Gulag (73 page)

Unable to cow the prisoners with threats of punishments, the guards resorted to actual violence. Some—including Solzhenitsyn—believe that these incidents also were provocations, designed to spark the revolt that followed. Whether or not this is true—and there are so far no records either way—camp guards did several times open fire on uncooperative prisoners during the winter of 1953 and the spring of 1954, killing several people.

Then, perhaps in a desperate attempt to reassert control, the camp administration shipped a group of criminals into the camps, and openly instructed them to provoke fights with the politicals in
lagpunkt
No. 3—the most rebellious of the Steplag
lagpunkts.
The plan backfired. “And here,” writes Solzhenitsyn, “we see how unpredictable is the course of human emotions and of social movements! Injecting in Kengir no. 3 a mammoth dose of tested ptomaine, the bosses obtained not a pacified camp but the biggest mutiny in the history of the Gulag Archipelago.”
³⁵
Instead of fighting, the two groups agreed to cooperate.

As in other camps, the prisoners of Steplag were organized by nationality. Steplag’s Ukrainians, however, appear to have taken their organization a few steps farther into conspiracy. Instead of openly choosing leaders, the Ukrainians formed a conspiratorial “Center,” a secret group whose membership never became publicly known, and probably contained representatives of all of the camp’s nationalities. By the time the thieves arrived in the camp, the Center had already started to produce weapons—makeshift knives, clubs, and picks—in the camp workshops, and were in contact with the prisoners of the two neighboring
lagpunkts
, No. 1—a
zona
for women— and No. 2. Perhaps these tough politicals impressed the thieves with their handiwork, or perhaps they terrified them. In any case, all agree that at a midnight meeting, representatives of both groups, criminal and political, shook hands and agreed to unite.

On May 16, this cooperation bore its first fruit. That afternoon, a large group of prisoners in
lagpunkt
No. 3 began to destroy the stone wall which separated their camp from the other two neighboring camps, and from the service yard, which contained both the camp workshops and the warehouses. In an earlier era, their aim would have been rape. Now, with Ukrainian nationalist partisans, male and female, on both sides of the wall, the men believed themselves to be coming to the aid of their women—their relatives, friends, or even spouses.

The destruction of the wall continued through the night. In response, the camp guards opened fire, killing thirteen prisoners and wounding forty-three, and beat up other prisoners, including women. The following day, infuriated by the killings, the prisoners of
lagpunkt
No. 3 staged a massive protest, and wrote anti-Soviet slogans on the walls of their dining hall. That night, groups of prisoners broke into the punishment isolator—literally taking it apart with their hands—and freed the 252 prisoners locked inside. They took full control of the camp warehouses, the camp kitchen and bakery, and the camp workshops, which they immediately turned over to the production of knives and clubs. By the morning of May 19, most of the prisoners were on strike.

Neither Moscow nor the local camp leadership seemed to know what to do next. The camp commander promptly informed Kruglov, the MVD boss, of what had happened. Equally promptly, Kruglov ordered Gubin, the head of the Kazakh MVD, to investigate. Gubin then turned around and asked the Gulag to send a commission from Moscow. A commission arrived. Negotiations ensued—and the commission, playing for time, promised the prisoners it would investigate the unlawful shootings, leave open the walls between the camps, and even speed up the process of re-examining prisoners’ cases.

The prisoners believed them. On May 23, they returned to work. When the day shift returned home, however, they saw that at least one of the promises had been broken: the walls between the
lagpunkts
had been rebuilt. By May 25, the boss of Kengir, V. M. Bochkov, was again telegramming frantically for permission to impose a “strict regime” on the prisoners: no letters, no meetings, no money orders, no re-examinations of cases. In addition, he removed about 420 criminal prisoners from the camp, and sent them to another
lagpunkt
, where they went on striking.

The result: within forty-eight hours, the prisoners had chased all of the camp authorities out of the
zona
, having threatened them with their newly produced weapons. Although the authorities had guns, they were outnumbered. More than 5,000 prisoners lived in the three camp divisions, and most of them had joined the uprising. Those who had not joined were too intimidated to protest. Those who felt neutral were soon caught up in the spirit of the forty-day uprising. On the first morning of the strike, remembered one prisoner with wonder, “we weren’t woken up by the guards, we weren’t greeted by shouts and cries.”

