Ardamatsky, Vasily Ivanovich

Born in the city of Dukhovschina of the Smolensk province in a teacher's family. There in the mid-twenties he joined the Komsomol. He was a fighter of the CHON , participated in collectivization, wrote notes as a village correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda and the Smolensk regional newspapers Work Way and Young Comrade.

Later, Ardamatsky entered the Smolensk Medical Institute . Since 1929, he began working in a local radio newspaper.

After serving in the Red Army (1931-1932), Ardamatsky moved to Moscow, connecting his life with radio journalism.

Of particular importance, according to Ardamatsky ^[1] , was the “Riga protracted business trip” of 1940 for him. “There, with my own eyes,” he recalls, “I saw the battle of revolution and counter-revolution, the birth of socialism and capitalism. I saw the activities of Western intelligence, in particular Hitler's, which began to prepare its forces in Latvia for the war literally from the first days of the establishment of Soviet power there in 1940. I saw spies and saboteurs caught, even had the opportunity to attend their interrogations and speak with them. One of them, never revealed, worked at my side on the Latvian radio ... In a word, the first touch on the topic of the struggle of intelligence took place there and left a deep imprint on me for life. ”

Then comes the war. Already on June 25 and 27, 1941, Pravda published Ardamatsky correspondence from the front. And then, for almost the entire first year of the war, he worked as a war correspondent for Moscow Radio in besieged Leningrad , in which he spent the first, most difficult blockade winter of 1941/1942.

Ardamatsky said about himself ^[2] that he "as a writer ... was born of a war that called many ... for creativity." He recalled a conversation with Vsevolod Vishnevsky in Leningrad. Vishnevsky questioned him in detail about the nature of the war correspondent’s work on the radio, and then said: “All this is important and necessary, but for you personally it’s all in the air ... And since you can at least somehow draw with a pencil on paper, you should write ... I tell you this in all seriousness and with party responsibility. You are unbelievably lucky! You were sent ... to Leningrad! What is happening here will go down in the tablets of the history of mankind, and every person who touches the feat of Leningrad is simply obliged to his conscience at least a scratch ... to leave on these tablets. Nothing should be forgotten, not a single dying step of the Leningrad man, not a single act before him for victory. ”

Ardamatsky wrote many short stories and stories related to the Great Patriotic War.

In 1967, the journal Neva published his documentary novel Retribution, which dealt with the failure of Boris Savinkov’s mission in 1924 . The creation of the novel was made possible thanks to the writer’s access to the KGB archives ^[3] . According to his script, the film “ Crash ” (1968) and his remake of “ Syndicate-2 ” (1983) were shot.

Member of the CPSU (b) since 1943 .

Wife: Kudryavtseva Iraida Vasilievna (1917-2003). Son: Ardamatsky Dmitry Vasilievich (b. 1938).

Vasily Ivanovich Ardamatsky died on February 20, 1989, at the 78th year of his life. He was buried in Moscow at the Kuntsevsky cemetery .

On March 20, 1953 , at the end of the so-called “Doctors' Doctors” , the Crocodile magazine published the Ardamat’s feignlet “Pine from Zhmerinka” about the thefts in the provincial district consumer union and about the selection of personnel there on the basis of kinship and personal acquaintance. Feuilleton was regarded by some as anti-Semitic ^{[4] [3]} only because all his characters bore Jewish names and surnames. According to the writer Grigory Svirsky (a Jew who emigrated from the USSR to Israel in 1972), at that time Ardamatsky received the nickname “Pinya” ^[5] .

Evgeny Yevtushenko tried to strengthen and use the negative attitude in this regard to Ardamatsky during the election to the Board of the Union of Moscow Writers. Speaking against the candidacy of Ardamatsky, he declared ^[6] :

I do not understand who could raise a hand to expose Vasily Ardamatsky. I am not happy with his public face. This man wrote an anti-Semitic thing - “Pine from Zhmerinka”.

As a result, the candidacy of Ardamatsky was withdrawn without discussion.

On October 14, 1963, Izvestia spoke about the Tu-124 Moscow-Tallinn emergency landing on the Neva . The plane broke off the front landing gear during takeoff. The car was sent to the Leningrad airport, but there was a malfunction of devices that showed a lack of fuel, two engines stalled. The car began to plan with an eye on the Neva. In just 14 seconds, the ship's commander correctly assessed the situation and decided to land on the river. Rushing under the bridge, the plane landed, plopping down into the Neva. He stayed afloat for just a few minutes. During this time, 52 people managed to get on a boat in time - all passengers and crew. The hero - pilot Mostovoy was charged with criminal negligence, suspended from work and wanted to be brought to justice. Ardamatsky insisted on identifying the causes of the accident. An investigation was conducted with experimental flights and a number of special studies. As a result, the pilot Mostovoy was returned to work and presented to the Order of the Red Star. They wanted to ban Ardamatsky’s reporting about this event under the pressure of OKB A.N. Tupolev, but in the end they published it in Izvestia under the personal responsibility of the editor-in-chief ^{[7] [8]} .

• 1967 - The Path to Saturn (based on the novel Saturn Almost Visible)
• 1967 - The end of "Saturn" (based on the novel "Saturn is almost invisible")
• 1968 - Crash (based on the novel Retribution)
• 1970 - I - 11-17 (according to the novel of the same name)
• 1972 - Fight after victory (based on the novel "Saturn is almost invisible")
• 1974 - Conscience
• 1976 - Refutation
• 1980 - Syndicate-2 (second adaptation of the novel "Retribution")
• 1983 - Bribe. From the notebook of journalist V. Tsvetkov

Marked by many Soviet literary prizes, including:

• State Prize of the RSFSR named after the Vasilyev brothers (1983) for the script of the film "Syndicate-2" (1980).
• Prize of the KGB of the USSR in the field of literature and art .
• Gold Medal named after Nikolai Kuznetsov
• Silver Medal of the World Council of Peace named after Joliot-Curie

• Grave at Kuntsevo cemetery, site 10
• Last year
• Grant calls Moscow
• Feuilleton “Pine from Zhmerinka”