Vorkuta: Three Chapters in the Making of a Working Class
Paul Kellogg
Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies
Athabasca University
Edmonton, Canada
Email address: pkellogg@athabascau.ca
Presented at “Making the World Working Class”,
Tenth Annual Historical Materialism Conference
School of Oriental and African Studies, London U.K.
November 8, 2013
Table of Contents
Introduction: The making of the working class ...............................................................1
Vorkuta ............................................................................................................................3
1. Graveyard of The Revolution: Vorkuta 1936-38 .............................................4
1.2. Stalin’s counter-revolution....................................................5
1.2. Trotskyists at Vorkuta – One Long Night.............................6
1.3. The Communist party of Anti-Communism .........................9
2. Arise ye slaves: Vorkuta 1947-1953 ................................................................11
2.1. The transition to Forced Labour ...........................................11
2.2. The transition to coal ............................................................13
2.3. The transition from slavery ...................................................15
3. Gravediggers of Stalinism: Vorkuta 1989-1991 ..............................................24
3.1. Perestroika from Below ........................................................24
3.2. The independent union movement ........................................26
3.3. The legacy of the past ...........................................................27
Conclusion: ‘They are their sons and daughters’ .............................................................28
Figure 1. Output per capita, Russia,
U.S., U.K., 1991-2011 (1990=100) .............................................29
Figure 2. Net Exports, wheat (tonnes),
USSR and Former USSR, 1961-2010 ..........................................30
Notes ................................................................................................................................32
References ........................................................................................................................33
Introduction: The making of the working class
When the term “class” is deployed, more often than not, it is deployed as an objectively
measurable category. We think of it variously as a statement about differential relations to wealth
and power, differential relations to status, or differential relations to the means of production.
These “objective” measures all have their place. Income levels tell us a considerable amount.
Status in a hierarchical economy is a very real, sometimes very offensive, thing. And the
question of relation to the means of production is often decisive. It is not uncommon to indicate
that for Karl Marx, these objective measures correspond to one half of his class analysis, the half
which can fit under the heading of “class in itself”, the objective or structural counterpart to the
subjective or struggle-based notion of “class for itself”.
Edward Andrew in 1983 provided a list of those who accept this “class-in-itself” reading
of Marx, a list which includes T. Dos Santos, Nicos Poulantzas, Irving M. Zetlin, and Robert
Tucker. However, Andrew went onto to make the interesting point that, in fact, Marx nowhere
used the term “class in itself” (Andrew 1983). Here is what Marx actually did argue, as a young
man in 1847, writing in The Poverty of Philosophy.
Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country
into workers. The domination of capital has created for this mass a common
situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital,
but not yet for itself. In the struggle … this mass becomes united, and constitutes
itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the
struggle of class against class is a political struggle (Marx 1976a, 211, emphasis
added, p.k.).
There are objective, structural pressures pushing in the direction of class formation. Capital in
the cycle of capital accumulation continually calls up and creates a “class as against capital”.
That is, however, nothing like the structuralist-formation implied by the term “class in itself”.
Structuralist Marxists who emphasize a “class in itself” versus “class for itself” binary, risk
falling into the same trap identified by Marx, a trap which vitiated all materialisms precedent to
historical materialism. “The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism … is that the thing,
reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as
sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively” (Marx 1976b, 5). Classes are not structures.
Classes are collections of human beings, with hopes, dreams, ideas and passions. Marx’s interest
is not with an inert mass of workers created and recreated by capitalism. His interest is with the
dynamic and alive mass of workers who, in struggle – in political struggle – begin to unite and
begin to become a “class for itself”. His is a subjective approach with an objective dimension,
rather than an objective approach with a subjectivist add-on.
This year is the 50th anniversary of E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working
Class. Thompson is in the company of C.L.R. James, and Rosa Luxemburg and others who
remind us, in their writings, of the human, class-for-itself dimension in serious historical
materialist analysis. The emergence of a class “for itself” is not automatically determined. It is a
product of struggle.
Thompson’s great work used the verb “[M]aking because it is a study in an active
process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning. The working class did not rise like
the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making … I do not see class as a
-2‘structure’, nor even as a ‘category’, but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown
to have happened) in human relationships” (Thompson 1963, 9). In a different context (the study
of Ancient Greece), but with the same emphasis, G.E.M. De Ste. Croix put it this way: “I am not
going to pretend that class is an entity existing objectively in its own right like a Platonic ‘Form’
… Class … is essentially a relationship … the social relations into which men [sic] enter in the
process of production” (De Ste. Croix 1981, 32).
