Igor Bondarenko: biography, literary and social activities

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

The prototypes of the heroes of his books were world-famous and famous people. He met with the legendary intelligence officer Shandor Rado. Ruth Werner, who worked with Richard Sorge in the pre-war period, received him in her Berlin apartment. Mikhail Vodopyanov, one of the first Heroes of the Soviet Union, was a consultant for one of the works. Pilots, Chekists, scouts and ordinary Soviet people made up a gallery of portraits of book characters written by Igor Bondarenko.

Igor Bondarenko: biography, literary and social activities

At the end of January 2014, Taganrog was covered with snow. Transport stopped, schools closed, fuel trucks and food trucks got stuck on the road. The whole city was shoveling snow. Only the path leading to a small house in the private sector remained uncleared. In the winter whirlwind, the neighbors did not immediately pay attention to the fact that they had not seen the elderly for several days.the person who lived in it. The door was forced open, but help came late. On a snowy day on January 30, 2014, Bondarenko Igor Mikhailovich, a young prisoner of the Nazi concentration camp, a front-line soldier and a writer, died in Taganrog.

Son of an enemy of the people

On October 22, 1927, a son was born in the family of the secretary of the district committee of the Komsomol Mikhail Bondarenko, who was given the name Harry. The young father, and he was only 22 years old at that time, devoted his life to the revolution and party work. In the following years, he headed the party organizations at various enterprises in Taganrog. In 1935 he became the second secretary of the city party committee - he oversaw the industry of the city. Unfortunately, the career of a young and energetic man ended naturally for that time. In December 1937, he was arrested and, after a short investigation, shot. In the summer of 1938, my mother, Ksenia Tikhonovna Bondarenko, was arrested. Igor (Harry) was left alone.

For the son of an enemy of the people, only one road was destined - to the orphanage. But here the boy was lucky - his cousin Anya took him to live with her. She was 18 years old, and she was not afraid to shelter a boy left without parents in her house. Mom was released three months later, at the end of 1938, but for several more years she remained under the open supervision of "competent" authorities.

Young prisoner 47704

About the beginning of the war, Taganrog, together with the whole country, learned from the speech of V. M. Molotov. Men massively stormed the draft board and demanded to be sent to the front. Their jobs at enterprises that have switched to military operationtime occupied by women. The boys helped adults and looked forward to an early victory over the Nazis. But the front was approaching, and in mid-October 1941, advanced units of the Wehrmacht marched through the streets of the city.

War Germany needed hands. People were taken away to work in German enterprises with whole families. Fourteen-year-old Bondarenko was among them. Igor, whose family consisted of one mother, was taken to Germany with her in 1942. More than 600 people were in the echelon. Later, the writer recalled that families were constantly trying to separate. For several weeks, the beatings of recalcitrant people continued. But later the guards reconciled - part of the barracks in the camp was given to the "family".

At the Heinkel factory

The concentration camp that the teenager ended up in was located in the ancient German city of Rostock. In fact, the camp itself has not yet been built. The prisoners were placed in the sports hall, where there were 2,000 bunk beds. The stench, stuffiness and crowding reigned there. The room didn't even have windows. Six months later, the prisoners were transferred to the barracks.

At 4 o'clock in the morning - rise and roll call. At 6 o'clock a column of prisoners came out of the barbed wire. We walked two hours to Rostock - 7 kilometers. Large industrial enterprises were located here. Bondarenko worked at one of them, the Mariene aviation plant, which belonged to the Heinkel company. Igor got into the team of loaders. And after exhausting work - again two hoursroad to your barracks. There were armed guards around, angry shepherds, hunger, diseases. And the pipes of the crematorium were visible from the windows of the barracks. Long years of hard slave labor lay ahead.

In the ranks of the Resistance

It is impossible to put up with life behind barbed wire. But life goes on even in captivity. Igor Bondarenko worked in the same team with the Czechs, Poles, French. They taught the guy German. Thanks to this, in 1943 he was transferred from the loaders to work on an electric crane. Here he met two French prisoners of war who were already in the ranks of the Resistance movement. Rumors about the defeat of the Nazi group near Stalingrad leaked through the camp walls. The captives tried with all their might to bring victory over fascism closer. Igor's two new comrades were just such people.

With the help of a Russian girl who worked in the factory design bureau, they managed to find out that the factory produces parts for FAA missiles. The French were able to transfer this information to the will. A series of allied air raids completely destroyed the factories in Rostock. During one of them, the future writer almost died. He waited out the bombing in the station building. The explosion of an aircraft projectile brought down the ceilings - almost everyone in the room was killed. Our hero survived, but was walled up under the ruins of brick walls. Salvation brought another bomb. Exploding next to the surviving wall, she made a large hole in it. People got out through this hole.

From POW toRed Army

After the aircraft factories were destroyed, the life of the captives changed. They were transferred to other camps. This also affected Bondarenko. Igor, along with a small group of Russian prisoners, was placed in a new concentration camp. The Nazis turned the building of an empty warehouse into a barrack at an old, idle brick factory. The guards did not perform their duties too diligently - the defeat of Germany in the war was already obvious. In early 1945, Igor escapes. He made his way to the east at night, and during the day he hid in forests or abandoned houses. He ate whatever he could, warmed himself by the fire, but stubbornly walked to his own. One night he was awakened by artillery fire. And in the morning, at the edge of the forest, he saw Soviet tanks.

