Gulag

In Gorlag, the special camp in the Norilsk complex, the mood was particularly angry in the spring of 1953. The previous autumn, a large group of prisoners, about 1,200 in all, had been transferred to Gorlag from Karaganda, where many seem to have been involved in the armed escape attempts and protests that had taken place there a few months earlier. All had been imprisoned for “revolutionary activity in the western Ukraine and Baltic States.” They had, according to the MVD’s records, started organizing a “revolutionary committee” even while still in transit to Norilsk.

According to prisoners’ accounts, they also murdered four camp informers—with pickaxes—within a few days of their arrival.⁹ By the spring of 1953, deeply angered by the amnesty which had passed them by, this group had created what the MVD described as an “anti-Soviet organization” in the camp, which probably means that they had strengthened the national organizations already in place.

Unrest percolated throughout the month of May. On May 25, convoy guards shot a prisoner on his way to work. On the following morning, two of the camp’s divisions went on strike in protest. A few days later, guards opened fire on prisoners who were throwing messages over the wall that separated the male and the female camps. Some were wounded. Then, on June 4 , a group of prisoners broke down the wooden barrier which divided their camp’s punishment barrack from the rest of the zona, and freed twenty-four prisoners. They also captured a member of the camp administration, took him into the zona, and made him hostage. The guards opened fire, killing five prisoners and wounding fourteen others. Four more camp divisions joined the protest. By June 5, 16,379 prisoners were on strike. Soldiers surrounded the camps, and all of the exits were blocked.¹⁰

At about the same time, a similar process was taking place in Rechlag, the special camp in the Vorkuta coal-mining complex. Prisoners had attempted to organize mass strikes in Rechlag as early as 1951, and the administration would later claim to have uncovered no less than five “revolutionary organizations” in the camp in 1951 and 1952.¹¹ When Stalin died, the prisoners of Rechlag were also particularly well-equipped to follow world events. Not only were they organized into national groups, as in Minlag and elsewhere, but they had also designated particular prisoners to follow Western radio transmissions on stolen or borrowed radios, and to write up the news in the form of bulletins, with commentary, which they carefully distributed among other prisoners. Thus did they learn not only of Stalin’s death and Beria’s arrest, but also of the mass strikes in East Berlin, which took place on June 17, 1953, and were put down by Soviet tanks.¹²

This piece of news appears to have galvanized the prisoners: if the Berliners could strike, so could they. John Noble, the American arrested in Dresden just after the war, recalled that “their spirit inspired us and we discussed nothing else for days afterwards . . . The next month we were cocky slaves. The long summer sun had melted the snow and its warmth was renewing our energy and courage. We discussed the chance of striking for our freedom, but no one knew what to do.”¹³

By June 30, the inmates of the Kapitalnaya mine were distributing leaflets, calling on prisoners to “Stop delivery of coal.” On the same day, someone wrote a slogan on the walls of mine No. 40: “No deliveries of coal until there’s an amnesty.” The trucks themselves were empty: the prisoners had stopped digging coal.¹⁴ On July 17, the authorities at Kapitalnaya mine had even greater cause for alarm: on that day, a group of prisoners beat up one of the foremen, allegedly because he had told them to “stop the sabotage.” When it came time for the second shift to begin, the next foreman refused to go down the mine shaft.

Just as the prisoners of Rechlag were absorbing news of these events, a large contingent of prisoners arrived—again from Karaganda. All had been promised better living conditions and a re-examination of their cases. When they arrived at work in Vorkuta’s mine No. 7, they found not an improvement, but the harshest conditions in the entire camp system. On the following day—July 19—350 of them went on strike. ¹⁵