Abstract
At the end of last year, the Ukrainian writer, prominent human rights activist and political prisoner, Mykola Rudenko, was freed and allowed to leave the Soviet Union. A decorated war veteran who suffered a serious spinal wound at the siege of Leningrad, Rudenko enjoyed a successful career as writer, poet and playwright, and had over 20 books published. That was before he became a friend of Andrei Sakharov and Major-General Petro Hryhorenko (or, Grigorenko) in the early 1970s and joined the Soviet human rights movement. Although harassed, arrested and briefly detained in a mental hospital for becoming a member of the Soviet branch of Amnesty International, Rudenko went on to found the Ukrainian Helsinki monitoring group in November 1976. The following year he was arrested and given a twelve-year sentence of camps and internal exile. In 1980, his wife Raisa was also punished by a ten-year term for campaigning for his release. Shortly after his arrival in the West, Rudenko was interviewed for Index by Bohdan Nahaylo.
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