Gulag (72 page)

Years afterward, Ukrainian nationalists would claim that all of the major Gulag strikes had been planned and executed by their secret organizations, which hid behind multinational strike committees: “The average prisoner, and we are referring in particular to the prisoners from the West and to the Russian prisoners, was unable either to participate in the decisions or to comprehend the mechanism of the movement.” As evidence, they cited the two “Karaganda
étaps
,” the contingents of Ukrainians who arrived in both camps, just in advance of the strikes.
¹⁹

The same evidence has led others to conclude that the strikes were provoked by elements within the MVD itself. Perhaps members of the security services feared that Khrushchev was about to shut down the camps altogether—and dismiss all of the camp authorities. As a result, they fomented rebellions in order to put them down, and thereby to prove how very necessary they all still were. Simeon Vilensky, an ex
-zek
and publisher, who subsequently organized two conferences on the subject of opposition in the camps, puts it best: “Who was running the camps? Thousands of people, who don’t have a civilian profession, people who are used to complete lawlessness, used to owning the prisoners, being able to do what they want with them. These are people who, compared with other working citizens, get paid rather well.”

Vilensky remains convinced that he witnessed a provocation in his special camp in Kolyma, in 1953. Suddenly, he says, a group of newcomers arrived in the camp. One of them began openly to organize the younger people in the camp into a rebellious group. They spoke of strikes, wrote leaflets, drew in other prisoners. They even used the camp metal workshop to make knives. Their behavior was so open and so provocative that Vilensky found it suspect: the camp administration could not be tolerating such activity by accident. He led the opposition to the newcomers until, finally, he was moved to another camp.
²⁰

In principle, these theses are compatible. It is possible that elements within the MVD brought rebellious Ukrainians into the camps in order to cause trouble of some kind. It is also possible that the Ukrainian strike leaders believed themselves to be acting of their own volition. From both official and eyewitness accounts, however, it seems more likely that the strikes gained momentum only thanks to the cooperation among the different national groups. Where the national groups competed more openly with one another, or did not have warm relationships—as in Minlag—strikes were much harder to organize.
²¹

Outside the camps, the strikes received no support to speak of. The Gorlag strikers, whose camps lay very close to the city of Norilsk, did try to attract attention to their cause with a banner: “Comrades, inhabitants of Norilsk! Help us in our struggle.”
²²
As most of Norilsk’s population were former prisoners, they were almost certainly too afraid to respond. Despite their bureaucratic language, the MVD reports written a few weeks after the events convey very well the terror that the strikes generated among prisoners and free workers alike. One of Gorlag’s accountants swore to the MVD that “if the strikers get out of the
zona
, we will fight against them, as we would fight against enemies.”

Another free worker told the MVD about his accidental meeting with the strikers: “I had stayed past the end of the shift, in order to finish drilling at the coal-face. A group of prisoners came up to me. Grabbing my electric drill, they ordered me to stop working, threatening punishment. I took fright, and stopped working . . . ” Fortunately for him, the prisoners shone a lantern on his face, recognized him as a free worker, and left him in peace.
²³
Alone, in the dark of the mine, surrounded by hostile, angry, coal-stained strikers, he must have been very frightened indeed.

Local camp bosses were intimidated too. Sensing this, strikers in both Gorlag and Rechlag demanded meetings with representatives from the Soviet government and the Communist Party—from Moscow. They argued that local commanders could not decide anything without Moscow’s permission anyway, which was perfectly true.

And Moscow came. That is, on several occasions, representatives of “Moscow commissions” met with committees of prisoners in Gorlag and Rechlag, to listen, and to discuss, their demands. I could describe these meetings as a break with precedent, but that hardly conveys the extent of their novelty. Never before had prisoners’ demands been met with anything other than brute force. In this new, post-Stalinist era, however, Khrushchev seemed willing to try, at least, to win the prisoners over with genuine concessions.

He, or rather his representatives, did not succeed. Four days into the Vorkuta strike, a Moscow commission, led by a senior officer, General I. I. Maslennikov, presented the prisoners with a new list of privileges: a nine-hour working day, the removal of numbers from uniforms, permission to have meetings with relatives, permission to receive letters and money from home. As the official report puts it, many of the strike leaders received this news with “hostility,” and remained on strike. The same reaction had followed a similar offer in Gorlag. The prisoners, it seems, wanted amnesty, not just an improvement in their living conditions.