This paper will suggest that a Thompsonian (i.e., historical materialist) approach to class
can help us understand class formation in the territories of the ex-Soviet Union in the Stalinist
and post-Stalinist eras. Usually we approach those eras in polemic: what was the “class nature”
of the Soviet Union? But sometimes lost in that polemic, has been the lived experience of the
poor, the oppressed and the exploited. An examination of their struggles – their hopes, their
dreams, their forms of organization, their ideas – can shed some light on the working class which
did emerge “for itself” on several occasions in the 20th century, and perhaps give us some insight
into the class to emerge for itself at some point in the 21st century. The paper will develop this
analysis through an examination of three pivotal moments of struggle in one northern Arctic city,
the city of Vorkuta.
In the 1930s, the Arctic town of Vorkuta entered history as one of the Soviet Union’s
principle future sources of coal. It was also the principal site of the final horror of Stalin’s
extermination of the politicized workers who had raised the Bolsheviks to power in 1917. Before
their extermination, the prisoners at Vorkuta, former members of the Left Opposition and
followers of Leon Trotsky, organized a magnificent hunger strike, which became the stuff of
whispered legend in the following decades.
By the 1950s, the coal first discovered in the 1930s, was being massively exploited, and
Vorkuta emerged as the principal supplier of coal to Leningrad. The miners who dug that coal
were almost all forced labourers. Not inaccurately, some use the term “slave labourers”. In 1953,
after Stalin’s death, several thousand of these forced labourers organized a massive strike against
the slave labour system, serving in large measure as the key blow ending forced labour in the
Soviet Union.
By the late 1980s, the mines of Vorkuta were operated by “free” wage labourers, and in
1989 a series of strikes by these miners – some of them the grandchildren of the 1930s Vorkuta
prisoners – announced to the world the coming end of the Stalinist system. The thousands of
miners in Vorkuta’s coal pits (the largest of which, Vorgashorskaya, was at the time capable of
producing 18,000 tons of coal a day), “launched the wave of strikes in 1989 that heralded the
collapse of the Soviet Union” (The Economist 1993). From being a graveyard for
revolutionaries, then, Vorkuta gave birth to the grave-diggers of first the forced labour system,
and eventually, Stalinism itself.
For the first, 1930’s moment, we have very few sources, word of the massacre of the Left
Opposition arriving sporadically from the very small number of survivors. But 25 years later, in
the second moment of Vorkuta’s emergence as a site of history, somewhat more is known. Many
of the slave labourers, in the years since their release, have written extremely important, moving
memoirs. Finally, for 1989, we have quite a lot more information. The collapse of the Soviet
Union was one of the pivotal events of the 20th century, and events in the workers’ movement
were followed closely throughout the world. This paper will use these sources to tell three
chapters of the Vorkuta story, three chapters in the emergence of a contemporary working class
“for itself” in the territories of the former Soviet Union.
-3Vorkuta
Above the Arctic Circle,
In a lost corner of the world,
The earth is shrouded by coal-black eternal night.
The wind howls like a wolf and will not let us sleep.
Oh for just a glimmer of dawn in this oppressive gloom!
A sinister presence floats in the shadows.
We are alone with our anguish and our sense of doom.
Above the Arctic Circle, there is no joy my friend.
A furious blizzard erases all our tracks.
Don’t come for us.
Don’t be tormented by us.
Save yourself.
But maybe, if you find a moment … remember me, my friend.
(Lyova Dranovsky or Comrade Granovsky, cited in Anon 1970, 152 –
author’s translation from the French)
An anonymous historian identifies the author of these lines as Lyova Dranovsky, an old
communist and prisoner in Stalin’s massive system of forced labour camps (the gulag), who
“began to write some very fine and moving poetry … sitting by the stove in the tent, by the bank
of the Vorkuta River” sometime before 1938 (Anon 1974, 165). To be honest, we cannot be sure
of the exact name of the poet. From another account by Hryhory Kostiuk, one of the very few
eye-witnesses who survived the events to be described here, we hear about another poet with a
slightly different name – Comrade Granovsky. Kostiuk says Granovsky’s poems were “read, and
some were put to music and sung as camp songs by the prisoners” (1999, 169). Compare that
with our first, anonymous, eye-witness who says that Dranovsky’s “poems became the common
property of the whole Vorkuta camp and were set to music, to sad and mournful tunes” (Anon
1974, 165). It is likely that Lyova Dranovsky and Comrade Granovsky are, thus, two names for
one person. And even if it turns out they were two different people, without question, they met
the same fate. Granovsky was “doomed to die in Stalin’s camps” (Kostiuk 1999, 169).
