65 years ago, on May 16, 1954, one of the most powerful and tragic uprisings in the Soviet camps broke out. Its history is widely known, including thanks to the famous work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn "The Gulag Archipelago". True, Solzhenitsyn was inclined to exaggerate and dramatize something, but to keep silent about something. But, in any case, the uprising, which will be discussed below, forever entered the history of the domestic prison-camp system as one of its most dramatic pages.
As you know, in the 1930s - 1950s, a significant part of Soviet camps, including camps for political prisoners, were located beyond the Urals - in Siberia and Kazakhstan. The endless steppes of Kazakhstan and its harsh climate, unusual for people from the central zone and the south, made its territory, as the Soviet leaders considered, the most suitable for placing camps.
Steplag and construction sites of Dzhezkazgan
Steplag (Steppe Camp), or Special Camp No. 4 for political prisoners, was located in Central Kazakhstan, in the vicinity of the modern city of Zhezkazgan (in Soviet times - Dzhezkazgan). Today it is the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan, which became part of Zhezkazgan after the abolition of the Zhezkazgan region in 1997.
The center of Steplag was the village of Kengir, where the camp administration was located. The steplag was a young camp, created after the war on the basis of the Dzhezkazgan prisoner of war camp No. 39. By 1954, the Steplag included 6 camp departments in the villages of Rudnik-Dzhezkazgan, Perevalka, Kengir, Krestovsky, Dzhezdy and Terekty.
By 1953, the Steplag held 20,869 prisoners, and by 1954 - 21,090 prisoners. The number of prisoners grew due to the reduction of the Ozerlag (Special Camp No. 7) in the Taishet-Bratsk region. Prisoners from Ozerlag were transferred to Steplag. Approximately half of the Steplag prisoners were Western Ukrainians, including members of Ukrainian nationalist organizations and the gangster underground. There were many Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Belarusians, Poles and Germans - participants in collaborationist and nationalist organizations.
But in general, almost the entire national palette of the Soviet Union was represented in the camp - there were Chechens with Ingush, and Armenians, and Uzbeks, and Turkmens, and even Turks, Afghans and Mongols. Russians accounted for about 10% of the total number of prisoners, among them were predominantly persons convicted of cooperation with the Nazi occupation authorities, who served in the Russian Liberation Army and other collaborationist formations.
The prisoners of Steplag were taken to work on the extraction of copper ore and manganese ore, on the construction of enterprises in the city of Dzhezkazgan (a brick factory, a bakery, a processing plant, residential buildings and other facilities). The prisoners also worked in the coal mines in Baikonur and Ekibastuz.
Head of the Steplag from 1948 to 1954. was Colonel Alexander Alexandrovich Chechev, who before being appointed to the post held the post of Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of the Lithuanian SSR - head of the prison department of the ministry (1945-1948), and before that he headed the prisons and camps of the Tajik SSR, the Tomsk special prison of the NKVD of the USSR.
Prerequisites for the prisoner uprising
In 1953, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin died. For some of the country's citizens, and such were the majority, the death of the leader became a real personal tragedy. But a certain part of the country's inhabitants, and among them, of course, were political prisoners, counted on the liberalization of the political course. The prisoners hoped that the regime of detention would become softer. But the softening of the regime took place not in all prisons and camps, especially if we talk about Siberia and Kazakhstan.
In Steplag, the order remained as strict as possible. It is interesting that one of the reasons for the even greater deterioration in the attitude of the camp administration and the guards towards the prisoners was precisely the innovations in the management of the Soviet prison-camp system that followed after Stalin's death. So, the officers of the camp administration were removed from the premiums for ranks, rumors began to spread about a possible reduction in the number of camps and the staff of the camp guards, which would lead to unemployment among the jailers, many of whom did not know how to do anything but watch the prisoners. Naturally, the guards became embittered, and took out their discontent on the prisoners, since the latter were deprived of rights.
The existing order in the camps, according to which a guard who shot a prisoner or several prisoners while trying to escape, received leave and bonuses, led to an increase in the number of murders of prisoners by the guards. Sometimes the guards used any excuse to start shooting at the prisoners. In the Steplag, the murder of prisoners was in the order of things, but in the end there was an incident that became the “last straw” for the thousands of convicts. Moreover, the latter were very excited by rumors about the impending relaxation of the regime and demanded free access to the women's zone - for carnal pleasures.
Shot of sentry Kalimulin and its aftermath
On May 15, 1954, in the village of Kengir, the sentry Kalimulin, who was on guard duty to protect the camp, fired a burst from a machine gun at a group of prisoners who were trying to break through from the territory of the male part of the zone into the female part of the camp. As a result of the shots of the guard, 13 people died, 33 people were injured, and 5 more later died from their injuries. The killings of prisoners by guards have been met before, but not with so many victims. Therefore, the shots of the sentry caused natural indignation among the prisoners.
It should be noted here that the camp mass in Steplag was not so harmless. A significant part of the convicts were former Bandera, "forest brothers", Vlasov, who had experience of participation in hostilities. In fact, they had nothing to lose, since many of them were sentenced to 25 years in prison, which in the harsh conditions of the camps actually meant a death sentence.
The next day, male prisoners destroyed the fence separating the male and female parts of the camp. In response, the camp administration ordered the establishment of firing points between these two parts of the zones. But this measure could no longer help.
