4. Labor Fights Back (1953-1955) At Stalin's Death 43-The June Days 44-Vorkuta 47-'New Course' 50-Stirring in the Factories 51-Party Changes 52-Stirring Among Writers 53
4. Labor Fights Back (1953-1955) "Whoever becomes the ruler of a free city and does not destroy it, can expect to be destroyed by it, for it can always find a motive for rebellion in the name of...
...MVD Major Chevchenko, the camp commander, and his political officer Captain Buikov tried to calm us, but we yelled for the release of the Karagandas...
...The paper ascribed "social democracy and trade-unionism" to "whoever, in the work of the trade unions, singles out care for the individual from matters of production...
...Then it happened at Mine 7, then No...
...Light industry, on the other bond, yielded 29 billion rubles to the state, white golling back only 10 billion...
...He also charges that "300 men, including the strike committees of all the camps, were executed...
...Labor's demands for higher wages, coupled with greater freedom for individual farmers, improved Hungarian living standards...
...According to a Party paper, it was "full of bitter disillusionment...
...On the 25th, all fifty were idle...
...and the annual increase in dairy products was the smallest since 1946...
...The amnesty of March 27 created even greater hope...
...If the Occupation power had not intervened," reported the correspondent of the Neue Zurcher Zeitung, "there would be no Pankow Government, no Central Committee of the SED, no state security services, and probably no People's Police left...
...Everyone took the example of the Karaganda rebels and refused to work...
...Why were the workers stirring...
...Party Secretary Khrushchev led a group which attacked Malenkov's promise of more consumer goods, and compared it to the "Right deviation" of the liquidated Old Bolsheviks Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky...
...In 1955, heavy industry provided the Soviet state with 37 billion rubles in revenue and received 101 billion rublea back in the form of capital investment...
...4. Labor Fights Back (1953-1955) "Whoever becomes the ruler of a free city and does not destroy it, can expect to be destroyed by it, for it can always find a motive for rebellion in the name of liberty and of its ancient usages, which are forgotten neither by lapse of time nor by benefits received...
...There are lots of the others!' Was ever feudal cynicism more brutally expressed...
...The immediate resignation of the so-called German Democratic Government which usurped power by election frauds...
...But in the same period, while the population of the Soviet Union increased by 50 million, the output of cotton textiles barely doubled—despite the reconquest of the Baltic states (which in 1913 had manufactured a third of Russia's cotton fabrics) and annexation of productive Polish and East Prussian textile mills...
...Party Changes: In the USSR, the "new course" proclaimed by Malenkov in August 1953 was too limited to produce marked change...
...On May 19, Rude Pravo declared that "any Party member who skips a shift without serious reason is a deserter," and said: "More serious offenses against work discipline will be punished by Party organizations according to Party rules, up to expulsion from the Party, and such punishment will be inflicted on everyone, regardless of his function or position...
...Khrushchev nominated Nikolai Bulganin as the new Premier...
...The bars would be removed from the windows...
...In Budapest, demands for freedom produced a stormy session of the Writers Union on November 10, 1955...
...In a telegram to "the so-called German Democratic Government in Berlin-Pankow," the strike committee of Bitterfeld demanded: "1...
...Kolyma, May 1954...
...We want free elections...
...they increased their own productivity 71 per cent...
...the workers replied with slow-downs and absenteeism...
...Ulbricht pleaded with them to give the Party more time...
...Even the simple man felt instinctively that a real revolution was taking place in East Germany—a revolution against the same police system which had arrested, sentenced and enslaved us...
...On September 27, Czechoslovak President Zapotocky promised to end forcible collectivization, and the next day Prague announced price reductions on 39 food items...
...When workers in Mine 29 refused to obey Maslennikov's order to return to the pits, the MVD troops opened fire...
...Some of them had belonged to groups in Moscow and Leningrad who argued that the state should not be run by one or by several parties but by workers' and peasants' "syndicates...
...Soviet books and papers became more available, and Radio Moscow was heard by the inmates...
...Stirring in the Factories: In Central Europe, workers seized on the "new course" to fight for better living conditions...
...Now Pravda admitted that the pre-trial "evidence" in the case was obtained "through the use of methods of investigation which are inadmissible and most strictly forbidden by Soviet law...
...a longtime member of the German Communist party...
