Микола Руденко

Activity: Literature, Human rights activity
Date of birth: December 19, 1920
Date of death: April 1, 2004, Kyiv
Navigator: Post-war USSR

He was a child of his time. He experienced hunger, orphanhood, the front line, infatuation and disappointment with Stalinism, and towards the end of his life — Soviet camps as a punishment for an especially dangerous freethinker who became one of the founders of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.

At the call of Destiny

“A person begins not from the date of their birth — they begin with the birth of their own memory,” Mykola Rudenko would write later in his book of memoirs “The Greatest Miracle — Life.”
He was born on December 19, 1920, in the village of Yurivka in the Luhansk region. His father was a miner, and in his spare time, he tanned hides to make boots, which left a persistent spirit from the vats in Mykolka’s memory. Another vivid memory is the wars with watermelons, which he, testing his childish strength, would roll to the edge of a chalk cliff and let slide down, watching them explode, splashing the red core all around. Or the road along which he ran to meet his father from work, waiting for a treat “from the bunny.” Unfortunately, this did not last long: when Mykola was six years old, his father died in the mine. In the cubbyhole where the miners sat, a gasoline lamp caught fire, and someone, to avoid an explosion, grabbed it and threw it out the open door. It was at this exact moment that Danylo Rudenko was entering through it.
And a year later, another misfortune befell Mykola: during children’s battles, his left eye was struck by a stone, which went blind for a long time.
Mykola Rudenko’s childhood passed under the sign of the “new life.” He remembered both the first dekulakizations and the collective farms, where they had to hand over a horse, a cow, and a pair of oxen, and the famine of 1933. For his whole life, there remained in his memory a clay mud-brick hut that his mother built, and a coat that she resewed from pieces of overcoat cloth and uniform boston.
Honesty and adherence to principles were characteristic of Mykola already from his youth. He refused the “privileges” given to him by his friendship with the son of Mitrofanov, the secretary of the district committee (who demanded that Rudenko write an essay in the Ukrainian language instead of him). He did not report his friend to the NKVD, even though he knew that he was recording and keeping memories of the Holodomor in the Poltava region. At a school meeting, he dared to speak out against the school principal.

A generation from the front-line overcoat

Mykola Rudenko began writing poems back in school. He even sent them to a contest and received a scholarship from the Commissariat of Education. This, as well as the assistance of Leonid Pervomaiskyi, helped him enroll in 1939 in the Faculty of Philology of the Kyiv Shevchenko University. He managed to study for only two months — by a decree of 1939, all young men who had turned 18 were mobilized into the army. The boy could have safely sat it out, because the medical commission immediately discovered his blindness and discharged him. But he was eager to go to the front and eventually got his way. In the cavalry regiment, he also had an opportunity to remain a regiment clerk, but he went through the hardest trials and eventually became an outstanding cavalryman and in the end even participated in parades on Red Square. “If I had not gone through the military, and therefore trench tempering — I would not have returned from the concentration camps, as my brothers-in-arms Vasyl Stus or Oleksa Tykhyi did not return,” he would write later in his memoirs.
On October 4, 1941, in the very first battles near Leningrad, Rudenko was severely wounded by an explosive bullet in the lower back. The doctors did not even hope that he would be able to walk. He could, having survived in the besieged Leningrad, then he was a political instructor of a front-line hospital. He returned from the war with the Orders of the Red Star, of the Patriotic War of the 1st class, and six medals.
With such a track record and a collection of poems “From the March” of 1946, the young man was admitted to the Writers’ Union. The party leadership immediately placed great hopes on the writers of the “generation from the front-line overcoat,” as they were called then, contrasting them with the venerable but “unreliable” Rylskyi, Yanovskyi, Malyshko. In the first year, Rudenko did fulfill the “honorable assignment” from Kaganovich and “branded the bourgeois nationalist Rylskyi with shame.” However, the mutual understanding with the authorities did not last long.
“Rudenko the dissident was born in 1949, when he, yesterday’s political instructor, was able to say a categorical ‘no’ to Beria’s friend Oleksandr Korniychuk. Rudenko had the imprudence to stand up for Zinaida Tulub, the author of the novel ‘The Man-Catchers,’ who had been exiled to Kazakhstan,” wrote journalist Vakhtang Kipiani in the article “The Last Saber of Word and Honor…”. And a few months later, Mykola refused to support the campaign to exterminate the Jewish intelligentsia and to write negative evaluations of the “rootless cosmopolitans” — writers of Jewish origin Riva Balyasna, Matviy Talalaievskyi, Hryhoriy Polyanker, Leonid Pervomaiskyi, and others. It saved some, some still went by transport. From 1950, Rudenko left his positions, voluntarily renouncing in this way all the privileges of the Soviet establishment. However, party ideals were still important to him: “For a long time I remained with a deep faith in the great cause of the Communist Party, was a loyal Stalinist, wrote many poems dedicated to the leader, there was even a poem about Stalin,” he would say in 1996 in a conversation with the “chronicler of the dissident movement” Vasyl Ovsienko.
A certain enlightenment came after the XX Congress of the CPSU and the denunciation of the cult of personality of Stalin. Rudenko began to study Marx’s “Das Kapital” in a new way and outlined his interpretations in the philosophical works “Economic Monologues” and “The Energy of Progress,” and later in the novel “The Formula of the Sun.” Rudenko wrote a letter to Khrushchev, criticizing the party system, and spoke at open meetings. Such freethinking could not last long: in 1974, Rudenko was expelled from the CPSU, a year later — from the UWS (Ukrainian Writers’ Union). In order to survive, he had to sell his car, his dacha, and get a job as a night watchman.

