Gulag (60 page)

Once again, however, archives tell a different story, revealing the existence of many minor camp protests and work stoppages. Criminal bosses in particular seemed to have conducted frequent, brief, apolitical workplace strikes if they wanted something from the camp authorities, who treated such incidents as nothing more than an annoyance. Particularly in the late 1930s and early 1940s, professional criminals’ privileged position would have made them less afraid of punishment, and would have given them more opportunities to organize these minor rebellions.
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Spontaneous criminal protests sometimes also occurred on the long train rides to the east, when there was no water available and no food except salted herring. To force the guards to give them water, the criminal prisoners would agree to “set up a cry and clamor together,” creating a noise that the guards hated, as one prisoner remembered: “Once, the Roman legion wept at the sound of the ancient Germans’ shriek, it was so terrifying. The same terror was felt by the sadists of the Gulag ...”
⁶³
This tradition lasted through the 1980s, when, as the poet and dissident Irina Ratushinskaya recalled, prisoners on a transport, if dissatisfied with their treatment, would carry the protest one step further:

“Hey, fellas! Start ’er rocking!” comes a male voice.

The prisoners bodily start to rock the carriage. All together, in unison, throwing themselves first against one wall of their enclosures, then against the opposite one. The carriage is so packed that the results can be felt immediately. In this manner, the carriage can be tipped off the tracks, derailing the whole train.
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Overcrowding and poor food could also produce protests of a sort best described as semi-organized outbreaks of hysteria. A witness described one such scene, lead by a group of female criminals:

About 200 women, as if by command, suddenly undressed and ran completely naked into the yard. In rude poses, they crowded around the guards and shouted, screeched, laughed and swore, fell on the ground in terrifying convulsions, tore at their hair, scratched blood from their faces, fell again on the ground and again stood up and ran to the gate.

“A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-gy!” howled the crowd.
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Aside from these moments of madness and spontaneity, there was another, older tradition of protest used, the hunger strike, one whose goals and methods were inherited directly from the earliest politicals (who in turn had inherited them from pre-revolutionary Russia), the Social Democrats, Anarchists, and Mensheviks who were imprisoned in the early 1920s. This group of prisoners kept up their tradition of hunger strikes—inherited from pre-revolutionary Russia—after they were sent to isolator prisons, away from Solovetsky, in 1925. Aleksandr Fedodeev, one of the leaders of the Social Revolutionaries, went on conducting hunger strikes in Suzdal prison, demanding the right to correspond with his relatives, right up to the moment of his execution in 1937.
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But even after they had been moved on again, from the prisons back to camps, some still tried to keep the tradition going. In the mid-1930s, the socialists were joined in their hunger strikes by some of the genuine Trotskyites. In October of 1936, hundreds of Trotskyites, Anarchists, and other political prisoners in one Vorkuta
lagpunkt
began a hunger strike that was to last, according to records, 132 days. Without question, their purpose was political: the strikers demanded that they be separated from criminal prisoners, that their working day be limited to eight hours, that they should be fed regardless of their work—and that their sentences should be annulled. In another Vorkuta
lagpunkt
, an even larger strike—joined, in this case, by a handful of professional criminals—was to last 115 days. In March 1937, the Gulag administration decreed that the strikers’ demands were to be met. By the end of 1938, however, most had been murdered in the mass executions of that year.
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At about the same time, another group of Trotskyites went on strike in the Vladivostok transit camp, while awaiting transit to Kolyma. While in the camp, they held organizational meetings and elected a leader. He demanded the right to examine the boat that they would be transported in. The request was refused. Still, as they got on the boat, they sang revolutionary songs and even—if the reports of the NKVD’s informers are to be believed—unfurled posters with slogans such as “Hooray for Trotsky, Revolutionary Genius!” and “Down with Stalin!” When the steamer reached Kolyma, the prisoners again began making demands: everyone should receive work according to his speciality, everyone must be paid for his work, spouses must not be divided, all prisoners have a right to send and receive mail without restriction. In due course, they called a series of hunger strikes, one of which lasted 100 days. A contemporary observer wrote that “The leadership of the Trotskyite prisoners at Kolyma had entered a fantasy realm, and ignored the real power relationships.” In due course, they too were all sentenced and shot.
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Yet their suffering made an impact. Years later, a former Kolyma prosecutor remembered the events very well:

Everything that happened afterwards made such a strong impression on me and my comrades, that for several days I myself wandered around as if in a fog, and in front of me seemed to walk a row of sentenced Trotskyite fanatics, fearlessly departing this life with their slogans on their lips . . .
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In response, perhaps, to these incidents of rebellion, the NKVD began to treat political hunger strikes and work strikes with more seriousness. From the late 1930s on, perpetrators of such disruptions received additional prison sentences, even death sentences. Hunger strikes were taken seriously, but work refusals were taken most seriously of all: they ran counter to the entire ethos of the camp. The prisoner who would not work was not only a disciplinary problem; he was a serious obstacle to the camp’s economic goals as well. After 1938 in particular, strikers were severely punished, as one ex-prisoner described:

Some of the prisoners refused to go out to work . . . something about the food being rotten. The administration of course acted with vigor. Fourteen of the ringleaders, twelve men and two women, were shot. The executions took place in the camp, with all the prisoners lined up to see the show. Then details from every barrack helped dig the graves, just outside the barbed-wire fence. Not much chance for another riot as long as the memory of this one remains fresh . . .
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But even the prospect of certain punishment—and the awareness of certain death—could not eliminate every prisoner’s urge to rebel altogether, and later, following Stalin’s death, some of them would do so en masse. Yet even during Stalin’s lifetime, even during the toughest, most difficult war years, the spirit of rebellion lived on—as the remarkable story of the Ust-Usa uprising of January 1942 well illustrates.

In the annals of the Gulag, the Ust-Usa rebellion was, as far as we know, unique. If there were other mass breakouts while Stalin was alive, we do not yet know about them. About Ust-Usa we know quite a lot: garbled versions of the story have long been part of the Gulag’s oral history, but in recent years it has been carefully documented as well.
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Oddly enough, this rebellion was led not by a prisoner, but by a free worker. Mark Retyunin was, at that time, the chief administrator of the Lesoreid
lagpunkt
, a small logging camp within the Vorkutlag complex. The
lagpunkt
held about 200 prisoners, more than half of whom were politicals. Retyunin had had much experience in the camp system by 1942: like many minor camp bosses, he was a former prisoner, having served ten years for alleged bank robbery. Nevertheless, he was trusted by the camp administration, one of whom described him as a man “prepared to sacrifice his life for the productive interests of the camp.” Others have remembered him variously as a drinker and a cardplayer—testimony, perhaps, to his criminal origins. Still others describe him as a poetry-lover and as a “strong character” with a tendency to boasting and brawling—testimony, perhaps, to the legend he left in his wake.

Retyunin’s precise motives remain unclear. It seems that he was deeply shocked when, following the outbreak of war in June 1941, the NKVD passed an edict forbidding all political prisoners from leaving their camp, even those whose sentences had expired. Afanasy Yashkin, the only one of the original co-conspirators to survive the rebellion, told his NKVD interrogators that Retyunin had believed that all of the
lagpunkt
’s inhabitants, prisoners and nonprisoners alike, would be executed when the Germans began advancing deeper into the Soviet Union. “What do we have to lose, even if they kill us,” he had urged them. “What’s the difference: we drop dead tomorrow, or we die today as rebels . . . the camp authorities are going to shoot all of those with counter-revolutionary sentences, even us, the free workers who are being held here until the end of the war.” This was not a completely paranoid sentiment: having himself been an inmate of Vorkutlag in 1938, he would have known that mass murder was well within the capabilities of the NKVD. And despite his high status as boss of an entire
lagpunkt
, he had only recently been refused permission to return home on a holiday.

