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
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 tha
t 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 thi
eves. 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.
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