Paul Goble
Staunton, June 4 – Reports that
Russian police are training to suppress working class risings (politsovet.ru/51980-policiya-uchitsya-razgonyat-protesty-uralskih-rabochih.html) appear
especially ominous given that they come precisely when many Russians are
remembering Khrushchev’s brutal suppression of worker protests in Novocherkassk
54 years ago this week.
Working
class protests against Soviet power occurred frequently in the early days of
the Bolshevik regime – the most famous was the revolt of the Izhevsk and
Votkinsk arms factory workers in 1918 – but the communist government did
everything it could to cover up, distort or at least minimize such things given
its notion that it was the representative of the working class.
Consequently,
for many Russians, the archetypical working class protest against Soviet power
was what happened in Novocherkassk, a city in Rostov oblast, on June 1-2, in
which workers protested price hikes and the KGB backed by the Soviet army moved
quickly and brutally against the workers.
On
this anniversary, Russian nationalist commentator Petr Romanov describes what
prompted the workers of a Novocherkassk factory to protest 54 years ago and how
the Soviet security agencies implicitly drawing parallels between the situation
then and the one now (rusnsn.info/analitika/segodnya-den-rasstrela-bol-shevikami-protestuyushhih-rabochih-novocherkasska.html).
As
Romanov notes, in the early 1960s, the economic situation in the USSR was
anything but good. There were shortages of meat and bread, and Soviet leader
Nikita Khrushchev was forced to take the humiliating step of purchasing grain
from abroad. But the population,
especially workers and those outside of Moscow, suffered horribly.
At
the end of May 1962, the Soviet leadership boosted prices for meat and meat
products by 30 percent, even as it changed pay rules so that workers in many
factories were paid less. That double whammy meant that many workers could not feed
their families even at the subsistence levels they had been.
Throughout
the spring of that year, there had been protests in Novocherkassk, but most had
been focused on pay cuts and relatively small. But when the price rises,
supposedly introduced the Communist Party said “at the rest of all the toilers,”
went into effect on June 1, workers at a major plant there walked out and were
quickly joined by others.
At
10:00 am on June 1, 200 workers had struck, but by 11:00, the number of
strikers had swollen to 1,000 and appeared likely to continue to grow and
engulf the whole city. The workers said
they had only one question for the bosses: “what are we supposed to live on” if
pay is cut and prices go up.
The
director of the factory, B.N. Kurochkin, made things worse with a Marie
Antoinette-like remark: He told the strikers that instead of eating bread and
meat, which they now could not afford, they should make do with liver. Not
surprisingly, his words outraged the strikers, the director had to flee, and
the workers took over the entire factory.
By
the evening of June 1, 5,000 workers were on strike, and they moved to block
rail connections between Moscow and south Russia and began to march on key
institutions, including the bank and CPSU headquarters.
Khrushchev
reportedly was told about this strike already at 10:00 am. He ordered the
ministers of defense and interior and the KGB to take all necessary measures to
suppress the strike and force the workers back to their jobs. The commander of the North Caucasus Military
District gave the order to send in tanks to do the job.
Fortunately,
as Romanov notes, Lt.Gen. M.K. Shaposhnikov refused to obey that order. He told
his bosses that “I do not see before me an opponent who should be attacked by
our tanks.” He was removed and expelled
from the CPSU. Later, when he was asked
what he thought would have happened had tanks been used, he said that “thousands
would have died.”
The
workers continued to stream into the center of the city, something the
authorities sought to block with troops on the bridges; but the workers simply
waded across, showing that they weren’t going to be intimidated by just a show
of force.
Moscow
had already dispatched senior party officials, including Frol Kozlov and
Anastas Mikoyan, but when they heard that columns of workers were marching in
their direction, they fled to protected military centers, something that
apparently the workers discovered and that may have given them courage to
continue.
Soviet
troops then fired twice into the air and then they fired directly into the
columns of workers. Some ten to fifteen workers were killed in this initial
action, according to official reports, but the real number was almost certainly
higher, especially since it appears that the uniformed personnel fired from
rooftops and used automatic weapons against the strikers.
Some
of the workers fled, but others sought to break into militia posts in order to
seize weapons and free those of their comrades who had already been taken into
custody. Again, according to official reports, “more than 30” had been
detained. By the end of the second day, 24 workers were dead, and the
authorities buried them in places where other workers couldn’t find them and
make pilgrimages to these martyrs.
Despite
the deaths and arrests, most of the workers continued their strike, apparently
terrifying the party command. It introduced martial law, and then Kozlov began
to make promises that price rises would be rescinded or at least limited and
that wage rules would go back to what they had been.
These
promises led some workers to end their strike but others called for killing, in
Romanov’s words “not only the leaders [of the factory and city] but also all
communists and all those ‘wearing glasses,’” a reminder of the powerful
anarcho-syndicalist tradition in Russia denounced by the CPSU as “Makhaevism.”
But
despite Kozlov’s promises, the Soviet authorities oved to arrest more people,
at least 240 by the end of June 4. And
then they began to mete out punishment: seven of the leaders of the strike were
shot, 105 others were sentenced to ten to fifteen years in strict regime camps.
Only later in Brezhnev’s time were those rehabilitated.
Initially,
the Soviet government did everything it could to prevent anyone from finding
out about the Novocherkassk rising and the Soviet suppression of it. Reports
did make their way into samizdat and to foreign radio stations, but only at the
end of the 1980s, under glasnost, did reports appear in the domestic Russian
press. Even then, however, these were incomplete.
Even
to this day, Romanov says, “many documents from the KGB archives devoted to the
Novocherkassk rising remain classified” and beyond the reach of investigators.
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