The camp authorities seem, at first, to have expected the strike to fall apart of its own accord. Sooner or later, they reckoned, the thieves and the politicals would fall out. The prisoners would wallow in anarchy and debauchery, the women would be raped, the food would be stolen. But although the prisoners’ behavior during the strike should not be idealized, it is true to say that nearly the opposite occurred: the camp began to run itself with a surprising degree of harmony.

Very quickly, the prisoners chose a strike committee, charged with the task of negotiations, as well as the organization of the daily life of the camp. Accounts of the origins of this committee differ radically. The official record of events claims that the authorities were holding general negotiations with groups of prisoners, when suddenly a group of people claiming to be the strike committee burst in on the scene, and denied anyone else the right to speak. A number of witnesses, however, have said that it was the authorities themselves who suggested to the prisoners that they form a strike committee, which was subsequently chosen by democratic vote.

The true relationship of the strike committee to the “real” leadership of the uprising also remains hazy, as it probably was at the time. Even if they had not exactly planned it step by step, the Ukrainian-led Center was clearly the motivating force behind the strike, and played a decisive role in the “democratic” election of the strike committee. The Ukrainians seem to have insisted on a multinational committee: they did not want the strike to seem too anti-Russian or anti-Soviet, and they wanted the strike to have a Russian leader.

That Russian was Colonel Kapiton Kuznetsov, who stands out, even in the murky tale of Kengir, as a notably ambiguous figure. An ex–Red Army officer, Kuznetsov had been captured by the Nazis during the war, and placed in a POW camp. In 1948, he was arrested and accused of having collaborated with the Nazi administration of the POW camp, and even accused of joining the battle against Soviet partisans. If these accusations are true, they help explain his behavior during the strike. Having played the part of turncoat once, he would have been well prepared to play a double role once again.

Apparently, the Ukrainians chose Kuznetsov in the hope that he would give a “Soviet” face to the uprising, depriving the authorities of an excuse to crush the prisoners. This he certainly did—perhaps going to extremes. At Kuznetsov’s urging, the striking prisoners hung banners around the camp: “Long live the Soviet constitution!” “Long live the Soviet regime!” “Down with the murdering Beriaites!” He harangued the prisoners, arguing that they should stop writing leaflets, that “counter-revolutionary” agitation would only harm their cause. He assiduously courted the “Soviet” prisoners, the inmates who had maintained their faith in the Party, and persuaded them to help keep order.

And although the Ukrainians had helped elect him, Kuznetsov certainly did not repay their faith. In the long, carefully detailed, written confession that he composed after the strike had come to its inevitable bloody end, Kuznetsov claimed he had always considered the Center to be illegitimate, and had fought against its secret edicts throughout the strike. But the Ukrainians never really trusted Kuznetsov either. Throughout the strike, two armed Ukrainian guards followed him everywhere. Ostensibly, this was for his protection. In reality, it was probably to ensure that he did not slip out of the camp at night, betraying the cause.

The Ukrainians may have been right to fear Kuznetsov’s escape, for another member of the strike committee, Aleksei Makeev, eventually did leave the camp, slipping out a few weeks into the strike. Later, Makeev read speeches over the camp radio, urging the prisoners to return to work. Perhaps he had understood early on that the strike was doomed to failure— or perhaps he had been a tool of the administration from the beginning.

Yet not all of the strike committee were people of doubtful committment. Kuznetsov himself would later claim that at least three committee members—“Gleb” Sluchenkov, Gersh Keller, and Yuri Knopmus—were in fact representatives of the secret Center. Camp authorities also later described one of them, Gersh Keller, as a representative of the secret Ukrainian conspiracy, and indeed his biography would seem to match this picture. Listed in the camp records as a Jew, Keller was in fact an ethnic Ukrainian—his real surname was Pendrak—who had managed to conceal his ethnicity from the MVD during his arrest. Keller put himself in charge of the strike’s “military” division, organizing the prisoners to fight back in case the guards attacked the camp. It was he who had begun the mass production of weapons—knives, staves, picks, clubs—in the camp workshops, and he who had set up a “laboratory” to build makeshift grenades, Molotov cocktails, and other “hot” weapons. Keller also supervised the building of barricades, and arranged for every barrack to keep a barrel of ground glass by its door—to be thrown in the eyes of the soldiers, if and when they should arrive.