“Live not by lies”

The searches for justice led Mykola Rudenko to the human rights organization “Amnesty International” and to contacts with Russian dissidents. On April 18, 1975, he was arrested for the first time for legal activity, but already during the investigation, in connection with the 30th anniversary of the Victory, he was amnestied as a war participant. To “calm down” the truth-seeker, he was forcibly subjected to a psychiatric examination (at that time, this was a common way of fighting dissenters), and only the decency of the doctors saved the 65-year-old Rudenko from being confined to a “psych ward.”
On November 9, 1976, at the apartment of Andrei Sakharov in Moscow, Rudenko held a press conference for foreign journalists, where he announced the creation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (UHG). It also included General Petro Grigorenko, Oksana Meshko, Oles Berdnyk, Levko Lukyanenko, Oleksa Tykhyi, Mykola Matusevych, Myroslav Marynovych, Nina Strokata. That same evening, Rudenko’s apartment on the second floor in Pushcha-Vodytsia near Kyiv was pelted with bricks. In this way, the KGB “saluted” in honor of the creation of the UHG. Soon, its Declaration and Memorandum No. 1 were published; in the section “Typical Violations of Human Rights,” there were data about the famine of 1933, about the repressions of the 1930s, the destruction of the UPA, repressions against the Sixties’ generation, a list of political camps and Ukrainian political prisoners.
The response of the system was immediate. On December 23–24, 1976, a search was conducted at Rudenko’s place, during which 39 US dollars planted by the KGB agents were “found.” The verdict was seven years of strict regime camps and five years of exile. Rudenko’s publicistic articles, fictional works, and oral statements were qualified as slanderous, and books authored by him were removed from bookstores and libraries.

But even in the camp, Rudenko remained unsubdued.

At first, as a war invalid of the second group, Rudenko was not involved in heavy physical labor. But after he passed his poems to freedom through his wife Raisa during a visit, he was transported from Mordovia in September 1981 to the village of Kuchino, Chusovoy district, Perm region (it is exactly here that Oleksa Tykhyi and Vasyl Stus would perish). For participating in prisoner strikes, tearing off name tags, and refusing to work, Rudenko was often thrown into a punishment isolation cell, and then, having changed his disability group from the second to the third, the administration sent him to heavy labor. The head of the camp dropped at this: “You have lost the right to be called a war invalid of the 2nd group.”
Raisa Rudenko was also imprisoned, being sentenced for participation in the UHG to 5 years of strict regime camps. And when they both were released in December 1987, it turned out that there was nowhere to return: the apartment was confiscated, there was no job. The Rudenkos obtained permission to leave for Germany, and from there — to the USA, where Mykola Danylovych worked at the radio stations “Freedom” and “Voice of America,” headed the foreign representation of the UHG, then of the Ukrainian Helsinki Association.
In 1988, the Philadelphia Educational and Scientific Center recognized Rudenko as the “Ukrainian of the Year” – for unwavering steadfastness in defense of the national rights of the Ukrainian people and its culture. At that time, he was invited to an audience by US President Ronald Reagan.
In September 1990, the Rudenkos returned to Kyiv. They were restored to citizenship and rehabilitated. Mykola Danylovych worked on his memoirs, but his right eye completely stopped seeing, so he had to record the texts on a dictaphone. On the other hand, half a year later, his left eye opened, which had not seen for 63 years.
The final years Mykola Rudenko lived in Kyiv, avoiding high rostrums and grand gatherings, trying to the end to “live not by lies.” He passed into eternity on April 1, 2004. When his wife was bustling about medicines and doctors, he would softly stop her: all that is vanity, no need, my time has come too. And on October 3, 2020, Raisa Rudenko passed away as well. She missed the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Mykola Danylovych by a few months.

Source: Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance. From the cohort of the righteous: Mykola Rudenko