Vorkuta: Russian Inmates revolt. The west ignores.

[AnarchistPatriot]

http://www.minesandcommunities.org/Country/ussr01.htm

Indeed, the most remarkable part of the strike is that it ever took place at all. For most participants it was the first strike they had ever been on. It was the ordinary man in the camps that had to bear the day-to-day burden of the strike. At first they just refused to work. But then they actually organized a public meeting right in the camp. They elected a strike committee of their own in which all nations were represented, and informed the camp police that they better withdraw because the prisoners themselves were taking control of the camp.

The police withdrew, not of course without informing Moscow immediately.The strikers refused to meet with their direct jailers but insisted that a representative from the Kremlin be sent down to meet with them. The Russian government sent a commission headed by General Derevianko.(3) His attempt to harangue a public meeting of the inmates proved a failure. The prisoners stood solid, refused to be moved by the [promise of] better food if their sentences remained the same, and they demanded a review of all political trials and removal of barbed wire.

The commission returned to Moscow. Nothing shows so well the uncertainty and insecurity of these totalitarian rulers than the caution with which the government at first dealt with this revolt. The sympathy of the soldiers was also with the prisoners. In the end they did what the Tsar did back in 1912 in the Lena gold field strike: they opened fire and shot down the strikers. But, whereas in East Berlin they resorted to violence quickly, here they bargained and moved cautiously for weeks before the mass shooting.

MYTH OF INVINCIBILITY DESTROYED

[The workers action] had the effect of shaking the Kremlin to its very foundations. A few months later students from the Leningrad Mining Institute ,working in the pit in Vorkuta, told [the prisoners] that everyone had talked about the strike in Leningrad:

"We soon got to know you were on strike,' they told us. ''The drop in coal was noticeable at once. We don't have any reserves. There's just the plan, that's all. And everyone knows how vulnerable plans are. It destroyed the myth that the system was unassailable'"

Five months after June 17 one of the leaders of the Russian resistance group met an East German student in Vorkuta and naturally the talk was all about the East German revolt. Then the Russian [strike] leaders first grasped the treachery of "the West." Not only had the Eisenhowers and the Churchills sided with the Stalin regime in Russia as the prisoners here knew, but they now found out that no encouragement to the workers in revolt had been sounded, even from their safe Allied radios. To the prisoners' "why," the East German students replied: "Because they were afraid that any aggravation of the situation might lead to war."

But it's clear from reports by the prisoners [as Scholmer explains] that the Russians were also afraid it might lead to war! Each side was afraid of the non-existent courage of the other.

The East German students resumed their tale that the labor bureaucrats, as well as the West German government, found nothing better to tell the workers than to be sure "not to compromise themselves." Finally the Russian resistance leader saw how wrong it was to at all depend on "the West."

The epilogue, Dr. Scholmer writes, is much more depressing than the conditions at Vorkuta. For here he was, free at last, he thought. He had been one of some thousands of slave laborers released [after Stalin's death] during the Big Four ministers' conference.(4) He had a story of revolt to tell and the press to listen. They listened but they didn't HEAR. First, these Russian experts could not understand that a revolt had occurred; they were (only) ready to discuss abstractions Then he was given the line that "the time was inopportune" to tell his story.

"When I first mentioned the word, 'civil war' to these people," Dr. Scholmer concludes, "they were appalled. The possibility of a rising lay outside their realm of comprehension. They had no idea that there were resistance groups in the camps... I talked to all sorts of people in the first few weeks after my return from the Soviet Union. It seemed to me that the man in the street had the best idea of what was going on. The 'experts' seemed to understand nothing."

The man in the street does indeed know more than these experts because the American worker, as the American public in general, in its own struggles with the bureaucrats, inside and outside factories; in its own aspirations for a new society and struggle for it, feels at one with the Russian and East German workers. It is not a question of language. It is a question of experiences and expectations.