No other details of the preparations are known. Not surprisingly, Retyunin left behind no written documentation. Nevertheless, it is clear from the events themselves that the rebellion was carefully planned. The rebels made their first move on the afternoon of January 24, 1942. This was a Saturday, and the day on which the camp’s armed guard planned to use the camp baths. They dutifully filed in. The camp bath attendant, a Chinese inmate named Lu Fa—who was in on the conspiracy—quickly locked the doors behind them. Immediately, the rest of the conspirators disarmed the remaining guards, who had been left standing sentry at the
vakhta.
Two of them fought back. One was killed, and the other wounded. All of their weapons fell into the hands of the rebels, twelve machine guns and four revolvers in all.

Quickly, a group of the rebels opened the camp storerooms and began distributing high-quality clothing and boots to the prisoners. These had been specially stockpiled by Retyunin, who called on the prisoners to join his uprising. Not all of them did. Some were afraid, some saw the hopeless-ness of the situation, some even tried to talk the rebels out of continuing altogether. Others agreed. By about five o’clock that afternoon, an hour or so after the rebellion had begun, a group of 100 men were marching in a column toward Ust-Usa, the neighboring town.

At first, the townspeople, thrown by the well-dressed appearance of the prisoners, did not understand what was happening. Then the rebels, by now split into two groups, attacked the town post office and the town jail. Both attacks were successful. The rebels opened up the jail cells, and twelve more prisoners joined their ranks. At the post office, they cut off communication links with the outside world. Ust-Usa had fallen under prisoner control.

At this point, the townspeople began to fight back. A few took up arms at the town militia building. Some rushed to defend the small airfield, where two small planes happened to be on the runway. Others sought help: one of the town policemen leaped on his horse and rode to the nearby
lagpunkt
of Polya-Kurya. There, panic broke out. The camp boss, convinced that the Germans had arrived, immediately ordered all prisoners to remove their shoes, so that they could not escape. Fifteen armed guards began marching from Polya-Kurya to Ust-Usa, thinking they were heading off to defend the motherland.

By this time, open fighting had broken out in the center of Ust-Usa. The rebels had disarmed some of the town policemen, and had procured more weapons. They failed, however, to reckon with the spirited defenders of the militia building. The subsequent battle raged all night, and by early morning the rebels’ losses were serious. Nine were dead, and one was wounded. Forty had been captured. Those who remained alive resolved upon a new tactic: they would leave Ust-Usa, and head for another town, Kozhva. They did not know, however, that the Ust-Usa authorities had already wired for help, using a hidden radio transmitter in the forest. All of the roads leading in every direction were slowly filling up with armed militiamen.

Still, they had some initial luck. Almost immediately, the rebels came upon a village where they met no real resistance. There, they harangued the local collective farmers in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade them to join them. At the post office, they listened in on an open line and realized that the militia were heading in their direction. They left the main road, and headed into the tundra, hiding, initially, at a reindeer farm. On the morning of January 28, they were discovered there: another battle broke out, with heavy casualties on both sides. By nightfall, however, the remaining rebels had escaped—about thirty were still alive—and holed up inside a hunter’s shelter on a nearby mountain. Some determined to remain there and fight, although by now, having run out of ammunition, they had no chance. Others set off into the woods where, in the dead of winter, in open country, they stood no chance either.

The final showdown took place on January 31, and lasted a day and a night. As the militia closed in, some of the rebels, including Retyunin, shot themselves. The NKVD hunted down the rest in the woods, picking them off one by one. The bodies were placed in a heap: the militia, in a frenzy of hatred, mutilated them, and then photographed them. The pictures, preserved in the regional archives, show tormented, twisted bodies, covered in snow and blood. There is no record of where the corpses were buried. Local legend has it that the militia men burned them on the spot.

In the aftermath, the rebels captured earlier were flown to Syktyvkar, the regional capital, and immediately put under investigation. After more than six months of questioning and torture, nineteen received new camp sentences, and forty-nine were executed on August 9, 1942.

The death toll among the defenders of Soviet order was high. But it was not just the loss of a few dozen guards and civilians that worried the NKVD. According to the recorded testimony, Yashkin also went on to “confess” that Retyunin’s ultimate goal was the overthrow of the regional authorities, the imposition of a fascist regime, and, naturally, an alliance with Nazi Germany. Knowing what we know about Soviet methods of interrogation, it is fairly safe to discount these motives.