ANADENKO, FRIEDRICH (FRED) PYLYPOVYCH (b. June 29, 1937, De-Kastri Bay, Ulchensky Raion, Khabarovsk Krai, Russia).
Strategic missile test engineer; author of the critical book about socialism, “The Normal Course.”
His father, Pylyp Mykolaiovych (1907-1994), was from Belarus and was sent to the Far East as a military man. His mother, Oleksandra Avraamivna Bezuhla (1913-1998), was from Kuban. Her father was also sent there to establish fishing industries.
Born in the year of the Great Terror, Fred learned about it in 1956 from N. Khrushchev’s report at the 20th Congress of the CPSU. Until then, he had been “a faithful Komsomol member.” He studied at a naval school in Pushkin, near Leningrad. To understand what the “cult of personality” was, he independently studied Marxist-Leninist philosophy.
In 1959, he graduated from the Sevastopol Higher Naval School with a degree in missile weaponry engineering and, in 1960, was assigned to the Baikonur Cosmodrome (Leninsk, Kyzyl-Orda Oblast, Kazakhstan). He held the position of a strategic missile test engineer. In 1960, he joined the CPSU. He was preparing to take his candidate’s examinations.
In 1960, he married. His daughters, Ulyana, was born in 1961, and Polina in 1964.
When N. Khrushchev, who had visited Baikonur two weeks earlier, was removed from the post of First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee in October 1964, Anadenko again immersed himself in historical and economic literature. He thoroughly studied Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital.” With his colleagues Vladimir Volkov and Yevhen Spichak, he discussed political issues and concluded that the USSR had not socialism, but pseudo-socialism. He began to write down his thoughts.
In 1968, after the occupation of Czechoslovakia, Anadenko decided he had to leave the army because he could not suppress democracy. He had a conflict with the party organizer over dishonorable methods of reviewing personal files. He defiantly walked out of a party meeting and a party commission. In October 1968, he was expelled from the CPSU for “violating the Party Charter and refusing to carry out a party assignment.” With the rank of major and several medals for impeccable service, he retired from the military in 1970 and moved to Kyiv with his family in March.
He worked for 6 years in the metro and 6 years at a technical paper factory. Meanwhile, he was writing a book, “The Normal Course,” in which he intended to explain why the USSR had pseudo-socialism, not socialism, and how it would eventually find a normal path and transform into a normal society. From 1980, he sent fragments of the book for review to his longtime like-minded friend, V. Volkov, without any conspiracy.
Unexpectedly, on April 2, 1982, Anadenko’s apartment was searched, and 22 notebooks, 135 separate sheets (totaling about 900), and all his correspondence were seized. It turned out that his correspondence had another reader: the KGB. Simultaneously, searches were conducted at V. Volkov’s home in Moscow and at the home of Anadenko’s sister, Kyiv resident Natalia Fedotova, who had retyped the first chapters of the book. The author found himself in the KGB pre-trial detention center of the Ukrainian SSR. On June 16, V. Volkov was summoned to Kyiv and arrested at the train station.
Two days after his arrest, Anadenko refused to testify, stating that he was conducting scientific research using a scientific methodology and was not guilty of the results. To avoid wasting time, he would go to interrogations with books, while the investigator “built” the case, copying whatever he needed from Anadenko’s manuscripts. He was not given newspapers in his cell, and there was no radio.
Anadenko himself suggested a psychiatric evaluation. The Pavlovska Hospital in July 1982 found him sane. In October, the Kyiv City Court, despite the fact that Anadenko’s works had not been disseminated at all, which meant there was no act of “agitation and propaganda,” passed a sentence under three codes. Under Article 62, Part 1 of the Criminal Code of the UkrSSR, Article 70 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, and Article 56 of the Criminal Code of the KazSSR, he was sentenced to 7 years of imprisonment in strict-regimen camps and 5 years of exile; V. Volkov was sentenced to 5 years of imprisonment and 2 years of exile. Only 5 people were called as witnesses at the trial: Y. Spichak, Anadenko’s sister, wife, and daughters, who did not testify against him. The court “justified” the existence of an intent to undermine Soviet power with a single sentence: “As is evident from the case materials.”
The main accusation: “Anadenko denies the fact of the construction of socialism in the USSR, attempts to justify the impossibility of socialist transformations in the modern world, and thereby undermines the authority of the communist movement, in connection with which he writes: ‘The more countries embark on the path of socialism, the more numerous the communist parties become, the deeper the crisis of the communist movement.’”
“Further, he insists on the absence of democratic freedoms in the USSR and compares the Soviet state system to a fascist one, and, predicting its demise, he proclaims: ‘This monstrous mixture of a fascist attitude toward human rights, commodity production, and communist phraseology that dominates in the USSR cannot last long…’”
The court stripped Anadenko and Volkov of their officer ranks and submitted a proposal to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR to deprive them of their state awards. It also ordered the destruction of Anadenko’s and Volkov’s manuscripts “as items of no value.”