If Keller represented the Ukrainians, Gleb Sluchenkov was linked, rather, to the camp’s criminals. Kuznetsov himself described him as a “representative of the criminal world,” and Ukrainian nationalist sources also describe Sluchenkov as the leader of the thieves. During the uprising, Sluchenkov ran the strike committee’s “counter-intelligence” operation. He had his own “police,” who patrolled the camp, kept the peace, and imprisoned potential turncoats and informers. Sluchenkov organized all the camps into divisions, and put a “commander” in charge of each one. Later, Kuznetsov would complain that the names of these commanders were kept secret, and were known only to Sluchenkov and Keller.

Kuznetsov was less vitriolic about Knopmus, an ethnic German born in St. Petersburg, who ran the uprising’s “propaganda” division. Yet in retrospect, Knopmus’s activities during the uprising were the most revolutionary, and the most anti-Soviet, of all. Knopmus’s “propaganda” included the production of leaflets—distributed to the local population outside the camp—the printing of a camp “wall newspaper” for the benefit of striking prisoners, and, most extraordinarily, the building of a makeshift radio station.

Given that the authorities had cut off the camp’s electricity in the first days of the strike, this radio station was not just a piece of bravado, but a great technical achievement. First, the
zeks
put together a “hydroelectric” power station—using a water tap. A motor was converted into a generator, and enough electricity was made to power the camp telephone system, as well as the radio. The radio, in turn, was put together using parts from the camp’s portable film projectors.

Within days, the camp had news announcers and regular news programs, designed for the prisoners as well as the local population outside the camp, including the guards and soldiers. Camp stenographers recorded the text of one of the radio addresses, made after the uprising had lasted a month, when food supplies were beginning to run out. Directed at the soldiers who now stood on guard outside the camp, the stenograph made its way into the MVD files:

Comrade Soldiers! We are not afraid of you and we ask you not to come into our
zona.
Don’t shoot at us, don’t buckle under the will of the Beriaites. We are not afraid of them, just as we are not afraid of death. We would rather die of hunger in this camp, than give up to the Beriaite band. Don’t soil your hands with the same dirty blood which your officers have on their hands . . .
³⁶

Kuznetsov, meanwhile, organized the distribution of food, which was prepared and cooked by the camp women. Each prisoner received the same ration—there were no extra portions for
pridurki—
which slowly grew smaller, as the weeks went by and the stores decreased. Voluntary details also cleaned the barracks, washed clothes, and stood guard. One inmate remembered that “order and cleanliness” reigned in the dining hall, which had often been filthy and chaotic in the past. The camp baths worked as usual, as did the hospital, although the camp authorities refused to hand over necessary medicines and supplies.

Prisoners organized their own “entertainments” as well. According to one memoir, a Polish aristocrat named Count Bobrinski opened a “café” in the camp, where he served “coffee”: “He threw something in the water, boiled it, and prisoners in the middle of a hot day sipped this drink with satisfaction, laughing.” The count himself sat in the corner of the café, played his guitar, and sang old romantic songs.
³⁷
Other prisoners organized lecture series, as well as concerts. A group of self-motivated thespians rehearsed and performed a play. One of the religious sects, its male and female members reunited by the destruction of the walls, claimed that their prophet had predicted they would now all be taken to heaven, alive. For several days, they sat on their mattresses in the main square, in the center of the
zona
, waiting to be taken to heaven. Alas, nothing happened.

Large numbers of newlyweds also appeared, united by the many prisoner priests who had been arrested along with their Baltic or Ukrainian flocks. Among them were some of those who had been married while standing on opposite sides of the camp walls, and were now meeting face-to-face for the first time. But although men and women mingled freely, all descriptions of the strike agree that women were never molested, and certainly not attacked or raped, as they were so often in ordinary camps.