Although this was not 1938, however, it was not 1989 either. Stalin was dead, but his legacy lived on. The first step might have been negotiations— but the second step was brute force.

In Norilsk, the authorities first promised that they would “look into the prisoners’ demands.” Instead, as the MVD report explains, “the commission of the MVD of the USSR decided to liquidate the strikes.” This decision, almost certainly taken by Khrushchev himself, had immediate, dramatic effects on the ground. Soldiers surrounded the striking camps.
Lagpunkt
by
lagpunkt
, they emptied the camps, arrested the strike leaders, and sent the other prisoners away on transports.

In a few cases, this “liquidation” went relatively smoothly. Arriving at the first camp division, troops caught the prisoners by surprise. Over the camp loudspeaker, the Norilsk chief prosecutor, Babilov, told the prisoners to leave the
zona
, assuring them that those who walked away peacefully would not be punished for their part in the “sabotage.” According to the official report, most of the prisoners did leave. Seeing that they were isolated, the ringleaders left as well. Out in the taiga, soldiers and camp bosses sorted the prisoners into groups. Trucks were waiting to take away those suspected of instigating the strike, and the “innocent” were allowed to return to the camp.

Some of the subsequent “liquidations” went less smoothly. When the authorities followed the same procedure on the following day in another
lagpunkt
, the strike leaders first threatened those wanting to leave—and then locked themselves into one of the barracks, from which they had to be forcibly removed. In the women’s camp, the prisoners formed a human circle and hung a black flag—a symbol of unjustly murdered comrades—in the center, and began to scream and shout slogans. After five hours of this, the guards began spraying them with powerful hoses. Only then did the circle break up sufficiently for the guards to drag the women out of the camp.

In
lagpunkt
No. 5, as many as 1,400 prisoners, mostly Ukrainians and Balts, refused to leave the
zona.
Instead, they hung black flags from their barracks, conducting themselves, in the words of an MVD bureaucrat, with “extreme aggression.” Then, when the camp guards, assisted by forty soldiers, attempted to rope off the barracks and protect the camp’s food supplies, a crowd of 500 prisoners attacked. They shouted curses and cheers, threw rocks, hit the soldiers with clubs and picks, tried to knock their guns out of their arms. The official report describes what happened next: “At the most critical moment of their attack on the guards, the soldiers opened fire on the prisoners. After the conclusion of the shooting, the prisoners were forced to lie on the ground. After this, the prisoners began to fulfill all of the orders of the guards and of the camp administration.”
²⁴

According to the same report, twenty-three prisoners died that day. According to eyewitnesses, several hundred prisoners died over several days in Norilsk, in a series of similar incidents.

The authorities put down the Vorkuta strike in a similar manner.
Lagpunkt
by
lagpunkt
, soldiers and police troops forced the prisoners out of the camps, sorted them into groups of 100, and put them through a “filtration” process, separating the presumed strike leaders from the other prisoners. In order to get the prisoners to leave peacefully, the Moscow commission also loudly promised all of the prisoners that their cases would be reviewed, and that the strike leaders would not be shot. The ruse worked: thanks to General Maslennikov’s “fatherly” attitude, “we believed him,” one of the participants later explained.
²⁵

In one camp, however—the
lagpunkt
beside mine No. 29—the prisoners did not believe the general—and when Maslennikov told them to return to work, they refused. Soldiers arrived, bringing a fire engine with them, intending to use water hoses to break up the crowd:

But before the hoses could be unwound and turned on us, Ripetsky waved the prisoners forward and a wall of them advanced, turning the vehicle out of the gate as if it had been a toy . . . There was a salvo of shots from the guards, straight into the mass of prisoners. But we were standing with our arms linked, and at first no one fell, though many were dead and wounded. Only Ihnatowicz, a little in front of the line, was standing alone. He seemed to stand for a moment in astonishment, then turned round to face us. His lips moved, but no words came out. He stretched out an arm, then fell.

As he fell, there came a second salvo, then a third, and a fourth. Then the heavy machine-guns opened fire.

