The Uprising at Vorkuta
SCHOLMER, JOSEPH
THE UPRISING AT VORKUTA By Dr. Joseph Scholmer Introduction by the Editors The story we present in this special section is a sensational one. But it is only a flashing detail in the intricate...
...3. Identification numbers on the left arm and left leg would be removed...
...other areas were laid bare when the purge of Lavrenti Beria set off a worldwide chain of defections from the Soviet MVD...
...because our health had been ruined, we simply sat on a bench in front of the barracks and watched the beauty of the tundra in the midsummer night's light...
...That they could use the weapon of the strike with impunity in Soviet Russia, the homeland of the toilers and workers, was already a sensational success...
...But now at last we'd arrived...
...two SS men who had received life sentences in the East German trial of the Sachsenhausen concentration-camp SS...
...The prisoner could not receive more than 300 rubles a month, however...
...Be reasonable...
...Since neither party made any concessions and a compromise between the demands of the prisoners and the Government's offer seemed impossible, events moved rapidly toward a solution by force...
...It had destroyed the aura of the system, for this system can be assailed as soon as the workers use the same methods of class struggle against the ruling classes that are used outside the Soviet Empire...
...Since last night, no coal cars have come out of the mines...
...he knew his muzhiks: "During the last few days, events have occurred in some camps which go against the interests of all well-meaning comrades...
...Only a few prisoners realized that the Soviet Government was in no position to consider even the partial fulfilment of such demands...
...The implications of this crisis for Western policy have long been evident...
...They had voluntarily eidisted for the Vorkuta transfer, for they had been promised better pay and settlement as free men...
...And an old Ukrainian kulak actually began to slowly read the final communique of the Central Committee of the SED [East German Socialist Unity party], which completely dispersed all doubts that the strike had been a movement originated by the workers, not one engineered by Adenauer or the Americans...
...Tell me...
...Often there were snowstorms...
...Two months later, two young students of the Leningrad Mining Academy were working in Mine 6. "We learned very soon that you had a strike here," they said...
...Unrest began spreading again among the workers...
...I can't make this out," said Georg...
...it had not rained, so there was nothing to dry...
...We did all we could, but each day more of the wounded died...
...Gleefully and swearing lustily, the prisoners began to wrench from their hinges the heavy iron bars barricading the barracks doors...
...Now there was no Tsar, but a Politburo, and the Vorkuta region had won additional charm as an exile zone: This outermost corner of the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic had coal deposits of several billion tons, which, in the inhospitable climate of the Sixty-eighth Parallel, could be mined only by forced labor...
...For we both"he winked meaningfully?went to the same nursery school of dialectical materialism...
...Hey, batya" someone called from the rear, "we can't wait till you're finished reading...
...All the barracks were locked...
...The Soviet regime governs the strongest domestic power apparatus in the world: an army larger than any other, a security police whose numerical strength is incalculable, a militia, paramilitary formations...
...It could not be measured by European standards...
...Further improvements will follow...
...Why don't you want to work...
...The general told him to write a petition...
...Who of their relatives was in a position to travel, at his own expense, 3,000 or more kilometers from the Ukraine, the Baltic states or Siberia across the Arctic Circle in order to see them for a few hours daily for three days...
...There was so much water in my feet that in the ambulatory I could not get them out of my felt boots when I wanted to show them to Dr...
...on the contrary, the camp leaders used the meetings to strengthen the strikers' morale...
...In 1945, he received a high administrative post in the Public Health Administration of the Soviet Zone of Germany, which later became the East German Ministry of Health...
...This only brings unrest and misfortune to the camps...
...While there were frequent lights in Mine Camp 9/10 over a seat at the mess table, a stool or a bunk, such incidents were rare in Mine Camp 6. Of all the mines in Vorkuta, Camp 11, numbering only seven barracks with about 800 prisoners, had the worst working conditions...
...Then the officers took over, attempting to intimidate the prisoners sufficiently to make them go to work...
...When they were officially informed that the administration of the Vorkuta mining camps could not consider itself bound by any promises which might have been made in Karaganda, the men successfully influenced the old Vorkuta men to join them in the strike...
...Well, tovarishch, what do you think of the strike...
...While they were eating, soldiers cut off their retreat to the barracks and forced them to the nearby guardhouse for razvod...
...As far as the promise of free settlement was concerned, it could not have been kept because the preliminary conditions for it did not exist...
...If what they say on the radio is true...
...I told him that, though completely innocent, I had been sentenced to fifteen years...
...The number of nadzirateli, guards at the mine entrance, had been increased...
...At night, powerful searchlights, placed 30 to 40 feet apart, lit up the forbidden zone like daylight...
...After the evening meal, the prisoners in the barracks drank kipyatok, hot water in which sugar or sweetening had been dissolved...
...Construction of new housing in Vorkuta was already far behind the most pressing needs...
...Another door led into the palata, the sleeping and living room of the barracks...
...The movement was to have spread from the already striking northern camps 6, 7, 14/16, 29 and TEZ (the second great power station) to the camps near town...
...In the mess hall, they ate their second meal...
...They were polite but firm...
...They had only one wish to see their families before they died...
...In the meantime, the camp was surrounded by troops, bunkers were armed, mortars were placed in position...
...Gradually, I came to the conclusion that I would die here, exactly as my public prosecutor, Mr...
...The city of Leningrad, to which Vorkuta is connected by a direct railway, is almost completely dependent on the output of the slave miners...
...It was also important that the two largest groups, most important for the strike, namely, the Ukrainians and Lithuanians, had put aside their political antagonisms...
...The Vorkuta mines were administered by the Ministry of Coal Industry...
...The preparation of this kipyatok was part of my duties: On the stove of the sushilka stood a large tin bucket which was always full of hot water...
...For the most part, they were sentenced between 1943 and 1947 and belonged to the survivors of the prisoner army of hundreds of thousands who perished in those years because of the inhuman living conditions in Vorkuta...
...For half a week, we operated day and night...
...A German who returned from this camp three weeks later told me: "They treated us with kid gloves...
...As soon as it was necessary, security measures were also improvised...
...The conditions which can produce a strike remain unchanged...
...When reveille sounded the next morning at 5 a.m., prisoners rose and went to work...
...Undoubtedly the most important was Stalin's death...
...Again, the prisoners were called upon over the loudspeaker to surrender...
...The 19th Party Congress raised new hopes for Stalin's death...
...The administration ordered the old, rickety barracks torn down and new, bigger and better ones built...
...our people asked...
...It demanded the right to negotiate with an authorized representative of the Central Committee of the Communist party or of the Soviet Government...
...a second group of leaders was placed on a reserve basis...
...By so doing, it would in most cases also rid itself of the responsibility for their upkeep...
...Don't make things hard for yourselves...
...I recalled the remark of an MGB officer in 1946, when I asked him whether it was necessary to carry out arrests in the German East Zone on such a large scale...
...Not necessary," she said...
...When I arrived in Vorkuta (68?North Latitude), I still had a few Central European illusions...
...And the most active groups among the strikers could have taken over the central technical apparatus, such as the coal elevator or the clearing yard for mine cars, from which control over the entire shaft could have been exercised easily and effectively...
...The train consisted of 50 closed two-axle box cars...
...Karaganda...
...The drying room of my barracks was nearly empty...
