Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [295]
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
As the prisoners grew bolder, practically no camp was unaffected. In November 1953, for example, 530 prisoners refused to work in Vyatlag. They demanded better pay, and an end to “abnormalities” in clothing distribution and living conditions. The camp administration agreed to meet their demands, but the following day the prisoners went on strike again. This time, they demanded to be included in Beria’s amnesty. The strike ended when the organizers were arrested and imprisoned.28 In March 1954, a group of “bandits” took over one lagpunkt of Kargopollag, threatening to riot unless they were given better food—and vodka. 29 In July 1954, 900 prisoners in Minlag staged a weeklong hunger strike, protesting the death of a prisoner who had been burned alive when a punishment block caught fire. The prisoners distributed leaflets around the camp and in the nearby village, explaining the reasons for the strike, stopping only when a Moscow commission arrived and met their demands for better treatment. Elsewhere in Minlag, strikes became a permanent part of life, sometimes carried out by individual brigades, sometimes by whole mines.30
More unrest was planned, as the authorities knew. In June 1954, the MVD sent an informer’s report directly to Kruglov, the Interior Minister. The report contained an account of a conversation between a group of Ukrainian prisoners whom the informer had met in Sverdlovsk transit prison. The prisoners were from Gorlag, and had taken part in the strike there. Now they were being transported elsewhere—but they were preparing for next time:
Everyone in the cell was made to explain to Pavlishin and Stepanyuk what they did during the strike, including myself . . . In my presence, Morushko reported to Stepanyuk about an incident on the barge from Norilsk to Krasnoyarsk. On this barge he conducted a filtration of prisoners, and those who were not useful, he destroyed. Stepanyuk told Pavlishin, “The mission you were given has been fulfilled, now our deeds will be part of the history of Ukraine.” He then hugged Morushko, and said,
“Pan Morushko, you have done great service to our organization . . . for this you will receive a medal, and after the collapse of Soviet power you will occupy an important post.”31
Although it is perfectly possible that the informer who filed this report did hear a conversation somewhat like this one, he elaborated as well: later in his report, he went on to accuse the Ukrainians of organizing a most unlikely plot to kill Khrushchev. Still, the fact that such dubious information was sent straight to Kruglov itself indicates how seriously the authorities now took the threat of further rebellion. Both of the commissions sent to investigate the situation in Rechlag and Gorlag had concluded that it was necessary to increase the number of guards, to toughen the regime, and above all to increase the number of informers.32
As it turned out, they were right to worry. The most dangerous uprising was still to come.
Like its two predecessors, the uprising that Solzhenitsyn christened “The Forty Days of Kengir” was not abrupt or unexpected.33 It emerged slowly, in the spring of 1954, out of a series of incidents at the Steplag special camp, which was