...They called for the release of all prisoners, who would, however, voluntarily undertake to remain as free workers and settlers in the region for another five years...
...Chevchenko, Buikov, the guards and the others in authority were kicked out of the camp...
...In the fortnight between the start of the Vorkuta strike and Malenkov's speech, Hungary's Imre Nagy had decreed an amnesty for non-political prisoners and canceled various farmers' debts to the state...
...I would never have dared dream," concludes Dr...
...In April 1949, he was arrested...
...In Po Prostu, organ of the Young Communist League, J. Urban revealed: "During the recruiting campaign for industry and mining, there existed near Warsaw a center in which young girls who worked in the nearby factory were billeted...
...When Selbmann said that the norms on their construction project would be reexamined, a shirtless worker replied: "Our demonstration is not only against increased labor norms and we don't come only on behalf of the Stalin Allee building workers...
...he revealed that the Soviet regime had invested nine times as much in heavy industry as in consumer industry between 1929 and 1952...
...In response, East Berlin building workers returning to their jobs on Monday morning, June 15, demanded that the norm increase also be revoked...
...in July, they participated in the Geneva "summit" conference, which established broader contacts between East and West...
...A Czech periodical boasted on September 30, 1955 that labor productivity in the Jiholen factory had increased 56 per cent in the past two years and norms had been raised 46 per cent...
...In Moscow on August 8, Premier Malenkov told the Supreme Soviet that "we can, and consequently must, force in every way the development of light industry...
...They were sometimes helped by local Party, union and industry officials who disregarded state directives...
...The Moscow amnesty was not the first in the Soviet orbit...
...When it was over, fifteen men lay on the ground...
...On the morning of July 23, continues Noble, the inmates of Camp 3 "went to work but about noon new arrivals from the Karaganda slave camp refused to go into the mine unless they were issued working clothes...
...Ae described in the Vienna Arbeiter-Zeitung...
...The workers called for Party Secretary Ulbricht and Premier Grotewohl, but neither appeared...
...According to Noble, the Karaganda prisoners finally overcame three drunken guards and broke out...
...When I, as a trade-unionist, expressed my outraged feelings at this deliberately planned class discrimination, I was smiled at pityingly...
...On July 6, the Czech Communists revoked a decree—announced only a week before—which had fixed criminal penalties for repeated absenteeism...
...1953 to main prisoners and forced laborers jailed for non-political offenses...
...At first, workers did not react to the speed-up decree...
...On July 5, the Rumanian regime also announced economic concessions: Grain would be released from state reserves, more bread and flour distributed, and other food shortages eased...
...In effect, the currency "reform" was a retroactive wage slash for the entire Czechoslovak working class...
...Malenkov remained, however, a Deputy Premier...
...one lives in new apartment houses, the other in old wooden shacks...
...Meanwhile, laying siege to Camp 3, according to Noble, were "about 300 soldiers deployed in newly dug trenches...
...On December 2, Pravda Vostoka reported that of 210 rural stores in the Central Asian province of Fergana, "in 103 there were no hats, in 18 no salt, in 75 no kerosene, and in 60 no cord...
...Another eye-witness of the Vorkuta strike was Dr...
...On May 23, 1955, Szabad Nep revealed what this policy had meant for labor: "In order to gain popularity, certain factory managers lowered norms...
...Vorkuta: A few days after Beria's arrest, a strike broke out in the coal mines of Vorkuta, near the Arctic Circle...
...The June uprising was the great sensation of the day," Scholmer continues...
...In some plants, so-called 'friends of the people' come forward with the statement that nobody could 'survive' on the work of such firm work norms, and they call for resistance [italics in original] against the tightening of norms...
...By noon on June 17, 1953, less than 24 hours after the Stalin-AUee building workers had walked out, a revolutionary general strike was in progress throughout East Germany...
...A Polish amnesty, announced on November 22, 1952, revoked or reduced sentences for "offenses against labor discipline" and for failure to deliver livestock, grain, potatoes and milk to the state ("on condition these deliveries are made by December 31...
...The intellectuals whose debating zeal had so struck me at first sight," reports Miss Gerland, "were students from Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev or Odessa...
...Most prisoners spent their entire income to buy additional food...
...Three months later, Frantisek Zupka, trade-union chairman, reported that Czech workers were exhibiting "social democratism" by their "lack of respect for the directives of higher bodies...