...The oldest were between 70 and 80...
...We'll see that nothing is stolen...
...The best-organized groups were Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian ones...
...I did not go to the Soviet Union voluntarily...
...they were ready to cooperate on the old anti-Polish basis even in Vorkuta...
...In the case of the Russians, the role of a resistance committee was played by the "Group of Democratic Socialists," an illegal association consisting chiefly of young, highly gifted students with representatives in all the state camps...
...Good evening, Mr...
...the strikers dug only as much coal as was absolutely necessary to run their camp...
...After some time, the people from Leningrad in the camps received cautious questions about the strike in letters from their relatives...
...The meaning of this dependence to last summer's revolt is explained by Dr...
...They came up, bathed, received their clean clothing and, at about 6 o'clock, were back in the camp...
...It was translated by Peter Jacobsohn of the New Leader staff, and is presented here unabridged...
...I am a physician, I thought, and so they'll probably let me work as a physician...
...The General himself has permitted us to write...
...Some of the old camp personnel returned...
...We had worked together in the lumber yard, too...
...Every other day, the floors were scrubbed...
...He was sitting on a bench in front of his barracks, the still impressive ruin of a revolutionary, and carefully rolling a cigaret out of makhorka and the usual piece of Pravda...
...It wasn't easy to become a sushilchik...
...It's useless for you to continue...
...In the evening, I met Gribowski, a member of the Old Guard of German Communism, a member of the Central Committee of the German Communist party until 1933, a veteran of revolutionary work who owed his stay in Vorkuta to Wilhelm Pieck...
...At one time, all prisoners who tried to escape were shot and left lying near the gate for a few days as a general warning...
...At the first medical examination, the female head of the Sanitary Commission, Major-Doctor Trofimovich, simply pinched my posterior and?since she apparently deemed this a tolerably satisfactory examination declared me fit for the medium-work category...
...first four weeks' rest in sick bay with one, then the second when necessary...
...The sentences of the prisoners were not reduced...
...For each mine, there was an MGB-supervised camp...
...Many elements characteristic of strikes in the "countries of capitalist exploitation" were entirely absent: a public vole by the workers for or against a strike...
...This group consisted of prisoners who had worked under so called "half-free" contracts...
...Accordingly, they remained in the camp...
...Scholmer is now at work on a book, Vorkuta, which will be published this fall by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London...
...The old Mine 7 complement declared its solidarity with the newcomers from Karaganda...
...Nine days after the operation...
...In every respect, the conditions of this strike, which had to be prepared and carried out under the eyes of the MGB, were much more difficult...
...The struggle will therefore continue...
...it is a major center of coal production...
...This visit, incidentally, ended with the complete emotional collapse of the poor woman, who, after thirteen years of separation, found not a husband but a physical and spiritual wreck...
...The camp administration was convinced that the months under barbaric living conditions were enough to break the strikers...
...Those who don't want to, stay here...
...The next day, the mine camps near the town were also reported on strike...
...his blue eyes, dimmed by five years in Lubianka, fixed upon me ironically, and he started by quoting a famous sentence: "The history of all known societies is the history of class struggles...
...If he earned more, it was placed in a blocked account to be turned over to him upon his release...
...The window bars were torn off and the numbers removed...
...Some demanded the review of all political trials, including the sentences...
...I am surprised you haven't written yet...
...each of the thirty camps housed about 3,500 men...
...The barbed wire was thus debited to the prisoner...
...On the second day of the strike, a soldier asked them to resume work...
...It was warm...
...Were they to be released, they could no longer be prevented as "free men" from living with their families...
...The politically conscious prisoners had no difficulty piecing together a fairly authentic picture of events on the basis of official radio and press reports...
...Only a handful read books or newspapers...
...At the end of the corridor to the left was the sushilka...
...Mines 7, 14/16 and 29 were on strike...
...So I sat in my corner...
...The invitation was passed on in the most courteous manner: "Those who want to go to work may now go...
...The Soviet Government thus could not dissolve the camps, if only because it could not furnish housing for the tens of thousands of prisoners who would be freed...
...I traveled many thousands of kilometers without paying a single copeck...
...A sushilchik's duties are pleasant and quiet...
...I was utterly mistaken...
...I would never have become an invalid my amiable colleague Trofimovich would surely have seen to that if there had not been a major from the Sanodel as chairman of the semi-annual review board...
...help for sick prisoners in special situations (e.g., purchase of penicillin in quantity) ; technical preparations in the event of war, which, however, cannot be described here for obvious reasons...
...They treated all prisoners more or less in that way...
...The name of my travel agency was not Intourist, but the MGB Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, Ministry of State Security...
...But in Vorkuta they remained without the means to support a family...
...But the report that Mine 7 was on strike was true...
...Now, as before, the forced laborers of Vorkuta, as well as those in all other camp districts of the Soviet Union, live behind barbed wire...
...Daily, low-flying biplanes (similar to those called "sewing machines" by German infantrymen during the last war) circled over the area, systematically searching each square on their map for suspects...
...The prisoners detained in the guardhouse for refusal to work or other non-criminal offenses were set free...
...It was not even able to house the few prisoners who...
...It was getting worse and worse, and I saw the end of my imprisonment arriving long before the end of the 25 years to which I was sentenced...
...All the Soviet Government needed to do was to release them...
...That was the origin of the city of Vorkuta, surrounded by the mine shafts, residences for a few thousand officials, technicians and secret police, and tens of thousands of "free miners," i.e., forced settlers and pardoned deportees...
...The largest camp area in the Soviet Union is the Dalstroy complex in Eastern Siberia...
...They were old and sick...
...Bread is lying around on the tables of the stolovaya...
...It was roughly 100 feet long, 25 feet wide and at the center about 15 feet high...
...public election of a strike committee, which usually consists of the most active elements...
...The prisoners massed near the gate offered an easy target for the submachine-guns...
...others merely asked substantial reductions of the sentences, regardless of the juridical forms employed...
...One must, after all, remember that this was a strike occurring under very special conditions...
...This strike was the first in his life which had not revolved around him, the first for which he was not responsible...
...We made Georgian tea from a package that cost 4 rubles an ounce on the camp black market...
...Each camp was surrounded by a 10' barbed-wire fence...
...These prisoners were entitled only to "free keep...
...Vorkuta plays a key role in the Soviet economy...
...Then came Letts, Estonians, Russians, Germans and Jews...
...The lack of trust which characterized the relations between the non-Russian and Russian groups went so far that information was not exchanged...
...The prisoners were counted again and went to bed...
...Nothing, nothing at all...
...Its source was the hospital...
...A few hundred yards away ran the road to the cluster of mining camps to the northwest of us...
...Soon, more than a thousand men had gathered facing a small table behind which two chairs had been placed...
...Georg was an engineer, I was a doctor...
...The prisoners lay in their bunks at night, thinking: "What, what can be done...
...The material well-being of our fatherland is progressing rapidly, in the camps as well...
...Mine 6, the one attached to our camp, was to be the fourth to join the strike...
...Those who refused were led to the guardhouse entrance and remained there until further orders...
...Some of the details in other parts of the mosaic were exposed in the German workers' revolt last June...
...I can tell you what you know well enough anyway...
...The mine hired prisoners from the camp for labor, and paid the camp each month according to work performed...
