Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [298]
Apparently, the Ukrainians chose Kuznetsov in the hope that he would give a “Soviet” face to the uprising, depriving the authorities of an excuse to crush the prisoners. This he certainly did—perhaps going to extremes. At Kuznetsov’s urging, the striking prisoners hung banners around the camp: “Long live the Soviet constitution!” “Long live the Soviet regime!” “Down with the murdering Beriaites!” He harangued the prisoners, arguing that they should stop writing leaflets, that “counter-revolutionary” agitation would only harm their cause. He assiduously courted the “Soviet” prisoners, the inmates who had maintained their faith in the Party, and persuaded them to help keep order.
And although the Ukrainians had helped elect him, Kuznetsov certainly did not repay their faith. In the long, carefully detailed, written confession that he composed after the strike had come to its inevitable bloody end, Kuznetsov claimed he had always considered the Center to be illegitimate, and had fought against its secret edicts throughout the strike. But the Ukrainians never really trusted Kuznetsov either. Throughout the strike, two armed Ukrainian guards followed him everywhere. Ostensibly, this was for his protection. In reality, it was probably to ensure that he did not slip out of the camp at night, betraying the cause.
The Ukrainians may have been right to fear Kuznetsov’s escape, for another member of the strike committee, Aleksei Makeev, eventually did leave the camp, slipping out a few weeks into the strike. Later, Makeev read speeches over the camp radio, urging the prisoners to return to work. Perhaps he had understood early on that the strike was doomed to failure— or perhaps he had been a tool of the administration from the beginning.
Yet not all of the strike committee were people of doubtful committment. Kuznetsov himself would later claim that at least three committee members—“Gleb” Sluchenkov, Gersh Keller, and Yuri Knopmus—were in fact representatives of the secret Center. Camp authorities also later described one of them, Gersh Keller, as a representative of the secret Ukrainian conspiracy, and indeed his biography would seem to match this picture. Listed in the camp records as a Jew, Keller was in fact an ethnic Ukrainian—his real surname was Pendrak—who had managed to conceal his ethnicity from the MVD during his arrest. Keller put himself in charge of the strike’s “military” division, organizing the prisoners to fight back in case the guards attacked the camp. It was he who had begun the mass production of weapons—knives, staves, picks, clubs—in the camp workshops, and he who had set up a “laboratory” to build makeshift grenades, Molotov cocktails, and other “hot” weapons. Keller also supervised the building of barricades, and arranged for every barrack to keep a barrel of ground glass by its door—to be thrown in the eyes of the soldiers, if and when they should arrive.
If Keller represented the Ukrainians, Gleb Sluchenkov was linked, rather, to the camp’s criminals. Kuznetsov himself described him as a “representative of the criminal world,” and Ukrainian nationalist sources also describe Sluchenkov as the leader of the thieves. During the uprising, Sluchenkov ran the strike committee’s “counter-intelligence” operation. He had his own “police,” who patrolled the camp, kept the peace, and imprisoned potential turncoats and informers. Sluchenkov organized all the camps into divisions, and put a “commander” in charge of each one. Later, Kuznetsov would complain that the names of these commanders were kept secret, and were known only to Sluchenkov and Keller.
Kuznetsov was less vitriolic about Knopmus, an ethnic German born in St. Petersburg, who ran the uprising’s “propaganda” division. Yet in retrospect, Knopmus’s activities during the uprising were the most revolutionary, and the most anti-Soviet, of all. Knopmus’s “propaganda” included the production of leaflets