappeared in the KGB. Only when he found himself in the West was the general able to finish his book, filled with ideas of human rights advocacy. A book by a man disappointed in the Soviet system, for the time being, who considered all the inconveniences of the Soviet system to be accidental, and then, suddenly, he saw the system in them.