Again, the estimates of those killed in mine No. 29 vary widely. The official documents speak of 42 dead and 135 wounded. Eyewitnesses again speak of “hundreds” of casualties.
²⁶

The strikes were over. But neither camp was ever truly pacified. Throughout the rest of 1953 and 1954, protests broke out sporadically in Vorkuta and Norilsk, in the other special camps, and in the ordinary camps as well. “A triumphant spirit, buoyed up by the wage increase we had won, was the strike’s heritage,” wrote Noble. When he was transferred into mine No. 29, scene of the massacre, prisoners who had survived proudly showed him their scars from that day.
²⁷

As the prisoners grew bolder, practically no camp was unaffected. In November 1953, for example, 530 prisoners refused to work in Vyatlag. They demanded better pay, and an end to “abnormalities” in clothing distribution and living conditions. The camp administration agreed to meet their demands, but the following day the prisoners went on strike again. This time, they demanded to be included in Beria’s amnesty. The strike ended when the organizers were arrested and imprisoned.
²⁸
In March 1954, a group of “bandits” took over one
lagpunkt
of Kargopollag, threatening to riot unless they were given better food—and vodka.
²⁹
In July 1954, 900 prisoners in Minlag staged a weeklong hunger strike, protesting the death of a prisoner who had been burned alive when a punishment block caught fire. The prisoners distributed leaflets around the camp and in the nearby village, explaining the reasons for the strike, stopping only when a Moscow commission arrived and met their demands for better treatment. Elsewhere in Minlag, strikes became a permanent part of life, sometimes carried out by individual brigades, sometimes by whole mines.
³⁰

More unrest was planned, as the authorities knew. In June 1954, the MVD sent an informer’s report directly to Kruglov, the Interior Minister. The report contained an account of a conversation between a group of Ukrainian prisoners whom the informer had met in Sverdlovsk transit prison. The prisoners were from Gorlag, and had taken part in the strike there. Now they were being transported elsewhere—but they were preparing for next time:

Everyone in the cell was made to explain to Pavlishin and Stepanyuk what they did during the strike, including myself . . . In my presence, Morushko reported to Stepanyuk about an incident on the barge from Norilsk to Krasnoyarsk. On this barge he conducted a filtration of prisoners, and those who were not useful, he destroyed. Stepanyuk told Pavlishin, “The mission you were given has been fulfilled, now our deeds will be part of the history of Ukraine.” He then hugged Morushko, and said,

“Pan Morushko, you have done great service to our organization . . . for this you will receive a medal, and after the collapse of Soviet power you will occupy an important post.”
³¹

Although it is perfectly possible that the informer who filed this report did hear a conversation somewhat like this one, he elaborated as well: later in his report, he went on to accuse the Ukrainians of organizing a most unlikely plot to kill Khrushchev. Still, the fact that such dubious information was sent straight to Kruglov itself indicates how seriously the authorities now took the threat of further rebellion. Both of the commissions sent to investigate the situation in Rechlag and Gorlag had concluded that it was necessary to increase the number of guards, to toughen the regime, and above all to increase the number of informers.
³²

As it turned out, they were right to worry. The most dangerous uprising was still to come.

Like its two predecessors, the uprising that Solzhenitsyn christened “The Forty Days of Kengir” was not abrupt or unexpected.
³³
It emerged slowly, in the spring of 1954, out of a series of incidents at the Steplag special camp, which was located beside the village of Kengir, in Kazakhstan.

Like their counterparts in Rechlag and Gorlag, the commanders of Steplag were, in the wake of Stalin’s death, unable to cope with their prisoners. One of the historians of the strike, having studied the camp’s archives from the year 1953, concludes that the administration had “totally lost control.” In the run-up to the strike, Steplag’s commanders periodically sent reports to Moscow, describing the underground organizations in the camp, the incidents of unrest, and the “crisis” afflicting the system of informers, by now almost completely incapacitated. Moscow wrote back, ordering the camp to isolate the Ukrainians and Balts from the other prisoners. But the administration either would not or could not do so. At that time, nearly half of the 20,000 prisoners in the camp were Ukrainians, and a quarter were Balts and Poles; perhaps the facilities to separate them did not exist. As a result, the prisoners kept on breaking the rules, staging intermittent strikes and protests.
³⁴