Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [293]
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
Outside the camps, the strikes received no support to speak of. The Gorlag strikers, whose camps lay very close to the city of Norilsk, did try to attract attention to their cause with a banner: “Comrades, inhabitants of Norilsk! Help us in our struggle.”22 As most of Norilsk’s population were former prisoners, they were almost certainly too afraid to respond. Despite their bureaucratic language, the MVD reports written a few weeks after the events convey very well the terror that the strikes generated among prisoners and free workers alike. One of Gorlag’s accountants swore to the MVD that “if the strikers get out of the zona, we will fight against them, as we would fight against enemies.”
Another free worker told the MVD about his accidental meeting with the strikers: “I had stayed past the end of the shift, in order to finish drilling at the coal-face. A group of prisoners came up to me. Grabbing my electric drill, they ordered me to stop working, threatening punishment. I took fright, and stopped working . . . ” Fortunately for him, the prisoners shone a lantern on his face, recognized him as a free worker, and left him in peace.23 Alone, in the dark of the mine, surrounded by hostile, angry, coal-stained strikers, he must have been very frightened indeed.
Local camp bosses were intimidated too. Sensing this, strikers in both Gorlag and Rechlag demanded meetings with representatives from the Soviet government and the Communist Party—from Moscow. They argued that local commanders could not decide anything without Moscow’s permission anyway, which was perfectly true.
And Moscow came. That is, on several occasions, representatives of “Moscow commissions” met with committees of prisoners in Gorlag and Rechlag, to listen, and to discuss, their demands. I could describe these meetings as a break with precedent, but that hardly conveys the extent of their novelty. Never before had prisoners’ demands been met with anything other than brute force. In this new, post-Stalinist era, however, Khrushchev seemed willing to try, at least, to win the prisoners over with genuine concessions.
He, or rather his representatives, did not succeed. Four days into the Vorkuta strike, a Moscow commission, led by a senior officer, General I. I. Maslennikov, presented the prisoners with a new list of privileges: a nine-hour working day, the removal of numbers from uniforms, permission to have meetings with relatives, permission to receive letters and money from home. As the official report puts it, many of the strike leaders received this news with “hostility,” and remained on strike. The same reaction had followed a similar offer in Gorlag. The prisoners, it seems, wanted amnesty, not just an improvement in their living conditions.
Although this was not 1938, however, it was not 1989 either. Stalin was dead, but his legacy lived on. The first step might have been negotiations— but the second step was brute force.
In Norilsk, the authorities first promised that they would “look into the prisoners’ demands.” Instead, as the MVD report explains, “the commission of the MVD of the USSR decided to