Dranovsky “was shot at Syr-Yaga in 1938” (Anon 1974, 165).
Our knowledge of Comrade Granovsky comes from a standard, peer-reviewed, scholarly
source. Our knowledge of Lyova Dranovsky has a quite different pedigree. It is part of a
remarkable memoir, circulated as part of the underground anti-Stalinist literature known as
“samizdat”. The memoirs were “written over a period of years and completed in the late sixties”
and “became known to the world in 1970”. Its anonymous author was one of the only survivors
of the 1936-1938 massacres visited upon anti-Stalinist socialists (Saunders 1974, 10). The poem,
translated here, was written on the banks of the Vorkuta River. At the tip of that river, 200
kilometres from where it connects to the Pechora, more than 100 kilometres north of the Arctic
Circle, at the extreme northern tip of the Komi Republic1, you will find a city of the same name.
Vorkuta is located further north than Great Bear Lake, Repulse Bay or Bathurst Inlet in
Canada. In the sense that it is a settled area in the far reaches of the Arctic, Inuvik in the
Mackenzie River Delta might be offered as a point of comparison. But Inuvik remains an
administrative centre with a population of just over 3,500. Vorkuta by 1993 had a population of
217,000, “most of whom are employed in the 13 surrounding coal mines” (The Economist 1993).
-4By 2013, the population of the town had plummeted to just 96,000 (Balmforth 2013), but this
was still far greater than any comparable Arctic settlement in Canada.
It is a forbidding place. Its modern day inhabitants describe their climate as “twelve
months of winter, followed by summer.” In the words of another, “After ten years here you stop
being human because of the cold, depression, polar nights, tough work” (The Economist 1993).
Two slave labourers in the Vorkutlag prison camps which surrounded the town in the early
1950s counselled a newcomer; “you mustn’t stay here too long. It’s a murderous climate.
Anyone who stays here too long gets the guts knocked out of him” (Scholmer 1954, 55). So grim
are the environs that, when advisors to Tsar Nicholas I in the 19th century “suggested to him that
he should make the territory around the rivers Petchora and Vorkuta into a colony for exiles, he
sent for a report on conditions there and decided that it was ‘too much to demand of any man that
he should live there’” (Scholmer 1954, 56).
1. Graveyard of The Revolution: Vorkuta 1936-38
The very thin layer of those who still think and feel and have not so far been
strangled, shot, starved or frozen, is depressed, oppressed, and – silent
(Maria Joffe 1978, 222, written in 1958 after 29 years in Stalin’s prison camps).
Vorkuta’s original purpose from 1933 to 1938 was as prison ground and massacre site for
thousands of socialists who opposed the rise to power of Stalin and his bureaucracy. In
impossible conditions, these anti-Stalinist socialists – followers of Leon Trotsky – fought to
uphold the ideals of the early years of the Russian Revolution. They fought with their bodies,
launching a series of mass hunger strikes, some of which actually, momentarily, won. Even when
denied books, paper and pens, they fought, to the end, with their minds. One anonymous “thin
man” who was one of the only survivors of the infamous “Brickworks” near Vorkuta, recounts
how – in the face of death at what was to be the site of mass execution …
We had a verbal newspaper, Truth Behind Bars, we had little groups – circles,
there were a lot of clever, knowledgeable people. Sometimes we issued a satirical
leaflet, The Underdog. Vilka, our barrack representative, was editor and the
illustrations were formed by people against a wall background. Quite a lot of
laughing, too, mostly young ones there. When everything suddenly came to an
end, the part of the Brickworks for those sentenced to death was closed down”
(Cited in Joffe 1978, 40–41).
