Vorkuta uprising

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Detail of the small cemetery where the prisoners who were shot on August 1, 1953 are buried (summer 2014)

The Vorkuta Uprising was a revolt by prisoners in the Soviet Vorkuta labor camp in the summer of 1953.

After Josef Stalin's death and the arrest of Interior Minister Lavrenti Beria , a strike began in the labor camp and the prisoners demanded better conditions. A high-ranking delegation from Moscow traveled to Vorkuta. The uprising lasted around ten days and ended on August 1, 1953 by force of arms.

procedure

The year 1953 brought many events in the communist sphere of influence with it, which also had serious consequences for the camp inmates in Vorkuta. First Josef Stalin died on March 5, 1953, which led to confusion among the guards about the changed power constellation, which eased the camp regime somewhat. At that time, the prisoners were already hoping to be released, which was reinforced by the fact that some Germans were actually sent to Kaliningrad Oblast . At the same time as the Pravda report on the June 17 uprising in the GDR, the first thoughts of a strike or uprising arose if the situation did not really change in the future. The popular uprising in the GDR also impressed non-German prisoners. It was mocked with self-deprecation that after eight years the Germans had had enough of communism and recognized it as a system of injustice so quickly, while Soviet citizens had tolerated this system for 35 years and had not yet done anything about it. At the latest after Lavrenti Beria was arrested for alleged espionage (June 26, 1953), calls for better working conditions, better food and supplies and for rehabilitation were openly put forward. Soviet officers held out the prospect of improvements, but not to the extent that the camp inmates wanted.

The strike was ultimately triggered by deportees from a camp near Karaganda in the Kazakh SSR , who arrived in Vorkuta in mid-June. They had volunteered to work in the ASSR Komi, as they were promised better working conditions than in Kazakhstan and free settlement. When they were supposed to start their work in shaft 7, however, the working conditions turned out to be considerably worse, and there was no longer any talk of free settlement. As a result, the mine workers, who expressed their solidarity with the newcomers, refused to work and only produced one tonne of coal a day instead of the normally mined amount of one thousand tons. Rumors of a strike in shaft 7 spread quickly. Other camps and shafts also went on strike, which had different consequences depending on the demands made. For example, while the workers of shaft 40 experienced a relatively quiet “free” summer and were able to spend the money they had earned down to the last ruble in order to then have to resume work in September, the situation escalated elsewhere. In contrast to the workers in shaft 40, who did not act aggressively and had only few demands, the inmates in camp 10 of shaft 29 took over the management of the camp, disarmed the guards and interned them. The head of the entire camp management in Vorkuta, General Andrei Afanassjewitsch Derewjanko , was unwilling to give in to the demands for revision procedures. High officials who had traveled from Moscow entered into negotiations with the prisoners, even though the negotiating partner Sergei Nikiforowitsch Kruglow (Interior Minister of the Soviet Union) called for by the prisoners was not part of the delegation. Rumor has it that he was in Vorkuta.

The Soviet Union strictly rejected revisions of judgments and thus releases; there was no real negotiation. Rather, the prisoners were threatened, for example by the Public Prosecutor Roman Andrejewitsch Rudenko (he had vigorously brought charges against leading Nazi officials and their system of injustice in the Nuremberg trials ).

Neither Rudenko's threats nor those of other politicians and high-ranking members of the military (e.g. Army General Ivan Ivanovich Maslennikov ) intimidated the prisoners. On the morning of August 1, 1953, Interior Ministry troops surrounded the camp. After a brief conversation between MWD officers and the leaders of the strike at the camp gate, one of the officers shot one of the inmates in the head. Then the soldiers opened fire on the other inmates; there was a massacre . 64 people died in the process; a total of 481 people died in the suppression of the uprising.

Many people were then removed from the camp, probably because they were denounced as leaders. The seriously injured who remained in the camp had to go back to work after only a short regeneration phase.

The 1953 strike wasn't the only one; Before that, too, forced laborers had protested several times. For example, because of the unbearable working conditions, they went on a hunger strike from October 1936 to February 1937, without success. After a Moscow commission investigated the events in Vorkuta, 2,901 people involved in the hunger strike were executed. The same thing happened to strikers from 1941 who refused to work for 15 days after the rations for forced laborers were reduced due to food shortages following the German attack on the Soviet Union . Here, too, the ringleaders were shot and the sentences already served were annulled. The information on strikes before 1953 in Vorkuta is even more incomplete than that from 1953.

literature

  • Roland Bude: Vorkuta. Punishment for political opposition in the Soviet Zone / GDR. (Series of publications by the Berlin State Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR, Volume 30). The Berlin State Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-934085-32-9 .
  • Heinrich Paul Fritsche: Vorkuta 1953. The terror machine. In: Jan Foitzik, Horst Hennig (Ed.): Encounters in Vorkuta. Memories, certificates, documents. Leipzig University Press, 2003.
  • Wladislaw Hedeler , Horst Hennig : Black pyramids, red slaves: The strike in Vorkuta in the summer of 1953. Leipzig University Press, 2007.
  • Mike Müller-Hellwig: Vorkuta - symbol of Soviet barbarism and German resistance. In: Jan Foitzik, Horst Hennig (Ed.): Encounters in Vorkuta. Memories, certificates, documents. Leipzig University Press, 2003.
  • Gerald Wiemers (ed.): The uprising. On the chronicle of the general strike in 1953 in Vorkuta, camp 10, shaft 29 . Leipziger Universitätsverlag 2013. ISBN 978-3-86583-780-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Bude, pp. 74f.
  2. ↑ See Hedeler, p. 55.
  3. ↑ a b cf. Müller-Hellwig, p. 112.
  4. ↑ See Bude, p. 76.
  5. ↑ See Müller-Hellwig, p. 114.
  6. ↑ See Fritsche, pp. 144f.
  7. ↑ See Müller-Hellwig, p. 115.
  8. ↑ spiegel.de: The forgotten slave revolt: Death in the Gulag (October 10, 2003)
  9. ↑ See Fritsche, pp. 153f.
  10. ↑ See Hedeler, p. 29