Petro Grigorenko or Petro Hryhorovych Hryhorenko was a high-ranking Soviet Army commander of Ukrainian descent, who in his fifties became a dissident and a writer, one of the founders of the human rights movement in the Soviet Union.

The Moscow Helsinki Group was one of Russia's leading human rights organisations. It was originally set up in 1976 to monitor Soviet compliance with the Helsinki Accords and to report to the West on Soviet human rights abuses. It had been forced out of existence in the early 1980s, but was revived in 1989 and continued to operate in Russia.