Almost to a person these Trotskyists were executed, most in what came to be known as the
“‘Kashketin executions,’ named after the … official sent to carry them out, Efim Iosifovich
Kashketin” a staff member with the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs)
(Barenberg 2007, 51). Robert Conquest says that “[c]hildren under twelve alone were spared”
(1968, 122). This is confirmed by the account of “M.B.”, an eyewitness from era. “At the time of
execution of a male prisoner, his imprisoned wife was automatically liable to capital punishment;
and when it was a question of well-known members of the Opposition, this applied equally to
any of his children over the age of twelve” (1974, 216).
The first wave of anti-Stalinist opposition culminated in the Vorkuta area prison camp
hunger strike of 1936/37, and the mass execution of these Trotskyist strikers in 1938. Theirs was
a movement against a regime headed by Joseph Stalin, and there are many controversies
concerning the exact nature of Stalinism. This article will not revisit these controversies, except
to assert five simple points. 1) There were tremendous hopes for a new world of freedom
-5associated with the Russian Revolutions of 1917. 2) The state associated with Stalin which
claimed the mantle of 1917, bore little resemblance to anything resembling a world of freedom,
and was in fact one of the twentieth century’s most repressive, totalitarian regimes. 3) Currents
on the left who looked to the original ideals of the Russian Revolution resisted this
totalitarianism. 4) A key component of this resistance was that associated with Leon Trotsky. 5)
The Great Terror of 1936-38 of which the Vorkuta strike and subsequent massacre formed a part,
was the final act in a counter-revolution directed against the hopes and dreams of the 1917
revolution.
1.2. Stalin’s counter-revolution
This counter-revolution was not targetting a “straw person.” There existed a whole layer
of Russian Marxists, who opposed the Stalin regime. Arriving at estimates for the size of this
opposition is difficult, but the numbers clearly ran into the thousands. In 1923, the “Manifesto of
the 46”, one of the first opposition documents, was supported by half the votes of party cells in
Moscow, one-third of the cells in the army and a majority of the students. In the same year,
Trotskyist students in the Communist cells of the institutions of higher learning in Moscow won
6594 votes to Stalin’s 2790 (Gaucher 1969, 90–91). In 1924 and 1925 – years of stalemate when
Trotsky’s advice was “do nothing, don’t reveal ourselves at all, maintain our connections, protect
our cadres from 1923, let Zinoviev wear himself out” (Broué 2003, 35, author’s translation) – the
Trotskyist opposition in Leningrad might have been “just a few dozen”, but “In Moscow, it was
something else altogether” where according to people active at the time the opposition
membership was 500 “very well organized. There, the Bolshevik-Leninists [Trotskyists] knew
that they had an absolute majority in the cells of the factories and the army” (Broué 2003, 37,
author’s translation). Roland Gaucher estimates that the United Opposition across the whole
Soviet Union, between 1926 and 1928, had some seven to eight thousand activists, much the
same as the number of activists who were at the core of the Stalin/Bukharin bloc (1969, 105).
There was, of course, one important difference – the several thousand Stalinist activists had the
resources of the state and the party at their disposal. The several thousand anti-Stalinist activists
had only their own wits and initiative. In 1927, in the teeth of intensifying repression, the
Opposition platform received between four and five thousand signatures. At the beginning of
1929, the anti-Stalinist opposition estimated that “between 2,000 and 3,000 of its members were
in captivity, but this approximate figure was later raised to 5,000” (Souvarine 1972, 492). Gus
Fagan in 1980 put the figure at between 6,000 and 8,000 (1980, 54).
This Marxist, anti-Stalinist opposition had, from time to time, a hearing inside the mass
of the working class. The Czech historian Michal Reiman argues that:
The importance of the left opposition is often underestimated in the literature. ...
many authors doubt that the opposition had any substantial influence on the mass
of party members and even less on broader sections of the population. One can
hardly agree with such views: they seem paradoxical indeed in light of the
mountain of ammunition expended on the opposition by the party leadership in
those years (1987, 19).
In 1926, according to Reiman:
[O]pposition activity was spreading like a river in flood. The opposition organized
mass meetings of industrial workers in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Leningrad and
Moscow; at a chemical plant in Moscow shouts where heard, “Down with Stalin’s
dictatorship, down with the Politburo!”
There were rumours of underground strike committees, in which the
-6opposition were said to be participating, in the Urals, the Donbass, the Moscow
textile region and Moscow proper – and of funds being raised for striking workers
(1987, 22).
