Rostyslav Dotsenko
Mykola Adamenko, from Voloshchuk’s group, or perhaps mettle
Ivan Maliuta’s thorough study, “Nicknamed Zek,” recently published in Molod Ukrainy, not only drew attention to the remarkable personality of Hrytsko Voloshchuk, a soul ruined by the totalitarian regime, but also inadvertently reminded us of how many undisclosed and unsolved dramatic secrets our plundered past still holds. Take, for instance, that last wave of Stalinist terror in Ukraine at the turn of 1952-53, specifically at Kyiv University—to this day, there seem to be no serious, or even preliminary, generalizing works about it. Yet at that time in Kyiv alone, several youth groups were convicted, including FZU students (students of factory-plant schools), who were independently forging their national consciousness, forming groups, and distributing leaflets… And at the university, it wasn’t limited to just the trio of third-year philology students—there were also “individual” victims in various faculties.
There was Ivan Koval, sentenced to several years in the camps; Mykola Kudelia, “voluntarily” sent to a logging site in Komi; Vasyl Novosvitnii, mentioned by Maliuta, who was drafted into the army from his third year; Stepan Muzychenko, who paid with only a few months of work in a geological or archaeological expedition—and there were others. Their subsequent fates varied: Koval later worked as a newspaperman in Kyiv and passed away about five years ago; Novosvitnii, after his army service, graduated from Moscow University and was the editor of a district newspaper in Bohuslav for many years; Kudelia, after his worker’s “reforging,” was reinstated at Kyiv State University and then worked as a teacher, but later, unable to bear the guilt for testifying excessively in the Voloshchuk and company case, he took his own life, although his testimony, as far as I can recall, was hardly worse than anyone else’s. At the time, the general mass of those interrogated so unanimously testified to all sorts of sedition, even to the point of inventing non-existent works by various banned authors, that it was viewed with a certain, albeit dark, humor. But the height of “objectivity” was reached by one female lecturer, brought in as an expert, who read the title of a notebook, “Slava Ukrainy” (Glory of Ukraine) (with positive reviews from representatives of different countries about Ukrainian culture), as the OUN slogan “Slava Ukraini!” (“Glory to Ukraine!”) and assessed the notebook owner’s worldview accordingly. In a Greek ornament decorating another notebook, she skillfully distinguished lines crossing at a right angle and saw a swastika in them—also with the requisite ideological conclusions.
A month after this expertise, this philologist was accepted into the ranks of the CPSU and later earned a doctoral degree. Other zealous persecutors of that time who lived to see the collapse of the Bolshevik empire properly turned 180 degrees and began to preach the national idea and defend the independence of Ukraine with no less fervor, as is befitting of chronic right-flankers.
As for Hrytsko Voloshchuk, having inherited a stomach ulcer from the hungry 1940s and 50s (when for whole weeks, they would live on liver pies costing 5 kopecks, washed down with carbonated water), he departed “beyond the horizon” prematurely, taking with him his unrealized talents as an artist, a philologist, and a public figure, but most of all—his fierce intolerance of all spiritual subservience and lethargy.
Now is a fitting time to remember Hrytsko’s accomplice, Mykola Adamenko (fitting because this December he celebrated his seventieth birthday in his native Sosnytsia, the homeland of Oleksandr Dovzhenko). Mykola differed from Hrytsko by a more restrained character and a poetic gift—though he tore through the censorship barriers to historical truth with no less thirst. Adamenko dedicated several stanzas in his autobiographical poem “Sign of the Era” (1993) to Hrytsko Voloshchuk from the pre-arrest period, specifically the episode with the caricature of Stalin that later featured in the case:
Гриць Волощук був майстер хвацький
І мав у серці дух козацький.
Бере у руку олівця
Й малює Сталіна-отця.
Торкнувсь паперу олівець —
Напівсвиня, напівотець.
«Уга-ха-ха! Оце так штука!
Мов натуральні вуса й руки!
Лиш заміть усмішки — гримаса,
Замість обличчя — купа м’яса,
В очах лиш похіть, а не міць.
А все бо схожий. Ну і Гриць!
Стукач не спить, стукач пильнує,
Уже в конспектах хазяйнує.
Ага! Ось аркуш цей! Прекрасно!
Начальнику все буде ясно.
Це вже не слово, це живий,
Як кажуть, доказ речовий.
After the verdict, Mykola, like Hrytsko, ended up in the Ural logging camps, where he also served only three years. The meager post-cult thaw allowed him to return to his native region, where he worked for some time as an unskilled laborer and then reinstated himself in correspondence courses at Kyiv State University. Subsequently, Adamenko worked as a teacher—under vigilant surveillance, of course—until his retirement, occasionally publishing as a poet, though he had been writing verse since his youth. He was only allowed to publish his first poetry collection, “Povіn” (The Flood)—and even that was interwoven with forced official phraseology—in 1985. Later came the freer collections “Tsvit na morozi” (Flower in the Frost) and “Prahnennia neba” (Longing for the Sky)—their very titles are eloquent. The rest of his poetic work exists mainly in typescript, as does the collection “Grono” (The Cluster).
Mykola Adamenko’s poetry is an infatuation with life-giving nature, it is the pain of a sincerely patriotic soul, the poignant reflections on Ukraine’s plight during its epochs of bondage and our collective helplessness in the supposedly independent days (when so many around are yesterday-minded and stubbornly thoughtless), it is a call to spiritual resistance against prosaic routine in the name of the dreamed-of and indeed hard-won bright future of Ukraine.
Besides this, Mykola Adamenko is also a prose writer: in 2002, the first part of his biographical trilogy, “Zakon-taiga” (Law of the Taiga), was published in Chernihiv as a separate edition, along with a selection of short stories. He is also a tireless publicist, critic, popularizer of scientific knowledge, historian of the Sosnytsia region, and simply a public figure and a sower of good deeds.
From a publication in the newspaper Molod Ukrainy, No. 8 (18271) of January 24, 2002.