...A prisoner raised his hand...
...In the mine, the prisoners refused to accept their work clothing...
...If a prisoner was really in a bad way, as I was, he could be operated on...
...The strike was the first visible, solid demonstration against the Government since the revolt of the sailors of Kronstadt in 1921...
...The remaining camps were known as "Vorkut" camps and housed the innocuous political prisoners...
...I said...
...To their families, they were as good as dead...
...From this margarine- and jam-rich diet, so many pickings were left for the so-called camp proletariat that, by 1952, practically nobody was actually starving (though, of course, it was no pleasure to eat the same monotonous menu day in, day out...
...It had found a strong echo among the prisoners and the population...
...For many years the dictator's end had been awaited with an intensity which had no equal in the annals of human despair...
...He speaks once, and then very briefly...
...All shades of political opinion were represented: ex-Communists like Franz Gribowski, former member of the Central Committee of the German Communist party...
...As a foreigner and former "Red," he stood completely apart from the "White" nationalist groups which were carrying out the strike...
...You don't believe we are making a revolution...
...Consequently, the latter groups were outspokenly pro-American...
...But when the strike became a real possibility, all the technical and personnel conditions for collective resistance were already in existence...
...By contrast, many prisoners were without any income whatsoever: Most jobs in the camp itself (barracks, kitchen, artisans' shops, construction projects) were unpaid...
...They knew that as long as Stalin was alive they didn't have a chance to get out of that hell...
...I witnessed this strike neither in Moscow nor in Leningrad, nor in the steel centers of the Donets and Don, nor in the power plants of Dniepropetrovsk, but among the poorest of the poor, the most miserable the utterly defenseless people who work as slaves in the so-called corrective-labor camps near the Arctic...
...We had dug holes to lay the foundations of the structures of Communism...
...No guard, no officer, no MGB official ever dares to descend into the dark maze of corridors and galleries for fear that he would not return alive...
...Then I was free to go...
...Liberty for these men would be tantamount to utter neglect, hunger and death...
...Sentries in camouflaged dugouts scanned the rolling lands with binoculars...
...On the other hand, the Soviet Government, whose hands were virtually tied as regards manpower, could easily give proof of its "good will" by releasing these disabled prisoners not only from the camps but from the Arctic region...
...He was about fifty years old, of medium height, sturdily built, with thick, greying, short-cropped hair and an intelligent, broad Russian face...
...Beria's arrest and the events of June 17 in East Germany also contributed to a spiritual resurgence and, a more hopeful mood...
...You can take as much as you want nobody has to suffer from hunger any more...
...This article was originally written for the international cultural magazine, Der Monat, published in West Berlin and edited by Melvin J. Lasky...
...The strikers were called up individually and asked whether or not they would return to work...
...After the end of the strike, the underground began to analyze the errors made during the strike...
...Scholmer estimates its prison complement somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 men...
...All you do that way is to put obstacles in the way of improvements which are to be made for you...
...Each prisoner received daily a pound and a half of bread...
...After all, why did I study medicine for six years...
...Yes, they were even prepared to continue working in the mines as "free men" until a new basis for mining coal had been created?either by recruiting new labor in the Soviet Union through attractive propaganda emphasizing monetary incentives, or by introducing a year's compulsory service in the North for Young Communists...
...But it did not release a single one...
...They were too exhausted by work...
...We shall make a revolution which will shake everything to its foundations...
...Most made between 20 and 40 rubles a month...
...We did not know at this time that, the day before, he had ordered the guards to fire on the strikers in Mine 29...
...The administration had a new out-patients' clinic erected...
...Physically, they were weaker than most other nationals...
...The locomotive takes empty cars up, but brings no coal back...
...More and more details became known...
...Add to this, of course, that none of the strikers had any strike experience they were striking for the first time in their lives...
...When will we learn what happens in Vorkuta in the summer of 1954...
...The copy of Pravda posted at the club was surrounded by a milling crowd...
...They could not go on alone...
...Shortly after the arrest of his immediate superior, Paul Konitzer, Scholmer realized he would be next...
...from 1940 to 1944, he worked at the Institute of Roentgenology and Radiology of the University of Leipzig...
...In those weeks, my choice of an occupation in the camp emerged...
...That evening, one of our two camp surgeons, Blagodatov, took himself an unofficial "leave...
...In Mine 6, for instance, it had the empty dump-cars sent across to the dump for three days, so as to create the impression in other camps that Mine 6 was still working...
...At the university, I never learned how to use a pickax or a pneumatic drill, and so my wrists gradually rebelled...
...Mine Camp 6. for example, had a complement of 3.500 prisoners: of these, about 700 were invalids who could no longer be utilized in the labor process...
...Then their escape method was reconstructed...
...We have to go on shift...
...I told the two prisoners I was going to visit a friend in the neighboring barrack...
...We couldn't tell in which mine the shooting was going on...
...I read Tolstoy's story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which I managed to get from the camp library...
...The Government has already approved the principle...
...When the news of Stalin's death finally arrived, bearded muzhiks with tears in their eyes fell on their knees and began to pray...
...its termination is an Arctic port about 30 miles to the north...
...4. Each prisoner could henceforth write to his family once a month instead of twice a year...
...By Joseph Scholmer "Do you hear, we are organizing a revolution," the other said quickly and wildly, as if in a fever...
...Perhaps he's already dead, but they won't announce it to the people before they have a new government...
...Neither dystrophy nor scurvy exists in our camps...
...The presence and activity of numerous illegal organizations within the camps at Vorkuta was perhaps the most remarkable phenomenon for newly arrived Central Europeans...
...The murmuring of the prisoners ceased...
...I answered, "he'll die...
...The strikers were hardened, and the strikes continued in the new camps...
...The second day, I was taken to be interrogated by an officer of the commission...
...In the whispered conversations taking place in the strikers' barracks, the view that the strike had to be terminated gained ground...
...Naturally, mistakes were made...
...The Soviet Government did the shrewdest thing it could under such circumstances...
...After the kipyatok, a few cigarets were smoked...
...At that, a listener shouted, amid general laughter: "Well, what has it shown the working class so far...
...Large new sick bays are being established...
...One was exclusively for political prisoners these were called state camps...
...At about 1:30 at night, the men from the afternoon shift arrived and reported that a strike had broken out in Mine 7. An engineer, who had visited Mine 7 and had taken cars loaded with coal out of our mine with his locomotive, had talked about it...
...This army of misery had to be seen to be believed: physicallv ruined by years and decades of imprisonment under barbaric conditions, poorly clothed, toothless, packed into overcrowded barracks, tubercular, afflicted with heart disease, almost all of them suffering from high blood pressure, the characteristic disease of the North...
...Read it aloud...
...Anyone dropping below 60 per cent of his norm received no money at all...
...the proceeds were turned over to the camp commandant...
...They could never ask a relative to forsake the South for the barbaric living conditions of the North...
...They reported that only the free workers were working, but that they were completely occupied with the maintenance of the technical safety devices, water pumps and ventilators in the mine shaft...
...Still others demanded "free settlement," declaring their willingness to remain in Vorkuta...
...Write a petition today and address it to me personally...
...Every public appearance of his was noted and scrutinized, and the rare new photographs taken of him were the subject of searching discussion...