Even in the early 1930s, when Stalinist repression was gathering steam, and the bulk of
the Left Opposition had been driven into exile or sent to the gulag, a workers’ opposition
continued which looked to the traditions of Lenin and Trotsky as a counter to Stalinist
oppression. Aleksandra Chumakova has provided an eyewitness account of one such episode. A
party worker in the Moscow Committee, she “was not in the Opposition” but “her husband was,
and her fate was linked to his and to that of other Oppositionists close to them” (Saunders 1974,
10). She was sent in 1932 to the Glukhovko textile mill, the oldest textile mill in Russia, to
investigate complaints about working and living conditions. This was a not insignificant mill. It
was in the Ivanovo district not far from Moscow, and had a long tradition of working class
militancy, having played a critical role in the 1917 revolution.
When I arrived at the factory I was immediately struck by the horrifying
unrelieved poverty of the workers. Gaunt from hunger, they were barely able to
get to work and stand up at their machines for the allotted eight hours. Through
the streets of the factory settlement wandered the starving, emaciated children of
the workers. They gathered around the garbage cans of the factory dining hall and
waited for something edible to be thrown out. The textile workers would call their
children into the dining halls and share with them the one bowl of soup allowed
each worker per day. ... the Glukhovka workers had no respect for Stalin. During
the 1932 May Day demonstration they had carried portraits of Lenin and Trotsky
through the streets of the settlement and had shouted angry phrases against Stalin
(Chumakova 1974, 190–191).
This bitterness and anger moved from demonstrations to strikes, which were fiercely repressed
(Berger 1971, 90). It indicates that fairly late in the day, there were still traditions of struggle and
resistance inside important sections of the working class, and that the ideas looked to by those
resisting were often those of Trotsky.
1.2. Trotskyists at Vorkuta – One Long Night
Precisely because the arguments of the Trotskyists had a hearing inside the working class, the
repression against them was fierce. It was, in Maria Joffe’s words, One Long Night. The darkest
pit of that night was in the gulag, in the network of concentration and labour camps where
millions of peasants who had defended their land, and hundreds of thousands of communists who
fought the rise of Stalin, were deposited. By 1936, the great majority of former Oppositionists
had “capitulated”. Many who did, did so in words only to preserve their lives and jobs. Berger
describes this well. Writing of the lifestyle of those Trotskyists who had capitulated in the early
1930s and who were, temporarily, allowed to live and work in relative freedom, he says:
There was something wild about them in those days. At their famous parties,
vodka flowed and an old gypsy song was sung with the refrain: ‘We’ll booze
away the lot, but we’ll keep the concertina, and we’ll make the bitches dance to
our tune!’ The concertina was their inner freedom, their integrity, their secret
ideological ‘core’. It was the justification of their hymns to Stalin, of their denial
of the spirit of October, which they knew they were helping the ‘bitches’ to bury.
It was recklessly ignored that every tenth guest at the party was an agent who
would be reporting what they said (1971, 91).
-7Capitulation would provide only a temporary reprieve. All would ultimately share the fate of the
irreconcilables, the “hard core of uncompromising Trotskyists, most of them in prisons and
camps.” According to Berger, in mid 1936, “[t]hey and their families had all been rounded up ...
and concentrated in three large camps – Kolyma, Vorkuta and Noril’sk” (1971, 94). Broué does
not include Noril’sk in his list. According to Broué, then director of the NKVD Genrickh
Yagoda “proposed to Stalin the arrest of all the Trotskyists in exile and deporting them to the
most distant camps of the gulag, Voorkuta and Kolyma-Magadan” (Broué 2003, 257, author’s
translation). With or without Noril’sk, the places of exile were grim indeed. Kolyma, the vast
district in the far east of the Russian land-mass, which had the reputation for being the deadliest
of the camps in the gulag (Conquest 1978, 13):2 some 3,000 kilometres due west, and 300
kilometres north of the Arctic circle, the camps centred around Noril’sk: and another 1100
kilometres due west, the camps centred around Vorkuta. A line connecting the three
extermination centres would describe a vast arc more than 4,000 kilometres long over some of
the most barren land in the entire world. Vorkuta was probably the most important of these three
as a killing ground for the Marxist opposition to Stalin, and it is the one where the most eyewitness testimony has emerged allowing us to piece together a picture of what occurred. The
most detailed report of this did not reach the west until 1961. Known only as “M.B.”, the author
described the camp as follows:
... the Trotskyists formed a quite disparate group at Vorkuta ... There were almost
500 at the mine, close to 1,000 at the camp of Ukhta-Pechora, and certainly
several thousands altogether around the Pechora district. ... In addition to these
genuine Trotskyists, there were in the camps of Vorkuta and elsewhere more than
100,000 prisoners who, members of the party and the youth, had adhered to the
Trotskyist Opposition and then at different times and for diverse reasons ... were
forced to “recant their errors” and withdraw from the Opposition. ... The
Trotskyists formed the only group of political prisoners who openly criticized the
Stalinist “general line” and offered organized resistance to the jailers (M.B. 1974,
206–207).
