The Kengir uprising was a prisoner rebellion that occurred in Kengir (Steplag), a Soviet MVD special camp for political prisoners, during May and June 1954. Its duration and intensity distinguished it from other Gulag rebellions during the same period, such as the Vorkuta uprising and Norilsk uprising.
After the murder of some of their fellow prisoners by guards, Kengir inmates rebelled and seized the entire camp compound, holding it for weeks and creating a period of freedom for themselves unique in the history of the Gulag. Through a rare alliance between criminals and political prisoners, prisoners succeeded in forcing the guards and camp administration to flee the camp and effectively quarantined it from the outside. The prisoners thereafter built intricate defenses to prevent the incursion of the authorities into their newly won territory. This situation lasted for an unprecedented length of time and resulted in novel activity, including the formation of a provisional government by the prisoners, prisoner marriages, the performance of religious ceremonies, and the waging of a propaganda campaign against the erstwhile authorities.
After 40 days of freedom within the camp walls, intermittent negotiation, and mutual preparation for violent conflict, the rebellion was suppressed by Soviet armed forces with tanks and guns on the morning of 26 June. According to former prisoners, five hundred to seven hundred people were killed or wounded by the suppression, although official figures claim only a few dozen had been killed. The story of the rebellion was first committed to history in The Gulag Archipelago, a work by former Gulag prisoner and Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, using former Kengir prisoners as sources.
Background Changes in the Gulag
A year before the rebellion, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin died. His death aroused great hopes among the prisoners of amnesty or at least prison reform, and this hope was further emboldened by the subsequent arrest of Stalin's former state security chief, Lavrenty Beria. Beria, who was the chief of the entire Soviet security and police apparatus and architect of some of the most hated policies relating to the camps, was declared an "enemy of the people" and executed by those who succeeded Stalin. Beria's newly discredited name became a liability to others in both the upper and lower echelons of the Soviet hierarchy, and anybody who had been associated with or spoken too much in favour of Beria was similarly at risk of being denounced as a traitor and persecuted. The camp administration were not excluded from this risk, and this fact weakened their authority vis à vis the prisoners. Writing about the strikes which were occurring at the time, Solzhenitsyn described this issue:
Prisoners all over the Gulag, for this reason and others, were becoming increasingly bold and impudent during the months preceding the rebellion, with hunger strikes, work stoppages, large-scale insubordination, and punitive violence becoming more and more common. In Kengir in particular, camp authorities were rapidly losing control of their charges, and the communiqués periodically sent by commanders up the camp hierarchy, in which they expressed their dismay at the frequent incidents of unrest, powerful underground organizations, the growing "crisis" afflicting their network of informants, and their desperate attempts to reassert control, attest to this.
Kengir Thieves The rebellion's causes can be traced back to a large arrival of "thieves" – the accepted slang term for the habitual criminals who were also imprisoned in Gulag along with the political prisoners. Traditionally, thieves and politicals had been antagonists, with the thieves exercising virtually unchecked dominance over the politicals, robbing and abusing them at will, and with the politicals remaining too disunited to muster a credible defense. This situation was facilitated by a variably complacent or actively encouraging camp administration, which recognized the value of discouraging the thieves and politicals from uniting with a common cause. Indeed, the infusion of about 650 thieves into the approximately 5,200-strong body of political prisoners at Kengir at the beginning of May was specifically for this purpose, as the Kengir prisoners had organized strikes before on a smaller scale and were becoming increasingly restless. The camp authorities hoped that these thieves would, as they had in the past, help reverse this trend.
Informers While the Gulag labour camps were established during the early 1920s, only during the early 1950s were the politicals and 'thieves' finally separated into different camp systems. With the thieves absent, the politicals began to unite in ways unprecedented in Gulag camps. The inmates organized as national, religious, and ethnic groups (Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Chechens, Armenians, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Muslims, Christians, etc.) and began murdering camp informers or prisoners who otherwise colluded with the camp administration. The informers had kept their identities secret and denounced fellow prisoners, causing them to distrust each other, but the national and ethnic groups killed so many of them that the remaining, unidentified informers fled to the camp administration for protection.
Weaponry and organization Of these above-mentioned ethnic blocs, the Ukrainians, many of whom were exiled members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (by some estimates comprising more than half of the camps' population) were the most important, and they quickly asserted a commanding role among the prisoners. Members of this "Ukrainian Centre", as it was often called, were the primary proponents of killing informers and later would prove essential to dealing with the newly arrived thieves.