The uprising itself began on May 18, 1954. More than three thousand prisoners did not go to their compulsory work in the morning. The camp supervisors were forced to flee from residential areas, hiding in administrative buildings. Then the rebels seized food and clothing warehouses, workshops, freed 252 prisoners who were in the punishment barracks and in the pre-trial detention center.
Thus, the camp actually came under the control of the prisoners. The rebels demanded the arrival of a government commission and a thorough investigation into the circumstances of the execution of prisoners by the sentry Kalimulin and, in general, violations and abuses of the Steplag administration.
The rebels created a parallel authority in the camp
On May 19, the prisoners formed a commission to lead the uprising, which included from the 1st camp point - Lyubov Bershadskaya and Maria Shimanskaya, from the 2nd camp point - Semyon Chinchaladze and Vagharshak Batoyan,from the 3rd camp point - Kapiton Kuznetsov and Alexey Makeev. Kapiton Ivanovich Kuznetsov was elected chairman of the commission.
The liberals are trying to present the participants in the uprising in the Kengir camp as innocent victims of Stalin's repressions. Perhaps there were such. But to get an idea of who was in charge of the uprising, just look at the biography of its leader Kapiton Kuznetsov. Former lieutenant colonel of the Red Army, Kuznetsov received a term for the fact that during the war he sided with the Nazis and not only began to serve the Nazis, but took the post of commandant of a prisoner of war camp, commanded anti-partisan operations. How many people died at the hands of the policeman Kuznetsov and his subordinates? It is possible that it was no less than during the suppression of the camp uprising.
The rebellious prisoners immediately formed a parallel management structure, in which they did not forget to allocate a security department, a detective bureau, a commandant's office and even their own prison. They managed to create their own radio, to make a dynamo that supplied the camp with electricity, since the administration cut off the centralized supply.
The propaganda department was headed by Yuri Knopmus (pictured), a 39-year-old former collaborator who served in the German field gendarmerie during the war. Engels (Gleb) Sluchenkov, a former Vlasovite, a warrant officer of the ROA, and once a lieutenant of the Red Army, who went over to the side of the Nazis, was put at the head of the "counterintelligence". The power support of the uprising was the shock detachments, formed from relatively young and healthy former Banderites, as well as criminals who joined the uprising.
The only group of prisoners who did not support the uprising were the "Jehovah's Witnesses" from Moldova - about 80 people. As you know, religion prohibits them from any violence, including opposition to the authorities. But the "victims of repression", which today liberals so touchingly recall, did not regret the "Jehovah's Witnesses", did not go into the intricacies of their religion, but drove the believing pacifists to the extreme barrack next to the entrance, so that in the event of an assault, the convoy troops would shoot them first.
As soon as the leadership of the camp informed the authorities about the uprising, reinforcements of 100 soldiers were sent from Karaganda to Kengir. For negotiations with the rebels, Lieutenant General Viktor Bochkov, Deputy Chief of the GULAG of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, and Major General Vladimir Gubin, Minister of Internal Affairs of the Kazakh SSR, went to the camp. As a result of the negotiations, the prisoners promised to end the riots on May 20. On May 21, order in the Steplag was restored, but not for long.
A new uprising
On May 25, the prisoners again did not go to work, demanding that the prisoners be granted the right to live freely in places of work with their families, allow free communication with the women's zone, reduce the sentences for those sentenced to 25 years in prison, and release prisoners 2 times a week into the city.
This time, the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR, Major General Sergei Yegorov, and the head of the Main Directorate of the camps, Lieutenant General Ivan Dolgikh, arrived to negotiate with the rebels. The representatives of the rebels met with the Moscow delegation and put forward a number of demands, including the arrival of the secretary of the Central Committee to the camp.
The head of the GULAG, General Dolgikh, went to meet the prisoners and ordered the dismissal of the officials responsible for the use of weapons. The negotiations continued, stretching out for more than a month. Since there is a large amount of information in the public domain about the course of negotiations, about the actions of the parties to the conflict, it makes no sense to go into details.
Suppression of the Kengir uprising
A month after the start of negotiations, on June 20, 1954, D. Ya. Raizer, Minister of Construction of Metallurgical Industry Enterprises of the USSR, and P. F. Lomako sent a memo to the Council of Ministers of the USSR, in which they expressed dissatisfaction with the riots in Steplag, since they disrupted the schedule of ore mining in Dzhezkazgan. After that, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR G. V. Malenkov appealed to the Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR, Colonel-General Sergei Kruglov, with a demand to restore order in the camp.
On June 24, troops arrived at the zone, including 5 T-34 tanks from the 1st division of the internal troops of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs. At 03:30 on June 26, military units were brought into the residential area of the camp, tanks moved, soldiers of assault units ran with machine guns. The prisoners put up fierce resistance, but the forces of the parties were, of course, unequal. During the storming of the camp and suppressing the uprising, 37 prisoners died, another 9 died of wounds.
The leaders of the uprising Ivashchenko, "Keller", Knopmus, Kuznetsov, Ryabov, Skiruk and Sluchenkov were sentenced to death, but Skiruk and Kuznetsova were commuted to death by lengthy prison terms. In 1960, five years after the verdict, Kapiton Kuznetsov was released. This is about the "cruelty" of the Soviet regime …