...At 1 p.m., the Soviet Army proclaimed martial law...
...The regime also promised to liberalize the Soviet penal code, and granted a broad amnesty on March 27...
...On January 24, 1955, a Pravda article by Dmitri Shepilov described the light-industry course as "the well-known path" of "Rightist restorationists...
...Each prisoner could henceforth write to his family once a month instead of twice a year...
...On July 20, 1953, seven thousand prisoners refused to work in the first pit...
...The prisoners were not interested...
...At 6 p.m...
...Then the strike spread to Mines 9, 10 and 25, and then to Mine 7, in our neighboring camp...
...Miss Gerland, Dr...
...The result, she says, was the creation of compounds where political opponents of the regime could meet and talk to one another...
...A third witness—and actual participant—in the Vorkuta strike was John H. Noble, a native of Detroit, who was not released from Vorkuta until June 1954...
...RIAS, the West Berlin radio, reported the demands of the strikers and described the growing demonstrations...
...The People's Police now began dispersing the crowd with clubs...
...Five days after the Hungarian Government decreed that peasants could leave collective farms, the Party paper Szabad Nep denounced farmers who intended to take advantage of the new law...
...it was no longer required to wear slave numbers sewn on our clothes...
...The regime announced, first, the abolition of the rationed market, which had enabled workers to buy basic necessities at reasonable prices...
...Pravda on December 10 reported "interruptions in the supply of bread and rolls, sugar, meat products, salt and the like" in the Crimean capital of Simferopol (population: 150,000...
...In Pilsen, Skoda munition workers stormed the city hall, raised the portraits of Thomas Masaryk and Benes, and demanded free elections...
...Then demands are often made for wage increases...
...Miss Gerland says that when MVD officials headed by General Maslennikov arrived from Moscow by plane, "at first they talked to the strikers' representatives with fatherly kindness...
...Only a week after the strike did Communist leaders dare enter the factories to "explain...
...about 600 strikers whom Fechner had released were rearrested and the Party Central Committee labeled the June uprising a "fascist putsch...
...We represent all Berlin and we want our freedom...
...Not long after the shooting, we raised our flag—a red flag we had bordered in black in mourning for our two comrades—at half-mast over the prison...
...You know we are striking.' We formed a strike committee...
...The tone of the security chiefs changed, became threatening...
...Labor's efforts more than doubled Soviet production of coal and oil, tripled iron and steel output, and boosted cement production to three times the peak prewar level...
...The release of all political prisoners, whether directly political, so-called 'economic criminals,' or victims of religious persecution...
...According to Miss Gerland, "strike committees and pickets were formed, thousands of leaflets were written by hand...
...Between 1945 and 1953, Soviet workers did a massive reconstruction job...
...The establishment of a Provisional Government made up of progressive working people...
...Tesla called this program "anarcho-syndicalism...
...Someone else made the decision for us...
...Perfect discipline was maintained...
...fewer pairs of shoes were turned out than in 1951...
...Among his fellow inmates was the former First Secretary of the Estonian Communist party, whose job was handing out food in Mine 29—later scene of the greatest bloodshed...
...In retrospect, the record showed that, between 1928 and 1955, Soviet production of iron, steel, coal and oil had increased tenfold...
...Malenkov's promise to develop light industry was qualified by renewed emphasis on heavy industry as the "basic foundation" of the Soviet economy...
...On January 27, 1956—a few weeks before the scheduled 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist party—Polish Politburo member Alexander Zawadzki wrote in Trybuna Ludu: "Various Party and state posts are still occupied by persons who get angry when faced with the necessity of changing . their attitude toward the people...
...Other changes were described by Brigitte Gerland, a young reporter for the West Berlin Sozialdemokrat who was arrested by the NKVD in Dresden in 1946, sent to Vorkuta early in 1948, and confined there until August 12, 1953...
...By evening, the Berlin insurrection was over...
...According to a Party resolution a month later, "Dery, Zelk and companions prepared a memorandum . . really an anti-Party platform...
...On Saturday, May 30, Prague launched a new attempt to make labor work harder by cutting real wages...
...The workers massed below began singing Brothers, Join Hands, an old hymn of German Social Democracy...
...and whatever one does or provides, so long as the inhabitants are not separated or dispersed, they do not forget that name and those usages, but appeal to them at once in every emergency...