...Their ideas had been developed without any contact with the old Russian Socialist movement and without any knowledge of the programs of the European Socialist parties...
...But I would never have dared dream that in the fatherland of the proletariat I would see a genuine strike, organized and carried out by thousands of mena strike with slogans, strike committees, leaflets and strikebreakers...
...In the course of the day, rumor turned the strike in Mine 40 into a shooting with a number of dead and wounded...
...There were about 120 Germans, the youngest 17, the oldest 73...
...Concessions Shortly after the strike began, the administration of the state camps announced the following order: 1. Prisoners would no longer be locked in at night...
...I don't think so...
...So I spent all of December resting in Levchenko's ward and had time to contemplate my situation...
...At 8 P.M...
...In winter, the outside was covered with a snow wall a foot thick, leaving only the small windows free...
...This action prevented the already scheduled strike in Mine 1, which was to be the signal for strikes in Camps 8, 9/10 and 11...
...People had learned to read between the lines and to hear the hidden overtones of a newscast...
...They had stricter camp discipline, a larger network of informers, and a tighter external-security system, as shown by the greater number of watchtowers...
...But they refused: they gathered around the camp gate, locked arms and thus formed a solid phalanx...
...When the men from Karaganda realized they had been cheated, they simply refused to work...
...It made no decisions whatever which might prove hasty or aggravate the situation, but undertook a thorough inquiry into precisely what had taken place in the camps...
...With it, they ate bread with their "private" margarine or jam...
...For a few months, Camp 11 remained a correction camp...
...the rest included the dispensary, tailor and cobbler shops, the food and supply depot, the kitchen and dining hall, the commandant's office, the "labor exchange," a warehouse, a jail, the so-called "restaurant"where one could buy with his own money borsht, shchi, porridge with oil, etc.and the "club," where from time to time movies of "great patriotic interest" were shown...
...Outside the camp, parallel to the fence, steel wires were strung to serve as guides for the police dogs...
...But when they arrived at Vorkuta, they were put into a routine state camp...
...From this respectable monthly income, the prisoners were docked for room and board, clothing and the guard system...
...So the major declared me an invalid and I became a sushilchik...
...Outside howled the purga, the polar snowstorm whose violence surpasses all the storms in the Alaska movies...
...Gladly...
...But no one knows for certain whether he reached his homeland...
...You yourselves know best how the administration has tried and is still trying to improve conditions...
...The MGB attempted a number of deceptive maneuvers...
...This maximum income of 300 rubles, incidentally, was earned only by miners who fulfilled the norm...
...This seemed understandable enough, for these prisoners lacked the unifying bond of a nationalist resistance against an oppressor...
...A long-time member of the German Communist party, he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 when the Nazis discovered his eleven years of uninterrupted contact with illegal resistance groups...
...The fact that the strikers remained in camp enabled the MGB administration to ferret out the most active elements, to isolate and transfer them, to conduct a general campaign of intimidation, to undermine the morale of the strikers by promises and rumors, and finally to choke off the strike by a variety of measures...
...On the inside of the fence, about 20' was considered the forbidden zone...
...Once the strike broke out, the MGB security organs realized that a number of mines containing extensive ethnic groupings had proved impervious to the infiltration of its spies...
...Demands The demands of the prisoners, submitted by strike committees or by individuals who were questioned, centered chiefly on the cancellation or marked reduction of the sentences, which ran to 10, 20 or more years...
...Chiefly, they were men of exceptional vitality: they had survived because they were the hardest and toughest...
...They began to shout: "Why don't you shoot...
...These were mainly organized on an ethnic basis, but had not been created for striking at all...
...46?below zero (Centigrade...
...You can only speak for yourself," said the general, "about your personal grievances...
...They carried their identification numbers on their backs instead of on their sleeves...
...But it was wrong...
...The fatherland of the toilers, whose Politburo is enthroned on the revolutionary Marxist traditions like a circle of cronies on their accustomed seats, is an abortion of socialism...
...Despite these hazards, escape attempts were made regularly every year, and just as regularly the escapees were brought back...
...welfare activities...
...In other respects, the cadres of the resistance groups did surprisingly good work, passing a crucial test, an ordeal by fire, so to speak...
...He was arrested in April 1949 and summarily sentenced as a "spy" to 25 years at hard labor...
...Camp life was hard for the Germans...
...From top to bottom, Soviet society is a house divided against itself...
...There were about thirty mine shafts...
...Next to each mine was the barracks camp for the miners and other forced laborers...
...A wave of depression swept over the barracks...
...In the entire district of Vorkuta, there were still about 3,000 Germans...
...This ration was inadequate in both calories and protein, and was based on the assumption that the prisoners would receive material support from their families either money or food packages...
...The events which led up to the strikes we had witnessed from our own camp...
...The number of old-age homes in Vorkuta was small, and these were overcrowded...
...Most of the prisoners realized from the start that the Soviet Government would never accept their demands in full, but thought some kind of compromise was possible, e.g., reduction of sentences in the ratio of 1:3 or 1:5, beginning with the first year served...
...He was polite and factual...
...Even if the Government wished to cany out a comprehensive amnesty, including the release of political prisoners, it could not possiblyat least not in Vorkuta implement such a measure...
...One of these days, I thought, he should come see us in person...
...What could be done to salvage the strike...
...5. With the permission of the commandant of the state camps of Vorkuta, General Derevyanko, prisoners whose output and conduct were satisfactory could, upon request and with the recommendation of their camp commandant, receive a visit once a year from members of their family...
...So the Soviet Government had no choice but to keep these invalids in camps beyond the expiration of their sentences...
...The prisoner explained his case...
...On those days, the prisoners tried to sleep off their fatigue...
...The MGB's most successful action during 1953 against the illegal groups at Vorkuta was taken in Mine 1, when the already constituted strike committee was arrested before the strike could spread to that mine...
...We have no reserves, only the Plan...
...In our camp, there were people of 37 nationalities...
...A few supplementary facts about Vorkuta: This concentration-camp area is located (see map, next page) at the confluence of the Pechora and Vorkuta rivers, just west of the Ural Mountains and about 30 miles south of the Arctic Sea...
...A camp police consisting of prisoners was set up...
...We didn't have to work, got regular food, took sun baths all day...
...Here, too, the demands of the prisoners were essentially identical with those in the other camps: removal of barbed wire, review of trial procedures, reduction of sentences...
...Actually, it took about a week after the outbreak of the strike in other camps before the psychological conditions had been created for a strike in Mine 6, and then the strike began there, too...
...These wretches, like other released prisoners, had to settle in the Vorkuta district, since they were forbidden to live with their relatives in other parts of Russia...
...I knew that just as Dr...
...I could let my fire go out...
...This order was announced on the night of the second day of the strike by a special courier of the State Camp Administration of Vorkuta...
...Beyond it was the railroad...
...As far as visits were concerned, the prisoners knew very well that this concession had no practical value...
...Such a program, under present conditions, would require several years...
...What the train crews reported was eagerly passed on...
...Twice a day, they got a pint and a half of cabbage or victual soup and about half a pound of kasha...
...A loudspeaker transmitted Radio Moscow...
...Between these two events, the following had taken place: After the military preparations for the "storming" of the camp had been completed under the personal command of General Derevyanko (that night, we saw a great many trucks filled with infantry driving toward the striking mines), an intermediary asked the prisoners in the name of the general to surrender...
