After his first arrest in February 1964, when Petro Grigorenko was declared mentally not responsible and deprived of his rank as a general, he was given no pension at all [1]. It was only in December 1965 that a Military Commission allotted him a pension of 120 roubles, this being a ‘personal’ pension (neither a private’s nor a general’s).
After his second arrest, in May 1969, the payment of this pension was terminated: only from January 1971 onwards — at which time he was in a Special Psychiatric Hospital — was he paid 35 roubles, later increased to 45 roubles. After he was released for the second time (in June 1974), his pension was restored to the level of 120 roubles.
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In August 1974 Grigorenko sent a declaration to the Moscow City Military Commissar in which he pointed to his unlawful deprivation of the pension due to him as a former soldier.
According to the law, a military pensioner can be deprived of his pension if he is sentenced by a court to a term of imprisonment, but pensioners receiving compulsory medical treatment are entitled to have their pensions paid in full (see sections 177 and 163 of the statutes brought into force by Decree 200 of the Ministry of Defence, dated 25 September 1972). On this basis P. G. Grigorenko asked for the back-payment of his pension covering the period when he did not receive it at all and for its retrospective topping-up to 120 roubles a month for the time when he was given a reduced pension.
Having received only formal acknowledgements in answer to his two declarations, Grigorenko appealed to a court on 11 May 1975, making a claim against the Moscow City Military Commission for the payment of his back pension to the sum of about 5,000 roubles. In addition, Grigorenko addressed a complaint to the USSR Procurator-General, demanding that either the court decision declaring him to be ill (not responsible) should be annulled as unlawful, or the decision made by the Ministry of Defence to deprive him of his general’s pension (300 roubles a month) should be rescinded.
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Judge Troitskaya of the Sverdlov district people’s court issued the following decision on 30 May: “To refuse P. G. Grigorenko’s claim, as the said claim is not within the jurisdiction of the courts,” and referred to “the statute concerning the allotment and payment of State pensions”. The Moscow City Court upheld the decision.
On 25 August the USSR Procurator’s Office replied:
“The criminal cases against you in 1964 and 1970 have been checked out. There are no grounds to contest the court decisions in these cases.”
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NOTE 32
- no 32 ↩︎
A Chronicle of Current Events 