...Though the new GUM department store opposite the Kremlin featured diamonds, furs, silks, and expensive toys for those who could afford them, basic necessities of life remained scarce in many parts of the USSR...
...Workers' subscriptions to the state loan were cut in half—from four weeks' wages to two...
...As before the war, Soviet tax and investment patterns built up plant capacity at the expense of living standards...
...Don't let us down...
...Free, secret elections within four months...
...Although there have been reports of widespread liquidation of the forced-labor camps in 1954-55, a committee of the International Labor Organization concluded in 1956 that forced labor still appeared "to play a part of some significance in the national economy" of the USSR...
...But we were afraid it was impossible...
...Scholmer, "that in the fatherland of the proletariat I would see a genuine strike, organized and carried out by thousands of men—a strike with slogans, strike committees, leaflets and strike-breakers...
...On July 9, Radio Moscow revealed that Minister of the Interior Lavrenti Beria had been removed from office, expelled from the Party and arrested as an "imperialist agent" who had pursued "policies of capitulation...
...New Course': In the first week of August 1953, immediately after the Vorkuta uprising, Communist leaders throughout the Soviet orbit extended the "new course" which had begun with the Czech and German workers' revolts...
...Wazyk indulges in a cold passion of generalization...
...there are people waiting for papers, there are people waiting for justice, there are people who have been waiting for a long time...
...By the time they arrived, 3,000 other workers had joined their ranks...
...Seized by the Gestapo in 1944 for anti-Nazi activities, in 1945 he was appointed to a high post in the Public Health Administration of the Soviet zone...
...the barracks would not be locked after evening roll call...
...The strike committee organized the 4,500 men in [Camp 3] thoroughly...
...The Crimea," Pravda noted, "is surrounded by the Black and Azov Seas, but in Simferopol it is difficult to buy fresh fish and herring...
...Britain spends some ?50 million a year on meat imports to supplement a home production of 55 pounds per person...
...others who favored leniency toward the workers were purged...
...Our pay was to be tripled to 300 rubles a month...
...Nagy also promised an amnesty for prisoners, abolition of internment camps, and a greater degree of constitutional government...
...The storeroom had none...
...With the permission of the commandant of the state camp 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...
...On July 23, twenty-five pits were idle...
...Comrade Imre Nagy," said the Hungarian Central Committee, "tended toward putting the brakes on . industrialization and especially the development of heavy industry...
...Italian workers had three, British workers four times as much...
...On July 4, a new Hungarian Premier, Imre Nagy, announced that the policy of "too rapid industrialization" was over and proclaimed a new emphasis on food and consumer goods...
...In the first month after Stalin's death, the new regime announced a number of economic and political concessions, aimed to persuade the Soviet people that a better era would begin...
...Meanwhile, the Warsaw Try buna Ludu revealed that 83 percent of workers recruited for the mines in 1953 had "left because of lack of interest in the living conditions of the miners...
...now they would have to pay more in the free markets...
...The changes affected both living conditions and access to information...
...for the rest, the authorities should check the records, release all the innocent, and set new, lower sentences...
...Gurevich went to the main gate and—looking into the muzzles of a hundred guns—announced that, from that moment on, the camp was under the control of the prisoners...
...The new international atmosphere, meanwhile, aroused brief hopes of greater freedom among writers and students...
...On the contrary, they continued to enforce their harsh labor codes...
...On June 18," Noble reports, "when Radio Moscow announced over our barracks' loudspeaker the news of the German uprising . we discussed the possibility of striking for our freedom...
...On September 8, Bulgarian Premier Chervenkov pledged concessions to the peasants, tax reductions, balanced development of light and heavy industry, and an immediate rise in living standards...
...While Soviet soldiers armed with tommy guns took positions at key points, columns of Soviet T.34 tanks rolled onto the streets of East Berlin, firing above the heads of the demonstrators...
...It lasted twenty seconds...
...Two months after Bulganin replaced Malenkov in Moscow, Imre Nagy was removed as Premier of Hungary (April 18, 1955), then expelled from the Government and Party...
...who had been recalled from Paris after World War II...
...there are Polish apples unobtainable by Polish children, there are children scorned by criminal doctors, there are boys forced to lie, there are girls forced to lie...
...The Soviet Union, Pollak concluded, "remains not socialism's fulfilment but its disenchantment...
...Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513...
...The Party now promised to "improve the living standards of workers, peasants, the intelligentsia, artisans and other parts of the population...
...Prisoners would no longer be locked in at night...
...The workers now demanded the release of imprisoned fellow-strikers and removal of the barriers to West Berlin...
...It halted farm collectivization, announced a partial amnesty for non-political prisoners, promised more lenient treatment to churches and offered to re-examine the cases of students persecuted for political opposition...
...In Czechoslovakia, as Zapotocky later revealed, absenteeism in 1953 reached a daily national average of 25 per cent...
...We could see the machine guns and mortars being put in place...
...Early next morning, 10,000 workers of the Henningsdorf steel and locomotive works to the north marched into East Berlin to join the demonstration...
...Otherwise, we said, no coal comes out of the mine for Leningrad...
...a mass of officers from the Soviet occupation forces in Germany...
...The slaves had simply put down their tools and refused to go into the mine...
...Somebody should explain why we are building palaces of culture, cinemas and theaters but not apartment houses...
...At 4 p.m., the Grotewohl Government announced that the norm increase would be "voluntary," but news of the Berlin demonstration was now reaching the entire Soviet zone...
...Foreign broadcasts were heard by elite prisoners in the camps and by free workers in the area...
...A new Party offensive to raise farm production held out the meager goal of 32.4 pounds of meat per person during 1955...
...Revolts in three camps in Kengir, Kazakhstan in 1954 were reported in October 1955 by repatriated Germans...
...in 1926, the same food had cost him only 26 hours' work...
...No "new course," however, was offered to labor...
...food which had cost 14 hours' wages in 1952 (and 8 before the war) cost only 11 by the end of 1954...
...The Czech demonstrations were only the beginning of labor's counter-offensive...
...Those who were members of strike committees will not be punished for their activity as strike leaders...
...The leader was Gurevich, the former diplomat...
...a former professor of Leningrad University...
...But workers' earnings, it reported, had only increased "from 5.80 to 5.83 crowns.'' George Brown, chairman of Britain's trade-union MPs, who visited Poland in the autumn of 1954, found that "the inequalities, the unhappiness and the oppression just cannot be hidden or ignored...
...Claims that stomachs are the same are made...
...That set it off...
...On May 28, Premier Grotewohl's Government in Berlin-Pankow announced a general increase of norms "by an average of not less than 10 per cent," effective by the end of June...
...In an effort to increase output, the Soviet Government had made changes in camps like Vorkuta starting in 1948...
...The June Days: The Central European Communist regimes did not, however, go beyond such measures in their bid for greater public support...
...Communist People's Police stood by, watching...
...Yet they will be compelled to change their attitudes, because the people have now acquired a sense of personal dignity and courage, and they won't agree to be treated as they were in the past...
...the workers had been receiving these bonds in their pay-envelopes for several years...
...Gyula Hay supported Zelk when he stated that Zelk had written sad poems only because he had seen sad people on the streets...
...During the night, railroad and telegraph workers carried further details to the zone's leading cities and factories...
...In July, when the snow was all melted and the sun shone continually, I heard from the 'free' people in the washroom that Mines 17 and 18 were striking...
...The new leaders returned to the emphasis on heavy industry* and even accentuated it in their Five Year Plan for 1956-60...
...Our demands were simple: Release of all prisoners who had served ten years or more in any Soviet prison...
...Although their pay did not increase appreciably, successive postwar price cuts on food, clothing and other consumer items brought labor's real wages at the end of 1952 back to near-1937 levels—though still far below the 1928 standard...
...Ten minutes later, from the electric power station across the hill, another red and black flag, a duplicate of ours, rose—magically, it seemed?up the pole into the sun...
...Meanwhile, greater press freedom in Poland permitted writers to describe the hardships of workers and farmers...
...Shortly after the strike began," reports Dr...
...On July 27, Noble reports, Derevyanko and the Interior Minister of the local Komi Republic came to speak: "They walked from one group of us to another, asking in a solicitous, fatherly manner, 'Don't you think it would be best to start production again?' " On July 29, according to Noble, Maslennikov allowed the strikers to assemble at the football field and encouraged them to speak...
...The Grotewohl regime—which since June 17 had already revoked the norm-increase, boosted social-security benefits, appropriated new funds for workers' housing, and promised more consumer goods—lifted the barriers...