Of course, it was not without verification. Soon a recruit appeared in the regimental intelligence of one of the advancing units of the 2nd Belorussian Front. In the battles on the Oder River, scouts found a camera in a destroyed Nazi dugout. Nobody knew how to take pictures, but enthusiastically "clicked" each other. There was such a photograph and Bondarenko. Igor kept the photo carefully - a frozen visible memory of the front. He ended the war on the Elbe as a mortar battery driver. Victory came, but military service continued. In the forests they caught "werewolves" - members of the organization of Hitler's partisans, created from old people and teenagers. They destroyed the unfinished SS men. It was still a long 6 years before demobilization.

Back at school

In 1951, a student appeared in secondary school No. 2 of Taganrog,standing out from the general mass of schoolchildren - Bondarenko. Igor studied books and educational literature almost around the clock. After all, before the war, he managed to finish only 6 classes. And yesterday's Red Army soldier was not going to linger at school - he was already 24 years old. He passed the school program as an external student. Immediately entered the Rostov State University. He studied eagerly, drinking heavily, as if catching up on lost years.

After 5 years, a young teacher Bondarenko, who graduated with honors from the Faculty of Philology, leaves for Kyrgyzstan by assignment. For two years he taught in the village of Balykchy. In 1958, a new literary collaborator crossed the threshold of the editorial office of the Don magazine in Rostov. Igor Mikhailovich dedicated the next 30 years of his life to this publication.

The feather is equivalent to the bayonet

How did Igor Bondarenko, a writer, start? For the first time, he felt the need to write down his thoughts while still at the front. Blank paper on the front line was a rarity. But somewhere on the ruins of a destroyed German house, he found a children's book. On her sheets he began to describe everything that happened to him. Somewhat awkward and naive - you need to remember that behind him were incomplete 6 classes of the school.

The first publications in the newspaper appeared in 1947. And while studying at the university, a book of stories was published (1964). Experienced during the war years spilled onto clean sheets. The first major work, the story "Who will come on the" Mariina ", was published by the Rostov book publishing house (1967). The artistic fiction of the work is closely intertwined with the actual material. After allthe action of the story took place at the same factory of the Heinkel company, where the juvenile prisoner Igor worked. The continuation of this story was the story "The Yellow Circle" (1973).

True, this book may not have seen the light of day. The manuscript, written in 1969, received a negative review from one of the departments of the state security agencies. It was about the use of espionage equipment by Western intelligence agencies. "Competent" employees saw this as the rise of foreign technology. The author did not agree with the comments and did not rewrite the story. The manuscript lay down on the table. 3 years later, at one of the meetings in the Writers' Union, Bondarenko told about this incident and added that he would no longer write on a similar topic. One of the leaders of Soviet intelligence took part in the discussion. Having delved into the essence of the issue, he gave the go-ahead for the publication of the story The Yellow Circle. Saying goodbye to the author, the general said: “The topic is very important, and there are fools everywhere. There will be questions - please contact!”

Two books about the main thing

The first part of the dilogy "Life So Long" appeared on the shelves of bookstores in 1978. Two years later, the second book of this novel was published. This is the history of the twentieth century, described through the events that accompanied the life of one family. In many ways, this is an autobiographical work. The Putivtsev family, whose life can be traced from the 20s to the 80s of the last century, lived in Taganrog. In the image of the head of the family, the features of the writer's father, Mikhail Markovich Bondarenko, are clearly visible. His son, Vladimir Putivtsev, went through Hitler'scamp, underground, front - these are the stages of the difficult life of the author himself. Perhaps, it was precisely because of its authenticity that the dilogy withstood several reprints - the events that it described accompanied the lives of many Soviet families.

Another significant work is the novel "Red Pianists". According to intelligence historians, this is the most complete artistic interpretation of the work of a group of illegal intelligence officers, who were given the pseudonym "Red Chapel" in the Nazi counterintelligence service. In order to study the factual material, the author visited Berlin and Budapest, met with the surviving participants in those events. The first readers of the manuscript were the legendary Soviet intelligence officer Shandor Rado and intelligence officer Ruth Werner. They praised the new novel.

Not just numbers (conclusion)

The life of any creative person can be expressed in numbers and dry official phrases. Bondarenko is no exception to this rule. Igor Mikhailovich lived a long and bright life, the success and value of which can be summed up very briefly:

• wrote 34 books;
• the total circulation of his works published in the Soviet Union is more than 2 million copies;
• books were translated into European languages and the languages of the peoples of the USSR.

He was also a member of the Union of Journalists (1963) and the Union of Writers (1970). He created a publishing cooperative (1989), then one of the first independent publishing houses in the history of new Russia, Maprekon, and the magazine Kontur (1991). Over a million books publishedPublishing house Bondarenko. As a result of the default and financial turmoil of 1998, the publishing industry collapsed. In addition, Bondarenko created a regional branch of the Union of Russian Writers in Rostov (1991) and became its first leader. For a long time, the branch existed only at the expense of income from the publishing activities of Maprekon.

In 1996, he changed his place of residence - from Rostov he moved to Taganrog. He has been an honorary citizen of his hometown since 2007. Edited the third edition of the Encyclopedia of Taganrog (2008). But is it possible to evaluate a writer by circulation and years?

On January 30, 2014, the author died in Taganrog, who did not have time to finish his last work. The film novel "The Whirlpool" was supposed to be a continuation of the dilogy "Such a Long Life". A life cut short in a winter blizzard…

P. S. The last will of the writer was not fulfilled. Igor (Harry) Mikhailovich Bondarenko bequeathed to scatter his ashes over the waters of the Taganrog Bay. He was buried at the Nicholas cemetery in Taganrog.