...Don't you know that here, as in Russia, we have to destroy the entire older generation if we want to build communism...
...I believe that by the end of August you will have left already...
...The prisoners gave evasive answers...
...but she had obtained special permission from President Voroshilov, independently of the rights proclaimed during the strike...
...Five hogs from the pigpen to which kitchen refuse went were slaughtered...
...Each rumor was accompanied by concrete details on its source and how it had been communicated: A so-called "free worker," who toiled in the mine and whose wife was in Vorkuta, told the brigadier of the 6th uchastok that Mine 7 had gone on strike...
...Every week, a few of them were buried in the tundra...
...Had it been only a beautiful dream...
...All he has to do is to see that the fire in his oven doesn't go out...
...At the beginning of June, the last snow melts in Vorkuta...
...The introduction of the wage system in the regime camps in 1952 resulted in marked improvement...
...There was one American -a Communist...
...Water dripped from the rock formation above, and the prisoners were soaked to the skin soon after they started working...
...7,500 rooms would have to be built...
...Something had to be done...
...At the moment, the prisoners were crammed together 70, 80, 100 and 120 to a barracks...
...Most prisoners spent their entire income to buy additional food: margarine, jam, sugar, canned fish...
...And that is only the beginning...
...These groups were cadre organizations, purposely kept small so as to give the camp MGB few openings for counter-activities...
...Now that it was over, the mines produced coal again...
...The towers were connected by telephone, and an electric alarm system connected them with the division HQ...
...Week after week, month after month, year after year passed in this fashion...
...The most drastic demand was made by the members of a construction detachment...
...The walls were painted yellow, the bunks stained with a carbol preservative...
...God has rescued the Jews," said a Polish Zionist who had barely escaped the Gestapo and who in 1940 was sentenced to 15 years...
...There were also Caucasians, Poles, Hungarians, Rumanians, Central Asian peoples, Chinese, Koreans and Japanese...
...A food inventory was taken which showed supplies for four weeks...
...Their experience, as the expert Gribowski pointed out, was roughly that of the workers of early capitalism, the Chartists of the Russian labor groups around 1880...
...He thereupon boarded a commuters' train and went directly to West Berlin...
...It took me half a year to become an invalid...
...If he hadn't died, there'd have been pogroms again, as with the Black Hundreds or [the Ukrainian nationalist, Simon] Petlura or Hitler...
...These groups were organized ethnically, first, because the members of the various nationalities generally knew each other very well...
...Nineteen years I've been in this camp," cried a Georgian, "but never have I had such good news...
...Above all, Karaganda lacks the long, murderous winter of the Arctic Circle...
...The rest of the diet included l1/2-2 ounces of meat or fish, half an ounce of lard, a white roll weighing about 11/2 ounces, and an ounce of sugar...
...Three days later, the strike broke out in Mine 7. The men from Karaganda had started it...
...In other camps, these despicable individuals have already received their just punishment...
...Mine 8 was also reported to have stopped work that evening...
...When the night shift was called up for work, the guards were already resigned...
...Small meetings would have been possible, which could not have taken place in the camp because of the informer system...
...Those who refused were led into a room occupied by an MGB interrogator...
...They lacked material support and the important morale factor of mail...
...behind the barbed-wire fences, they could at least manage to eke out a bare subsistence...
...The strike leadership, whose representatives in the individual camps were members of the most varied nationalities, had at its disposal a reliable apparatus which could work with precision...
...But three mines...
...For the enlightenment of those who are more familiar with Intourist, the MGB is cheap beyond comparison...
...Instructions were given not to fall in for razvod at the guardhouse, but to retire after breakfast to the barracks...
...After serving your sentence, you will be released...
...I decided to become a sushilchik, that is, one of the firemen who stoke the drying-room stoves in the barracks...
...This most important organizational error showed the inexperience of the strike committees...
...At that moment, of course, the strikers could not appreciate what a tremendous concession the granting of even their smallest demands represented...
...I found Georg on a bench in front of his barracks...
...He took all this down on a large sheet of paper that lay before him...
...Any other questions...
...The Resistance Groups Another preliminary condition for the strike was the existence of resistance groups within the camp...
...Then Derevyanko gave the order to storm the camp...
...One source of antagonism was that the Russian groups had formulated a concrete political program which contained anti-capitalist and anti-American tendencies, while the other groups pursued primarily nationalist aims, which they believed could not possibly be attained without American help...
...Imagine," I said, "that you had organized this strike, the way you used to organize hundreds of strikes for the Communist party in Germany...
...The immediate result of this was that, in our Mine Camp 6, the administration saved the hogs from the prisoners' appetites the moment our strike began...
...they were numbered up to 40, but these included several which never got beyond the project stage...
...The strike in Vorkuta soon became popular in Leningrad...
...I must say I had pictured my first encounter with a Soviet colleague quite differently...
...Trofimovich did not know it, because never in her life had she known much about heart disease...
...Where from...
...The construction workers at the new power plant near the striking mines were also on strike...
...As part of some inscrutable Soviet propaganda for the Berlin Conference, he and several other prisoners were amnestied last winter and brought back to East Germany...
...Those willing to work mainly technical personnel were formed into a column and marched across to the mine...
...The medical bulletins sounded grave and subdued, their pessimism foreshadowing the end...
...At a small table in the corner, two prisoners were playing dominoes...
...Its low vegetation offered neither hiding place nor shelter...
...Their work was comparable to that of the illegal groups in the German concentration camps from 1933 to 1945: combating the spy system, even killing particularly dangerous spies undetected by the MGB...
...So I decided to see the doctor and complain of a hernia...
...Upon his return, I learned about the dramatic events in Mine 29...
...He had organized innumerable strikes in his time, with the same passion with which other people organize boxing matches, horse races or auctions...
...a general amnesty was not proclaimed...
...The largest apartments in Vorkuta had 2 1/2 rooms plus a kitchen: they housed the MGB aristocracy of the central State Administration of Camps...
...He was away for a week...
...For all participants, this strike was the first resistance action, something unheard of, undreamt of...
...When Radio Moscow announced the historic apoplexy, a wave of hope swept through the camp: "Surely he will not recover...
...I know that you are not guilty...
...About a fifth were Lithuanians...
...Only invalids got these posts...
...When our group of nine Germans from Camp 6 started home, we left 112 German comrades behind...
...The guard system could be eludedunder the cover of the polar fogs, which were unusually thick, or during a heavy snowstorm...
...All doors should have been locked, but the careless guards often left them open...
...This intermediary behaved so provocatively toward the prisoners that they beat him up...
...There were two groups of camps...
...Vorkuta is only one district?who knows exactly how many such districts there are in the Soviet Union...
...came poverka-retreat...
...and refused to resume work until the barbed-wire fence and the watchtowers had been removed...
...At 4 p.m., they were usually through with their work...
...On that occasion, my blood pressure had been 210, and that is quite something...
...Naturally, the camp MGB was aware of the existence of these illegal organizations...
...What do you think of the strike...
...And everyone knows how sensitive the Plan is...
...But the principal lesson of these events was that the authorities met a revolt by the prisoners far more cautiously than might have been expected, because a gigantic blood bath would have held up production...