...On this earth we appeal on behalf of people who are exhausted from work, we appeal for locks that fit the door, for rooms with windows, for walls which do not rot, for a holy human time...
...Norm and bonus requirements were relaxed in the plants, various jobs were classed into higher wage categories, wage rates exceeded the schedule...
...Immediately two thousand of us, with Gurevich and the strike committee, stormed down toward the prison...
...Instead, a wave of sit-down strikes broke out...
...Moscow's bid to the Yugoslavs acted to reopen the cases of Central European Communists who had been condemned for "Titoism...
...We became enraged...
...A new revolt in Vorkuta in October 1955 was reported by Austrian prisoners later repatriated...
...According to Scholmer, a wage system was introduced in 1952 that improved conditions for able-bodied inmates...
...On July 2, Minister of Justice Max Fechner wrote in Neues Deutschland: "The right to strike is laid down in the constitution...
...Terrible things happened there: dirt, hunger, misery, disease, prostitution, lack of care, mass attacks of hysteria, attempts at suicide...
...An MVD lieutenant ordered his troops to open fire...
...Second, it devalued the Czech crown, making one new crown worth 50 of the old ones...
...In the major cities of the Soviet zone, unarmed workers organized strike committees, burned Communist propaganda, wrecked Party offices, stormed prisons and police stations, destroyed security files, and liberated political prisoners...
...Dery's address was, from beginning to end, an open and brutal attack on the Party...
...When flats are built, they are given to directors, managers or Army officers, but not to us workers...
...Obviously, some Party members and trade-union functionaries were helping labor fight the higher norms and longer hours...
...In order to realize his opportunist, Rightist policy, he tried to use methods which are hostile to the Party...
...Three years later, Khrushchev defined these methods as "beat, beat and beat again...
...Later that month, however, Fechner was expelled from the Party and jailed...
...It repudiated the so-called "affair of the doctor-plotters" (accused during Stalin's last months of conspiring to poison prominent Communists), an affair which many thought would lead to a vast Party purge...
...Primarily because the Party-state denied them the benefits of their own higher production...
...Captain Buikov . . . asked permission to enter the camp and speak to us...
...Immediate abolition of zonal boundaries and withdrawal of the People's Police...
...He tried to push the leading role of the Party into the background...
...These imprecations did not halt the stirring in the factories...
...No reprisals against a single striker...
...According to Miss Gerland, common criminals and political inmates were separated early in 1948...
...In Czechoslovakia and Poland, workers demanded decent wages and control of industry...
...In other cities, the general strike continued for several days despite Soviet armed intervention...
...The German uprising had speedy repercussions elsewhere in the Soviet orbit...
...On October 13, 1953, the state trade-union paper Trud disclosed that in Saratov (population: 500,000) "salt, sugar, margarine, coffee are not always available...
...Often narrow and sectional interests of individual unions, as well as local interests, are pursued...
...When Radio Moscow announced that Stalin had suffered a stroke, reports Scholmer, hope swept the camp...
...Still, the Communist leaders attempted to speed up production without raising wages, and labor continued to fight back...
...Workers, joined by the general populace, marched against the regime in Leipzig, Dresden, Halle, Magdeburg, Gera, Weimar, Frankfurt-on-Oder, GSrlitz, Cottbus, Potsdam, Brandenburg, Dessau, Stralsund, Fuerstenberg, Chemnitz, Rostock, Warnemunde, Gotha...
...Next day, June 16, about 80 building workers of Block 40 on the Stalin Allee marched in protest to the Government buildings...
...Maslennikov . never spoke, except every few minutes to warn: 'Remember, you are insulting the great Soviet Union.' " On August 1, the MVD began to break up the strike by moving cautiously against individual mines...
...Two were dead...
...Zapotocky complained in Prague on February 27, 1955 that when management posted higher norms, "the workers stop working...
...The Soviet Trade Ministry paper confessed on November 12 that "interruptions in the supply of kerosene, matches and salt are still not overcome...
...Wazyk wrote: "There are people tired of work...
...According to Government data, the "average" Soviet worker at the beginning of 1953 required 42 hours' wages to buy a week's rations for a family of four...
...Among the other forced-labor camps in which revolts were reported between 1953 and 1955: Norilsk, August 1953...
