Gulag

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