...A first group of leaders was chosen with the purpose of exposing themselves during the strike, risking almost inevitable arrest...
...Notorious MGB informers were locked in the guardhouse for their own safety and guarded by the camp police...
...batya, you are a doctor, what does it mean: 'He is getting oxygen?' Can he recover with that...
...If it just affected one mine, okay...
...Everybody thought of the 25 years of imprisonment to which almost everyone in the camp had been sentenced and which faced them again with deadly certainty...
...anyone entering it was shot at from the watchtowers...
...They were either rejected or not even answered...
...There is no reason to re-open your case...
...they had outlived the hundreds of thousands who had perished in Vorkuta during the war and early postwar years...
...The June uprising was the great sensation of the day...
...When I arrived at the camp," Blagodatov told me, "I found about 200 wounded, most of them with critical abdominal and chest wounds...
...Self-Criticism Temporarily, the prisoners had ceased to question their realistic chances of success...
...My friend Heinrich visited me...
...Here was found a wash room about 10' square, containing an umyvalnik, a wash-stand with two basins, and also two pails, one with hot water, one with cold...
...Once a month, the bunk boards were boiled in hot water for bedbug control...
...The following day, the surgeon Blagodatov was summoned to Mine 29...
...The prisoners dressed and went to the mess hall...
...Two stoves provided sufficient warmth...
...Even the simple man felt instinctively that a real revolution was taking place in East Germanya revolution against the same police system which had arrested, sentenced and enslaved us...
...Meeting with the General The third day of the strike, around noon, the nadziratel suddenly announced that, in a few minutes, a meeting would take place on the square in front of the club building, at which General Derevyanko would speak...
...The prisoners were distressed...
...As Germans, we could not work at our professions in Vorkuta...
...The guards lived in barracks, which were sometimes even worse as regards space and sanitation than those of the prisoners...
...Joseph Scholmer studied medicine in Bonn and Basle...
...Even invalid muzhiks had crawled out of their barracks and said: "Give it to them, boys...
...Social Democrats like Hoch, former Deputy Chief of the People's Police of Saxony...
...He was soon sentenced to ten years' imprisonment for "capitalist propaganda...
...At once, each mine was sealed off hermetically, so that regular contacts between the various pits were cut off...
...The next day, I was standing on Leningradskaya Street in Vorkuta with a pickax in my hand and a quota of 45 cubir feet of loam per shift...
...often, they were unequal to the hard physical labor...
...Georg asked...
...The SED," he read, "will in the future turn its face to the working class...
...Our camp, Mine Camp 6, contained 64 such barracks, two-thirds of which were sleeping quarters...
...It's better to die than to bear this life any longer...
...The prisoners didn't dare attack the guards...
...The construction brigades outside the camp could earn up to 100 rubles if they fulfilled their norms...
...The coal deposits, on the average, were three or four feet high...
...The General was right: The other mines were working again...
...Scholmer's narrative shows that even in the area where Soviet power is considered most formidable, the punitive labor camp, resistance poses insoluble dilemmas for the Communist authorities...
...The more judicious, of course, sensed that this strike could not be crowned with tangible success...
...The prisoners had the feeling that the interrogator wanted to trick them, no matter where they signed, and so they refused to sign anywhere...
...Not a ton of coal for the Plan...
...This camp leadership went to the camp commandant and informed him that the prisoners were, as of that moment, taking over the administration of their camp...
...The brigades were called up, shuffled through the camp gates, formed a column (guarded by sentries with submachine-guns), and marched along a road about 350 yards long to the mine...
...They earned no money, were forbidden to write their families, and were deprived of a radio and newspapers...
...It is not too much to say that the crisis of Communist society is at hand...
...After the experience of the morning, the afternoon shift refused to go to the mess hall...
...When will we be able to return home...
...Everything is quiet...
...The guards, for their part, realized that any attacks on the prisoners would be carrying things too far...
...The General made a shrewd speech, in a fatherly tone...
...its task was purely the gathering of information...
...The first door led into a vestibule about 7' square, a second door into a corridor 4' x 22...
...The last fourteen of them, among them students of the Free University of Berlin, the Academy for Politics and the Institute of Technology, had been arrested in the spring of 1953 and had arrived in our camp at the end of November...
...Perhaps a breakdown...
...Now they sighed: "We thought you would strike until they took the fence away...
...The least disciplined and most thoroughly infiltrated were Russian ones...
...Hopes at Stalin's Death What were the preliminary conditions for the readiness to strike...
...Its arse...
...Some hid in the pits, and the guards chased them...
...All foreigners, Germans included, will be returned to their native countries in the near future...
...Booby traps were wired into the fence...
...As to the last point: The petitions of about a third of the 3,500 prisoners in Mine Camp 6, submitted in accordance with the proclamation to General Maslennikov or to the Chief Public Prosecutor of the USSR, Rudenko (the Soviet prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials), were all (with one exception) refused with the following stereotyped formula: "Your petition dated ?has been examined...
...Telephone wires were strung from car to car, sentries with submachine-guns clung to the roofs and buffers, the tender was adorned with a machine-gun...
...that was a certainty...
...The season for hernia operations was the cold months December, January and February...
...Life during those years had made them incredibly brutal, hard and inconsiderate, even in personal matters...
...second, because this was a guarantee against the infiltration of police spies...
...It was headed by Colonel-General Maslennikov, twice a Hero of the Great Patriotic War, and a holder of the Order of Lenin...
...This was electrifying news...
...I am surprised at your question," he said...
...Irresponsible provocateurs have incited hard-working comrades to refuse to work and go on strike...
...But the new camp leadership refused to deal with the local authorities from Vorkuta...
...We stayed up for hours discussing it...
...It appeared doubtful that it would join the strike...
...the same will happen here...
...The three women's camps of Vorkuta did not strike, mainly because the political consciousness of most women proved insufficient for planned strike action, although even among the women there were individuals who refused to work...
...They handed in their camp fatigues in the banya (bath-house) of the mine, received their work clothes, their lamps, and the naryad (assignment), and then went down into the pits...
...The Camp City Vorkuta When the counselors of Tsar Nicholas I (1825-1855) suggested that the region around the Pechora and Vorkuta Rivers be declared an exile area, he asked for a report on the living conditions there and then decided: "No human being can be expected to live there...
...64 victims of the shooting died at once...
...make it hot for this damned government...
...Some played dominoes or chess...
...The invalids no longer represented a danger for the regime...
...Strike Rumors I PUT ASIDE the ancient copy of Ogonyok in which I had just been examining the venerable face of the Dean of Canterbury, who always has a kind word for the Soviet Union...
...The day began at 5 A.M...
...clay was used to weatherproof the structure...
...He must be very old...
...Tension dammed up for years was suddenly released...
...In the pits, open and effective strike propaganda could have been carried out...
...Others were brought to the central isolator, a large wooden cell in Camp 1. Those in Camp 11 were kept under special reduced living conditions, working twelve hours, and with food rations below the camp average...
...In the evening, my friend Seryozha told me: "I've been playing cops and robbers all day long...
...From Mine 7, the strike then spread to Mines 14/16 and 29...
...These should have been the center of gravity of the strike, for the following very simple reason: The mine shaft is the exclusive preserve of the prisoners...
...Nowadays, they are merely half beaten to death...