On December 22, 1982, Anadenko was transported to Mordovia. He arrived at camp ZhKh-385/3-4, in the village of Barashevo, Tengushevsky Raion, on December 30. Here, he met political prisoners V. STRILTSIV, Y. BADZIO, Y. MELNYK, D. MAZUR, and later Volodymyr Delydivka, H. KUTSENKO, Yevhen Antsupov, and H. ALTUNIAN.
Since Anadenko’s sentence was overly informative (28 pages), it was not given to him. The camp administration, however, demanded: “Show the verdict.” Anadenko then asked the special unit to provide him with the verdict to write an appeal. He was locked up, but he passed the verdict through a small window into the camp. It was read and returned.
The political prisoners, the “anti-Soviets” (about 30-40 men), formed the core of the camp. They studied law, wrote complaints and statements, marked the Day of the Political Prisoner (October 30) and Human Rights Day (December 10) with hunger strikes, and were put in punishment cells. On Sundays, they held seminars to share what they had read. The work—sewing mittens—and the regimen seemed easy. It was a real school that proved useful later in freedom.
In December 1986, the Tengushevsky District Court sentenced Anadenko to be transferred to prison confinement for the remainder of his term. He was held in the camp prison (BUR). But in February 1987, he and other prisoners were transported to Moscow, and then to Kyiv. At that time, under pressure from the West, a campaign to release political prisoners began in the USSR. Little was required: a written promise not to break the law. A conversation about this was arranged in the presence of his father and sister Natalia (his wife had divorced him in the meantime). Anadenko wrote that he did not consider himself guilty but welcomed the abolition of the institution of political prisoners, pledged to obey the law, but would also demand that the authorities obey the law. On March 16, 1987, Anadenko was released by a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on his pardon.
He lived with his parents in Kyiv and worked in a construction brigade at the “Bortnychi” state farm. He married Nina Mostepanova.
He traveled to Moscow and established contacts with dissident circles, in particular, with Sergei Grigoryants, who published the magazine “Glasnost.”
When the Ukrainian Culturological Club was founded in the summer of 1987 on the initiative of S. NABOKA, Anadenko maintained contact with it.
Following petitions by V. Volkov, the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the USSR, upon protest from the Chairman of the Supreme Court of the USSR on September 27, 1988, overturned the verdict and closed the case due to the absence of a crime. After a year of delays, Anadenko’s housing was returned and he received compensation, which he used to buy furniture.
In the fall of 1988, Anadenko joined the Democratic Union (led by V. Novodvorskaya). He participated in writing the party’s program. With the collapse of the USSR, the work of the Kyiv organization of the Democratic Union ceased. For Anadenko, general democratic norms were always the most important. When the Ukrainian national state emerged, he delved into history. Anadenko cooperates with the International Society of (Former) Soviet Political Prisoners and is a member of the Ukrainian Section, which cares for political prisoners and the repressed, providing them with humanitarian aid, as well as helping large families and orphanages. He is a full member of the Ukrainian Section of the International Society for Human Rights and constantly participates in international competitions for school and student works on human rights. He lives in Kyiv.
Bibliography:
1.
Anadenko, Fred. Skvoz smekh i slyozy istorii [Through the Laughter and Tears of History] / Anadenko F. - Kyiv: Yevshan-zillia Publishing House, 2008. - 392 p.: ill.
2.
Verdict of the Kyiv City Court of October 29, 1982, in the case of F. P. Anadenko and V. S. Volkov.
Alexander Filatov, Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Court of the USSR. O sude i sudyakh, spravedlivosti i gumanizme [On Courts and Judges, Justice and Humanism]. - Nedelya, 1988. - No. 52 (1500). - pp. 14-15.
Anatoly Golovkov. Vremya na razmyshleniye [Time for Reflection]. - Ogonyok, 1989. - No. 4. - pp. 6-9.
KhPG Archive: Interview with F. Anadenko on May 12, 2000: https://museum.khpg.org/1183580547
Mizhnarodnyi biohrafichnyi slovnyk dysydentiv krain Tsentralnoi ta Skhidnoi Yevropy y kolyshnoho SRSR. T. 1. Ukraina. Chastyna 1 [International Biographical Dictionary of Dissidents in Central and Eastern Europe and the former USSR. Vol. 1. Ukraine. Part 1]. - Kharkiv: Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group; “Prava Liudyny.” - 2006. - 1-516 p.; Part 2. - 517-1020 p.; Part 3. - 2011. - 1021-1380; Anadenko, pp. 1033-1036: https://museum.khpg.org/1183578494
Rukh oporu v Ukraini: 1960 - 1990. Entsyklopedychnyi dovidnyk [The Resistance Movement in Ukraine: 1960 - 1990. An Encyclopedic Guide] / Preface by Osyp Zinkevych, Oles Obertas. - Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2010. - 804 p., 56 ill.; Anadenko: pp. 49-52; 2nd ed., 2012. - 896 p. + 64 ill.; Anadenko: pp. 55-56.
Vasyl Ovsiyenko, Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. February 20, 2007. Corrections by F. Anadenko on July 4, 2007.
Characters 8,738. Final reading May 13, 2016.