Gulag

Other strikes followed—thanks, in part, to the geography of Vorkuta itself. Vorkutlag lies at the center of a vast coal basin—one of the largest in the world. To exploit the coal, a series of mines were set up in a wide circle around the basin. Between the mines lay other enterprises—electric power stations, brick and cement factories—each one connected to a camp, as well as the city of Vorkuta and the smaller settlement of Yur-Shor. A railway line ran between all of these sites. The trains, like everything else in Vorkuta, were run by prisoners—which is how the rebellion spread: along with the coal and other supplies that they carried from one lagpunkt to the next, the prisoners manning the engines passed on news of the strike in camp No. 7. As the trains traveled around the great circle, thousands of prisoners heard the whispered accounts, thousands more saw the slogans painted on the trains’ sides: “To hell with your coal. We want freedom.” ¹⁶ One camp after another joined the strike until, by July 29, 1953, six of the seventeen divisions of Rechlag—15,604 people—were on strike.¹⁷

Within most of the striking Vorkuta and Norilsk lagpunkts, strike committees took charge of what was clearly a dangerous situation. Terrified administrators had vacated the camps, and the potential for anarchy was great. In some cases, these committees found themselves organizing the prisoners’ food. In others, they tried to persuade inmates not to take out their aggression on the now completely defenseless informers. In the case of both Rechlag and Gorlag, memoirs and archives agree that those in charge (to the extent that anyone was in charge) were almost always western Ukrainians, Poles, and Balts. The MVD later fingered a Ukrainian named Herman Stepanyuk as the leader in Norilsk, and a Pole named Kendzerski—a “former captain in the Polish army”—as one of the leaders in Vorkuta. In his account of the rebellion, Edward Buca, another Pole, also claimed to have led the strike in Vorkuta’s mine No. 29. Although he was clearly in that camp at the time, there are reasons to doubt his account, not least because so many of the real strike leaders were later shot.¹⁸

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