On July 15, Ukraine celebrates the Day of Ukrainian Statehood.
Ukrainian Statehood is the invisible chain that connects the glorious history of Kyivan Rus, the Galician-Volhynian principality, the Ukrainian Cossack state, the Ukrainian People's Republic, the West Ukrainian People's Republic, and modern independent Ukraine. Ukrainian Statehood is not only laws and the apparatus of governance; it is the millennia-long history of a multi-million people, of dozens of generations with their native language, customs, traditions, and culture. Ukrainian Statehood is hundreds, thousands, millions of people who day by day shaped, fought for, defended, and passed on to their descendants the values that today unite us as the Ukrainian people.
On the occasion of the Day of Ukrainian Statehood, the Donetsk Regional State Administration publishes a series of stories about outstanding figures from Donetsk – fighters for the idea of Ukrainian statehood and the independence of Ukraine.
The writer, founder of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, political prisoner of Soviet concentration camps Mykola Rudenko was born on December 19, 1920, in the village of Yuriyivka in the Donetsk province (now part of Luhansk region).
Mykola Rudenko's childhood was marked by the "new life." He remembered the first dekulakization, the collective farms where he had to give up a horse, a cow, and a pair of oxen, and the famine of '33.
In 1939, he entered the philological faculty of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. He studied for only two months – the war was approaching, and all first-year students were mobilized.
On October 4, 1941, in the first battles near Leningrad, Rudenko was severely wounded by a shrapnel bullet in the back. The doctors did not even expect that he would be able to walk. He survived in besieged Leningrad, then served as a political officer in a front-line hospital. He returned from the war with the Orders of the Red Star, the Patriotic War of the 1st degree, and six medals.
With such a service record and a collection of poems "From the Campaign," Rudenko was accepted into the Union of Writers in 1946. He was the secretary of the party organization of the Union of Writers, but he entered into a sharp conflict with the then head of the Union, Oleksandr Korniychuk, standing up for the repressed Zinaida Tulub and refusing to support the campaign to exterminate the Jewish intelligentsia. From 1950, Rudenko left all positions, thus voluntarily giving up all privileges of the Soviet establishment. However, he remained loyal to party ideals for a long time. A certain enlightenment came after the 20th Congress of the CPSU and the denouncement of the cult of personality of Stalin. Rudenko began to study Marx's "Capital" anew and concluded that his theory of surplus value was flawed because this very surplus value is created not by the over-exploitation of the worker, but by solar energy (through photosynthesis), combined with the labor of the peasant and his cattle on the land. Rudenko expressed his vision of this problem in 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 free-thinking could not last long: in 1974, Rudenko was expelled from the CPSU, and a year later – from the Union of Writers. To survive, he was forced to sell his car, dacha, and take a job as a night watchman.
The search for justice led Mykola Rudenko to "Amnesty International" and close contacts with Russian dissidents, primarily with Andrei Sakharov.
On April 18, 1975, he was arrested for the first time – for legal activities, but during the investigation related to the 30th anniversary of Victory, he was amnestied as a participant in the war. The 55-year-old Rudenko miraculously escaped being sent to a "psychiatric hospital."
But the path was set. On November 9, 1976, at Sakharov's apartment in Moscow, Rudenko held a press conference for foreign journalists, announcing the creation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. It also included General Hryhorenko, Oksana Meshko, Oles Berdnyk, Levko Lukyanenko, Oleksa Tykhyy, Mykola Matushevych, Myroslav Marynovych, and Nina Strokata. That same evening, Rudenko's apartment on the second floor in Pushcha-Vodytsia near Kyiv was pelted with bricks.
On December 23-24, 1976, Rudenko was searched, during which "39 US dollars" were "found" that had been planted. In February 1977, the co-founder of the UHG was arrested and transported by plane to the Donetsk pre-trial detention center, where a case was opened against him and Oleksa Tykhyy.
"And so, finally, the prison 'crow' is taking me from Donetsk to Druzhkivka – the trial is to take place there, in the district center to which the hamlet belongs, where Oleksa Tykhyy lived. This is, in fact, the procedural basis for judging me in Donbas," Rudenko wrote.
The verdict – 7 years in strict regime camps and 5 years of exile. Rudenko's journalistic articles, artistic works, and oral statements were classified as defamatory, and all books were confiscated from bookstores and libraries.
The writer's wife, Raisa Rudenko, was also arrested for her active involvement in the UHG and sentenced to 5 years in strict regime camps.
Despite being in camps, Mykola Rudenko continued his human rights activities, writing letters to US Secretary of State Schultz and to US President Jimmy Carter, asking for help in creating an international commission to inspect Soviet political camps. He protested against the introduction of Soviet troops into Afghanistan.
In December 1987, Mykola and Raisa Rudenko were released from exile, but there was nowhere to return – their apartment was confiscated after the arrests. So the dissidents moved to Germany and then to the USA. Rudenko worked at Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. A year later, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship.
In 1988, the Philadelphia Educational and Scientific Center recognized Rudenko as "Ukrainian of the Year" for his unwavering resilience in defending the national rights of the Ukrainian people and its culture. At that time, Rudenko was invited for an audience by US President Ronald Reagan.
In September 1990, the Rudenko family returned to Kyiv. They were restored to citizenship and rehabilitated. In his last years, Mykola Rudenko lived in Kyiv, avoiding high tribunes and pompous gatherings, trying to live to the end "not by lies." He passed into Eternity on the first day of April 2004.