Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 26 – One of the
most unfortunate aspects of Western research on Russia is that most people
examining that country have ignored new information on little known events in
Soviet times despite the ways in which new reports shed light on how that
system operated and on how its successors function as well.
The last few days have brought
articles containing new information about three intriguing events: a planned revolt
by an OGPU officer against the system his organization helped maintain, risings
by Western Belarusians forced into the ranks of the Soviet Army at the end of
World War II, and the largest ever revolt by GULAG political prisoners at
Vorkutlag in 1942.
Even a Chekist Can
Rebel against the Chekist State
Any “individual who stands up
against the system in a totalitarian state is doomed,” the editors of the Taiga
news service say; “but what if this individual is not a simple mortal but an
officer of the special services?” That happened in 1933 in the Altay (http://tayga.info/139082, using barnaul.fm/2018/02/20/vosstanie-altajskogo-chekista/
http://tayga.info/139082).
In Stalin’s times, Mikhail Kleymyonov,
an OGPU officer who was a native of Altay Kray, was so horrified by the fabrication
of cases, torture, and mass executions carried out by his colleagues that he began
to plan an uprising against Soviet power in the Troitsk and Biisk districts
where he had relatives and many friends.
He chose as X hour August 1, 1933.
He assembled a small group of people
of similar mind; and they began to prepare for an armed uprising.
Unfortunately, one of them appears to have been betrayed. And Kleymyonov was
forced to flee into China where his OGPU comrades assumed he would stay. But
instead, he changed his name and returned to the USSR settling in Alma-Ata.
Still unhappy with what he saw
around him, he decided in 1948 to flee to Iran or Turkey. Unfortunately for
him, he was caught by the Ministry for State Security which viewed his arrest
as a great victory because they were certain that Kleymyonov has “long ago fled
to the Chinese” and was beyond their reach.
They dispatched him the GULAG, but
he remained alive. And in 1960, after
his release, he appealed for rehabilitation arguing that he was horrified by what
Stalinists had done but that he personally had committed no crimes against the
Soviet people. Despite Khrushchev being in the midst of his anti-Stalin
campaign, Kleymyonov’s request was refused.
But his case suggests that there
were more angry Chekists than the standard histories indicate and that at least
some of them were prepared to take things into their own hands.
Belarusians
Revolted When Forced into Soviet Army
In order to fill the depleted ranks
of Red Army units in 1945, commanders drafted people from the local population
in the western borderlands. Among them were many Western Belarusians who did
not want to fight for the USSR and hoped that they could become Poles and
Polish soldiers. To that end, some of them revolted against their officers.
“By the spring of 1945, a significant
part of such newly minted soldiers consisted of people from Western Belarus, a
territory which during the war was for a long time under the Germans,” Russian
historians say, adding that SMERSH concluded that these men did not want to
fight for Moscow (russian7.ru/post/bunt-v-krasnoy-armii-v-marte-1945-goda-chto-p/).
Many of these people considered
themselves to be Poles and “were convinced that Western Belarus should be given
to Poland;” and they wanted to serve in the Polish army which was suffering
significantly smaller losses than were units of the Red Army nearby. The center of the revolt was the 34th
Division, and its soldiers revolted on March 23.
They locked up their officers,
seized guns, and deserted in large numbers. When the Soviet security services
restored order, they concluded that disaffection among the Belarusians was so
great that the only solution was to send these soldiers to distant parts of the
Soviet Union even though that reduced the size of the Soviet attacking forces.
Political
Prisoners Lead a Mass Revolt in Vorkutlag, Make Plans to Seize Entire Region
The largest revolt in GULAG history
was led by political prisoners allied with free workers in the Lesoreid camp in
the Komi ASSR in January 1942. They worked closely with a civilian worker named
Retyunin for whom the uprising has been named and who was clever enough to get
weapons (russian7.ru/post/retyuninskoe-vosstanie-pervyy-myatezh-z/).
On the first day of the rising, the
prisoners led by Retyunin overpowered the guards, cut the camp off from the outside
world, and started to march toward civilian facilities like the town and
airport. The security forces didn’t know
what happened until after everything began, and they were located in the wrong
places to stop things immediately.
Once it became obvious how serious
the revolt was, the Soviet security police brought in heavy weapons and gave
battle. Forty-two prisoners and free employees who joined them were killed; but
so too were 33 guards. Once the revolt was suppressed, 68 people were charged
with violating Soviet laws, and 50 were sentenced to death.
The point in each of these cases is
not that they succeeded but that they acted at all, something many histories of
the Stalin period have ignored. Indeed, suggestions that Russians and
especially politicals bowed to the authorities at that time abound, even in the
works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Such views were demolished in an
important if little known pamphlet published by an émigré writer in 1974.
Entitled How We Submitted and written
by Yury Srechinsky, he called attention to many cases in which Russians as well
as non-Russians revolted even if they were doomed to fail.
Information about such resistance is
becoming more available if not always widely attended to. Recently, Moscow commentator
Andrey Illarionov compiled a list of more than 210 revolts by Soviet citizens
against Soviet power that were not part of the Civil War (echo.msk.ru/blog/aillar/2003620-echo/).
Illarionov concedes that even his
list is incomplete. The three cases
mentioned here are the tip of a very large iceberg, one that should encourage
those who believe that the Russians and non-Russians can resist and rise up
even against the most fearful opponents and that should at the same time
frighten those who think they can rule by fear and intimidation alone.
No comments:
Post a Comment