...Brown also noted that, "although the great mass of the people are very badly off, there is no pretense at 'equal shares.' There is a bureaucratic minority that is extremely comfortably off by any standards...
...Peasants would be permitted to leave collective farms in the fall if they so desired...
...the bars were to be taken off the windows...
...Permission to function in the Soviet zone for all the major democratic parties of West Germany...
...On December 4, Pravda Vkrainy reported that in Alexandrovsk, "the city of coal miners," the "needs of the population are not always met: There are interruptions in supplying them with bread, salt and matches...
...A week after the Soviet amnesty, Rumania followed suit, and on May 3 President Zapotocky announced a Czech decree covering most non-political prisoners...
...Coal cars coming through our camp from Mine 7 were three-fourths empty, and chalked across the inside in big, bold, Russian letters was written: 'To hell with your coal, we want freedom!' Leaflets pasted on the car read: 'Comrades from Mines 12, 14 and 16...
...Despite these measures, labor in the Soviet orbit did not obtain better food, clothing and housing...
...Then, as far as the eye could see, the new black-bordered red banner of slaves-made-free replaced the Communist flag over Vorkuta...
...A Politburo member revealed that Zelk had "read the memorandum aloud and made public the names of those who had approved it...
...These decisions were announced in the Party paper, Neues Deulschland, on Friday, June 12...
...a Kiev University leader of the Young Communist League, and a former political commissar of the Soviet Army...
...After a half hour of angry demonstration, Selbmann, Minister of Mines, and Rau, Economic Affairs Minister, emerged on a balcony...
...Immediate dissolution of the so-called People's Army...
...wage differentials grew larger...
...When the medical bulletins were broadcast, "the prisoners gathered around the loudspeaker, listened with strained attention...
...The British Labor leader observed "mine-workers in the Gottwald mine near [Katowice] who hid behind pillars and doors until one of us lagged behind, then ran out to show us their poverty of clothes and food...
...In the same camp were two Spanish Communists who had helped ship munitions from Odessa to the Loyalists during the Civil War, and Poles who had served in the Home Army during World War II...
...Beria had been identified in the public mind with the "new course" measures which preceded the June 17 revolt, as well as with Soviet promises of legal reform...
...On August 21, 1955, the Warsaw magazine Noioa Kultura published "A Poem for Adults" by Adam Wazyk...
...Immediate normalization of the standard of living...
...Perhaps nowhere else did . . [Nagy's policy] cause as much tangible damage as...
...Not one lump of coal was taken from the mine...
...Although Soviet construction workers built or restored more than 150 million square meters of housing after the war, the average city dweller in the USSR had a third less living space in 1953 than in 1923...
...We never again saw Gurevich or the heroes who had spoken for us on the football field to Maslennikov...
...They did not let me write about these things in the name of 'higher goals.' " Radio Warsaw began reading letters from listeners: "Why is it that families must share apartments and live in dingy holes...
...At the plenary session of the Party Central Committee that week, the Khrushchev group gained the upper hand, and at the opening of the Supreme Soviet on February 8 Malenkov resigned...
...When Party policy at home failed to change, writers began to speak...
...He . . . read an order from General Derevyanko...
...Combined persuasion and threats began to take effect...
...Did I not realize, someone asked me, that 'they are the people Poland needs...
...Taishet (Siberia), May 1955...
...As compared with 1953, productivity in the manufacturing industry fell in 1954 by over 1 per cent [sic] while real wages and salaries increased 15 per cent...
...Immediately, Gurevich and the crowd seized control of the camp...
...Workers went on strike in the Erzegebirge mines, on the wharves of the Baltic, in the giant Buna Works and Leuna chemical plant near Merseburg, in the Zeiss optical plant at Jena...
...According to trade-union secretary Josef Tesla (July 2, 1954), Czech workers also urged "transfer of the means of production into the hands of the trade unions without the [Communist] Party...
...In Camp 3, where Noble was imprisoned, he met a former Soviet diplomat named Gurevich...
...But between June 9 and 11 the SED (Communist) party Politburo embarked on a "new course" for the benefit of "individual peasants, private businessmen, artisans and the intelligentsia...
...Joseph Scholmer...
...In Hungary, a Communist official declared later, "lax labor discipline in 1953-54 was coupled with a definite slackening of wage and norm discipline...