...In the evening, the first loaded coal cars rumbled down into the neighboring mines...
...There the prisoners not only refused to work but, at a public meeting, elected their own camp administration, in which all the larger nationalities were represented...
...Next morning, the empty cars were pulled out...
...in addition, his food ration was reduced...
...It is generally believed to be the largest permanent concentration camp in European Russia...
...Mine Camp 6 employed only zaklyuchonnye, normal prisoners...
...You are unwise to let yourselves be incited to strike by a few agitators and provocateurs...
...With his stubby forefinger he had drawn a generous arc over the northern coast of Asiatic Russia, reaching from Vorkuta to the neighborhood of Sakhalin, and said: "Somewhere here you will perish...
...It depended to a great extent on the groups comprising the camp...
...The sole inhabitants of the tundra, the Komis, a tribe related to the Samoyeds, received rewards many times their yearly income for each escapee they helped deliver to the militia...
...Of all the prisoners who tried to escape during my time, only one Finn was not brought back...
...No one else raised his hand...
...Pray God, may Satan soon come get his soul...
...Two attempts at a public meeting by General Derevyanko to change the prisoners' minds failed...
...only those directly in front of the paper could read it...
...His experience with Soviet and Communist methods at first hand was disillusioning...
...Many of the wounded could not be saved because the wound infections had progressed too far and because neither sufficient instruments, nor operating facilities, nor bandages, nor professional help was available...
...The personnel of the barracks consisted of a chief, a day stoker (myself), a night stoker, and a prisoner who carried coal and water...
...The years in Europe were the "good years" for the prisoners...
...Within a few days all of Mine 7 was struckcompletely...
...They tried to induce the prisoners to start work...
...Some of the rumors may have been planted by the MGB in order to confuse us...
...Then they went to the guard house for muster (razvod...
...The members of these ethnic groups had, from the first, established the necessary contacts among themselves...
...But this did not apply to the foreigners, who had no contact at all with their relatives...
...The men on the early shift returned from the pits in the afternoon without having mined a single ton of coal...
...It was a mild summer night, July 1953, around midnight...
...We had carried bricks, mixed cement and carried mortar...
...Was any other outcome possible but termination of the strike without having forced substantial concessions by the Government...
...for a good miner, the payment was about 1,200 rubles...
...You go," one of them said...
...Behind the small, barred windows the heads of the prisoners were clearly visible...
...Most of them said: "Because the others don't work...
...after serving their sentences, were set free as disabled invalids...
...They have learned from their mistakes and drawn conclusions...
...When the growing number of construction projects at Vorkuta resulted in a labor shortage, and more and more prisoners in Vorkuta had to be put on the sick list, the MGB headquarters in Moscow decided to transfer a trainload of workers from Karaganda to Vorkuta...
...Apparently, they only wanted to know what had happened, nothing else...
...Nazis interned at Buchenwald till 1950 who had been sentenced to 25 years' hard labor and transferred to Vorkuta...
...Now I can confess that I helped create that effect...
...No one remained behind, just as if the strike had never taken place...
...they talked incessantly about the sights in the West...
...In the other camps, the whole thing has already fizzled out...
...Trofimovich wanted to send me hack to work, but Levchenko saved me: "According to an order of Suruxlrl [ the central medical headquarters of Vorkuta], patients must remain in bed four weeks after a hernia operation...
...The coal shortage became apparent right away...
...He looks old enough, let's hope he'll drop dead soon," the prisoners kept saying...
...Until then, I worked in the woodshed with logs of all descriptions...
...The heads of the ethnic groups notified their men...
...During the night, the illegal strike committee, in which Ukrainians and Lithuanians were prominent, issued the order for the strike the next morning...
...We can go even further: The industrial production of the Soviet Union, because it is based on a planned system, is far more sensitive to any interference...
...Not far from where we sat, it branches out: One track runs straight and disappears on the horizon of the tundra...
...Some strikers were distributed among other camps...
...Nobody wanted to go to work...
...A few nights before, a special transport train from Vorkuta had rolled by our mine...
...The letters lay around the censor's office for three months and then were returned to the senders...
...Late in the fall, it was converted back into a normal camp...
...The technique of this strike was developed on the spot, independently in each camp and without contact or exchange of experiences with the neighboring camps, so that each camp developed its own techniques and, in many instances, the strike took a completely different course in various camps...
...Thus, the concessions of the Soviet Government, measured against the demands of the prisoners, were too insignificant to be considered substantial gains by the prisoners...
...most of them had been construction workers...
...Ukrainians sang their freedom songs...
...An Independent Camp Republic One day, we heard, far away but quite clearly, furious submachine-gun and rifle fire from the direction of Mines 7, 14/16 and 29 right ahead of us...
...finally, because the various "national elite" groups had the upper hand in these organizations...
...The man replied: "During the past two years, I've already written seven petitions...
...Trofimovich...
...His commission had no authority...
...Anyone wanting to get to know the real Soviet Union should travel through the good offices of the MGB rather than those of Intourist, for the latter always takes its guests over the same boring route: Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, and then the Crimea...
...He can hardly talk any more," said a Ukrainian kolkhoznih...
...Dostoyevsky, The Possessed In the three-and-a-half years between June 1950 and December 1953 which I spent as a guest of the Soviet Union, I lived through fantastic events...
...The space between the planks was filled with cinders...
...His life is simple and contemplative...
...A strike comprising not only Vorkuta, but all districts of the MGB camps, would shake the entire structure of the Soviet economy to its very foundations...
...But it is only a flashing detail in the intricate mosaic of Russian and satellite resistance to Communism...
...Resume work tomorrow...
...Prisoners in the Karaganda district live in somewhat better conditions (climatic and general) than those in Vorkuta...
...A large commission, consisting of about thirty officers, arrived by plane at the small airstrip in Vorkuta...
...And the old revolutionary, whose declining years were proof of the axiom that the Revolution devours its own children, had not lost his sense of the historical irony of this strike...
...That was the extent of her medicine...
...The content of their program was comparable to that of the British Labor party...
...Morale during the strike had been good, since the strike had been so popular...
...Only in the summer can they strike...
...What remained of the entire action...
...They succeeded in mustering the entire first shift at the camp gate...
...In November 1953, Mine Camp 11 was once more declared a punitive camp and filled with strikers from all other mines...
...He questioned me about personal data, the length of my sentence and its reasons, and why I didn't want to work...
...Ruptures were extraordinarily worthwhile in the camp...
...A great Party Congresseveryone talks for hours, and the Mustache hardly says a word...
...Would you like some tea...
...Colleague," he replied...
...It is all the more remarkable that these young people, through their own thinking and without studying the theory or practice of other Socialist parties, had created a party which in every way was "modern...
...As the Pravda slowly dissolved into blue smoke, he turned his weather-beaten face to me...
...Besides that, I have a heart ailment...
...Along the walls were double rows of wooden bunks, each about 32" wide, covered with straw sacks...
...Mine Camp 9/10, for instance, consisted of about 40 per cent so-called katorzhniki, prisoners explicitly sentenced to katorga, penal servitude...
...At Vorkuta, there were thirteen state camps run by the MGB under a special chief, General Derevyanko...
...The illegal resistance groups of the camp used this week to make direct preparations for the strike...
...Good evening, Comrade Sushilchik...