Along with this effective elimination of informers, the prisoners began fashioning shivs, which were previously the exclusive possession of thieves. In addition, many incidents occurred (usually including the wanton murder of some well-liked prisoner by guards) during the previous months that came to increase resentment and justify extreme action on behalf of the prisoners. Protests and collective refusals to work were increasing in frequency and the prisoners were learning how to plan and maintain large-scale disturbances, mainly by creating systems of communication between camp divisions and establishing command hierarchies.
Into this changed situation the thieves were injected and, to the surprise of the camp authorities, they joined forces with the politicals, meeting secretly on the first night with the Ukrainian Centre and establishing a pact. This was due both to the fact that they recognized their odds against the almost 5,200 strong body of well-armed and united political prisoners, and because thieves across the whole Gulag had learned of the politicals' campaign against the informers and began to respect them for it.
The camp compound The entire Kengir camp complex formed a large rectangle, divided width-wise into four distinct areas: the women's camp, the "service yard", where all the workshops and storerooms were located, and two camps for men, each with its own jailhouse for punishing prisoners or hiding informers. The women's camp was blocked off both from access and sight to the men's camp.
Seizing of the camp The formative stage of the rebellion began on the evening of 16 May 1954, a Sunday and thus a day of rest for all the prisoners. The thieves contrived to break into the service yard, where the food was stored, and from there break into the women's camp, which was easier to do from that location. They did this initially, but they were soon chased away by guards. At nightfall, though, the thieves regrouped, shot out all of the lights in range with their slingshots, and broke through the barrier between the men's camp and service yard with an improvised battering ram. It was at this time the Kengir rebellion proper started when the guards began shooting at the thieves, killing 13 and wounding 43.
The remaining thieves retreated and an uneasy peace followed. During the night, though, thieves, now joined by the politicals, started breaking up their bunks and cells, trying to add to their cache of shivs and arm those without weapons, while the camp authorities posted machine gunners at the hole in the wall. After a tense standoff, the camp authorities, in a surprise gesture, ordered the withdrawal of all guards from the compound.
This was actually a tactical response by the authorities. The next day they feigned acquiescence to the prisoners' demands and, while the prisoners then agreeably went to work outside the camp, the guards busied themselves repairing the broken-down wall. Nevertheless, this was arguably an error on their part because it exposed the bad faith of the guards and eliminated all remaining trust the prisoners had in their word. More importantly, though, the prisoners had, for one whole day, had total freedom (within the confines of the camp compound), mingling freely with the female prisoners, eating their fill, and fraternizing as they pleased, and this put in them a desire for freedom that would not be so easily quenched.
During this time, the first propaganda about the rebellion was released by the camp authorities (they re-enacted, in full prisoner costume, the alleged rape of the women prisoners and photographed themselves, releasing the photographs and declaring that the revolt was in fact a disguise for debauchery and hedonism).
When the prisoners became aware of these tricks, they reasserted themselves, sending the guards fleeing from the camp again. They then proceeded to re-destroy the wall that had just been repaired and release the prisoners from the camp's solitary confinement cells. The camp had been seized and would remain in the control of the prisoners for the next 40 days.
Camp society post-rebellion Culture With the entire camp at their disposal, and with feelings of fellowship and good-will in abundance, prisoners began to enjoy some of the joys of normal life which had been denied to them. As Solzhenitsyn and others retold, men and women from different camp divisions who had romantically conversed secretly for years, but had never seen each other, finally met. Imprisoned priests presided over a number of improvised weddings. Prisoners retrieved what remained of their civilian clothing from the storeroom (the guards regularly stole and sold prisoners' items), and soon prisoners were seen adorned with fur coats and assorted colourful clothing, in addition to the religious wear that had been banned. Business, as well, resumed as best it could, with one Russian aristocrat opening a "café" serving ersatz "coffee", which proved to be quite popular with the prisoners.
Soon a number of organized recreational activities began. Because of the large number of political prisoners in the Gulag, almost every camp had a selection of engineers, scientists, intellectuals, and artists, who gave lectures to other inmates. Poetry recitals and even hastily prepared plays were performed. Hymns, composed by the Ukrainians, were performed en masse.
One hymn in particular, with its simultaneously mournful and celebratory theme and its demand for freedom, is a good example of the prevailing themes in the works produced during the rebellion:
In addition to the renewed presence of religious regalia, religious practices were also given new life. Notably, one of the religious sects massed at the original hole broken into the dividing wall on the first night of the rebellion, claiming that their prophet had predicted its destruction and the freedom that followed. They, according to former prisoners, then sat on mattresses for several days by the hole, praying and waiting to be taken to heaven.
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