...On Monday, June 1, labor replied with strikes and demonstrations at the Moravska-Ostrava coal mines and foundries, the Tatra auto plant in Koprovnice, machine and textile plants at Brno, mines and factories of the Kladno basin...
...In mid-1955, Nase Pravda of Gottwaldov reported that "in many plants . . . ordinary as well as leading comrades . . [propose] lower norms...
...Scholmer and Noble also met former Ukrainian partisans who had fought both the SS and the NKVD, Jews arrested as "Zionists," deportees from the Baltic states and—according to Miss Gerland...
...As a result, while Soviet iron, steel, oil and electric-power output increased about 10 per cent during 1953, cotton cloth production was only 5 per cent higher than in 1952...
...All in all, in eight years Soviet workers doubled the prewar production of heavy industry...
...Identification numbers on the left arm and left leg would be removed...
...Stirring Among Writers: Two acts of the new Soviet leaders abroad stimulated new ferment in Central Europe, this time among writers and Party members: In May 1955, Khrushchev and Bulganin flew to Belgrade and apologized to Tito...
...Remnants of social democracy and trade-unionism" were also found among Polish workers by Glos Pracy of Warsaw (August 5, 1954...
...Scholmer, "the administration of the state camps announced the following order: "1...
...Never in the history of the world have working slaves been treated so cruelly as they are in the Soviet Union.' " Speaker after speaker continued in the same vein...
...A former Leningrad history professor began: "He traced the history of slavery compared our lot to that of other slaves...
...In other words, the slate used a 19-billion-rnblo profit on light industry (and an even greater profit on agriculture) to subsidize the producers'-goods and war industries at a rate of 64 billion rubles a year...
...Later in 1954, other state officials branded similar workers' resistance as "social democratism" and "equalilarianism...
...Here an estimated 100,000 forced laborers supplied 6 per cent of the Soviet Union's coal—including most of that for Leningrad, 1,400 miles to the southwest...
...For new workers they set a slack norm at the start and illegally enrolled them in higher wage groups...
...The Prague Rude Pravo (March 12, 1954) rebuked Party members who had abetted "social democratic demands based on the old-fashioned theories that everybody's stomach was the same...
...in the sphere of work, wages and norms...
...Meanwhile, the Government promised a greater degree of personal security than had obtained in Stalin's last year...
...In the Oberschoeneweide electrical-transformer factory, workers asked Ulbricht why his government hadn't resigned...
...Price cuts on 125 categories of retail products added an estimated 30 billion rubles to the Soviet population's purchasing power (about 150 rubles, or a week to two weeks' wages, per citizen...
...Throughout 1953 and 1954, the Party leaders appeared to be traveling along the widely-heralded "new course" with one foot firmly planted on the brakes...
...Thirty of the Karaganda men who had set off the strike had been put into the camp prison," continues Noble...
...Noble says that 110 were killed, 500 wounded...
...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...
...Late that afternoon, Party and state union officials turned down their demand...
...At the Brandenburg Gate—dividing point between East and West Berlin?two young strikers climbed to the top of the arch, hauled down the Soviet flag, and raised the black, red and gold of the 1848 Revolution and Weimar Republic...
...At this meeting, Communist writers Tibor Dery, Zoltan Zelk, Tamas Aczel, Tibor Meray and Gyula Hay resigned their union posts and denounced Party policies...
...in July 1950, he was sent to Vorkuta and spent three-and-a-half years there...
...the grain harvest was smaller than in 1952...
...The Party said norms would now be increased...
...32 prisoners were killed...
...Karaganda, May 15-17, 1954...
...The strikes lasted three days before they were put down by security troops...
...To underscore this point, in 1954 and again in 1955 the Party reprinted Stalin's On the Right-Wing Deviation Within the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, a tract which condemned those who placed consumer needs above heavy industry...
...The MVD was doing nothing about it...
...Within a year, the traditional Communist bias in favor of heavy industry reasserted itself...
...This virtually wiped out the value of state bonds...
...Oscar Pollak, editor of the Vienna Social Democratic Arbeiter-Zeitung, who visited the USSR in 1955, observed two classes: "One rides in automobiles, the other in overcrowded streetcars...
...the 10-per-cent norm increase stood...
...A few days later, a Byelorussian newspaper reported that "there is frequently a lack of such goods as salt, kerosene and soap...
Vol. 39 • December 1956 • No. 62