...Mine Camp 6 My barracks was No...
...he had entered the U.S...
...Before they descended into the mine, they were counted again...
...The formulas used by different groups varied widely...
...2. The bars would be removed from the windows...
...All discussions were allowed to take place in the camp, instead of transferring them to the pits...
...Work could be done only by squatting or lying down...
...New, higher food rations, uniform for all prisoners, were fixed...
...He wore an elegant uniform, and his golden epaulets glittered in the sun...
...The gornyaki, the miners, rose, washed and ate the first of their two daily meals in the great mess hall...
...He tried to persuade the prisoners to sign their names in one of the columns...
...their living conditions were no different from those of the old Vorkuta prisoners...
...The End of the Strike The end of the strike came with the same ghostly quiet as the beginning...
...You have been sentenced in accordance with the law...
...They assured him that order would be maintained and asked him to withdraw his officers and soldiers so as to avoid unnecessary complications...
...Only during the summer is the climate an ally of the prisoners...
...They replied: "Has the fence been taken away...
...proclamation of the strike demands...
...In none of the mines did the illegal strike committees develop that form of strike which, in the history of all strikes, has proved the most effective, i.e., the strike at the place of work, the sit-down strike...
...creating national links against the "anonymization policy" of the camp administration...
...Perhaps he was right, perhaps not...
...A German spoke up: "Why aren't we allowed to write...
...He's finished...
...A rumor spread about a strike in Mine 40, the largest and most modern in Vorkuta...
...The barracks were always locked and the windows barred...
...The arrested people were mostly leaders of the resistance groups...
...But in most cases the norm was too high for most prisoners to fulfill...
...Trofimovich, of course, knew why, and had strictly forbidden hernia operations...
...Discipline was not as strict for example, good behavior could result in a pass to town...
...To what extent its agents could infiltrate them would depend mainly on two factors: the conspiratorial experience and techniques of the illegal groups on the one hand, and the ability of the camp MGB chief on the other...
...The quarters which common soldiers or non-coms of the camp administration and their families were assigned never exceeded a single small room...
...The free warehouse sold its supplies to the prisoners...
...I asked...
...There was a little talk, chiefly stories of the war or captivity in Germany...
...They were almost intoxicated by their strike...
...Not all of the mines went on strike, mainly because of the counter-measures taken by the MGB on the strength of their experiences in other mines...
...The locomotives were still pulling single carloads of coal in our direction: Were the other shafts around the same railroad track as 7 working...
...They were led under guard from the barracks to the mess hall, from the mess hall to the mine, and back from work again...
...But in my case the surgeon, the fat Levchenko, told her that my rupture might he fatal, and that 1 would have to be operated on immediately...
...Camps with a high percentage of kalorzliniki were specially guarded by the MGB...
...Neither the miners nor the outside construction detachments went to work...
...The heads of the individual groups were in touch with one another, but this contact was limited to the exchange of information, lists of spies, etc...
...The following day brought a host of rumors which mostly turned out to be what is called parasha, scuttlebutt...
...Pakhanov, had prophesied during our last conversation in Berlin...
...We Also Strike As already Reported, Mine Camp 6 was among the relatively peaceful camps in Vorkuta...
...Reveille sounded as usual at 5 o'clock...
...Finally, the officers succeeded in bringing a second, larger batch to the pits...
...The atmosphere there was comparatively civil and friendly...
...The General appeared with the camp commandant and no other escort...
...Four days of the month, there was no work...
...In the hands of the millions of forced laborers are about 50 per cent of the coal output and nearly 80 per cent of the lumber industry...
...The strike committee had either not had enough time in the few minutes between the announcement and the beginning of this meeting to appoint a spokesman, or else it knew that, after the resumption of work in the other mines, the strike could not be continued in Mine 6. That same day, some of the Germans wrote letters to their families...
...Their number varied with each camp...
...Could it have ended otherwise...
...The prosecutor sat behind a huge ledger with two columns: one for prisoners willing to work, the other for those who were not...
...If this were my strike," Gribowski interrupted me, "things would be going differently you can depend on that...
...Who wants to say something...
...The wages you get for your work will be increased by the Government...
...All released prisoners would have had to remain in the North if coal production were not to stop completely...
...They just carried on welfare activities for their ethnic groups...
...The guilt rests with those enemies of the people and of the Soviet power who have egged you on...
...We were invalids...
...Camp and mine commandants, and their deputies and officers, received at best two-room apartments...
...some remained...
...6. Petitions for review of their investigation and trial procedures could be submitted by each prisoner to the chairman of the commission especially dispatched from Moscow, General Maslennikov...
...Almost every one of them had a family a wife, sons, daughters or grandchildren who would welcome them home...
...Outside the window hung a thermometer which showed 35?40?38?42...
...At first it was impossible to draw a clear picture of the situation, but gradually the facts began to emerge...
...He was transferred to Vorkuta in July 1950, and remained there for three-and-a-half years...
...the accumulated strike experience of the trade unions...
...The strikers in Mine 6 realized that they were linked to the events in the other mines...
...If the alarm sounded, say, when a searchlight broke down, within a few minutes the compound would be surrounded by a special guard troop kept in constant readiness...
...If only 15,000 prisoners that is, about a tenth of those workingwere released and if just one room were assigned to two prisoners with their families...
...The most important result was that the strike had taken place at all...
...Sometimes, early in the morning, I stood by the window and watched the brigades leave the camp gates to work...
...The train rolled down the track leading to Mine 7 and stopped on a siding...
...There were three tables with chairs or stools, and twenty small cabinets in which the eighty occupants kept sugar, margarine and jam...
...This was done...
...on the Right, the former chief of the Anglo-American section of the Reich Air Ministry, Herr von Dewitz...
...Not both sides at the same time?if he should be lucky enough to have two...
...When they were broadcast, the prisoners gathered around the loudspeaker listened with strained attention...
...But the tundra itself remained...
...About half the prisoners were Ukrainians, most of them from the former Polish Ukraine (Galicia...
...Leningrad's coal supply was no longer endangered...
...To its headquarters in a small camp adjoining Mine 8 were brought all the prisoners* ringleaders and, in fact, all the arrested strikers...
...Not one of the leaders of the strike had ever seen, taken part in or led a strike...
...Mine Camp 11 was filled with prisoners who had been arrested in the striking mines and were to be isolated from the rest of the prisoners...
...In the five months following the strike, one prisoner in Mine Camp 6 was visited once by his wife...
...By the end of August we would all be going home...
...at the age of three, and, deciding at 45 that the American climate was not liberal enough, he had returned to Russia...
...This was a secret strike, a strike of the "underground...
...But this was not to happen...
...During our odyssey in countless work brigades, we had done just about everything...
...In addition, the camp leadership tended to be anti-German: The Germans were and would always remain fascists...
...The commission worked for about a week, and then flew off again, leaving no instructions at all...
...according to her own words, she was leaving the camp more desperate and despondent than ever...
...I shall have it studied immediately...
...Each camp had its specific atmosphere, which differed substantially from one camp to another...
...The gates were pushed in by the soldiers...
...Go In work...
...It was built simply: A row of thick poles was rammed into the tundra earth, crossbeams were nailed to it, and the beams covered by wooden planks both inside and out...
Vol. 37 • March 1954 • No. 62