The resistance that could be organized was difficult in the extreme. The work being done
by the inmates at the time – unlike later years when the Vorkuta area was transformed into a
massive mining complex – had no economic importance to the regime. As the terror began to
bite in late 1936, the Trotskyists at Vorkuta launched what is the last resort in any collective
struggle – the hunger strike. The 1936 strike was the biggest in the camp system. With
participants such as Socrates Gevorkian (formerly of the Russian Association of the Centres of
Scientific Research of the Institute of Human Sciences), Melnais (formerly on the Central
Committee of the Young Communists), Vladimir Ivanov (Old Bolshevik and former member of
the Central Committee of the party), V.V. Kossior (formerly a senior official in the petroleum
industry) and Poznansky (Trotsky’s ex-secretary) – the strike was launched on October 27, 1936
to protest the second frame-up trials being staged in Moscow (with Kamenev and Zinoviev as the
star prisoners) and was to involve 1,000 prisoners over an agonizing four months (M.B. 1974,
210–212). “Even the children persisted [in the hunger strike], although the strike leaders begged
the mothers to stop them because the sight was intolerable to the men” (Berger 1971, 97).
According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, he strikers demanded, among other things:
“[s]eparation of the politicals from the criminals; an eight-hour workday; the restoration of the
special ration for politicals and the issuing of rations independently of work performance” (1975,
2:319). Solzhenitsyn’s is a not very sympathetic account. He very much sees the Trotskyist
opponents to Stalin as operating in an illusion, not sharing his analysis that Stalin’s Terror was
deeply rooted in Lenin’s state of 1917-1924. A more sympathetic account of the strike comes
-8from M.B., who makes no mention of a demand for special rations for politicals. M.B. says they
demanded that “the food quota of the prisoners should not depend on their norm of output. A
cash bonus, not the food ration, should be used as a productive incentive (1974, 211)”. After 132
agonizing days, the strikers received a “radiogram from the headquarters of the NKVD, drawn
up in these words: ‘Inform the hunger strikers held in the Vorkuta mines that all their demands
will be satisfied’” (M.B. 1974, 213).
This can only be considered a remarkable victory. What is more remarkable, is that it was
not the first. Solzhenitsyn reports that before the Vorkuta strike there was “a hundred-day strike
somewhere in the Kolyma ... they demanded a free settlement instead of camps, and they won”
(Solzhenitsyn 1975, 2:319). The anonymous survivor of Vorkuta who remained a Trotskyist,
mentions a 1934 hunger strike in his prison before he arrived at Vorkuta (Anon 1974, 142). Both
victories were pyrrhic. The strikers at Kolyma were “scattered among various camps, where they
were gradually annihilated” (Solzhenitsyn 1975, 2:319). Elinor Lipper, a German socialist who
was a prisoner in the Kolyma system, has documented massacres of communists at this time in
Kolyma. According to Lipper, in 1937 and 1938:
[a]ll who were still capable of independent thinking and independent decisions, all
those who still knew what the word socialism meant, who still had some idealism,
all those whose vision of freedom was not yet distorted, were to be robbed of their
influence and liquidated.
A jailer named Garanin, in 1938:
undertook to liquidate thousands of intellectuals. ... [H]e travelled from camp to
camp examining the list of counterrevolutionaries. He took special note of those
who were convicted of KRTD (counterrevolutionary Trotskyist activity). ... At
night he would have thousands of enemies of the people taken out of all the
Kolyma camps, loaded on to trucks and driven off to a prison ... one of the most
ghastly institutions in the Soviet Union. Only a few fortunate prisoners ... came
back from this prison to the labor camps. Years later they were so gripped by the
horror of it that they did not dare to tell their fellow prisoners of the inhumanity
they had seen and experienced. ... It was estimated that Garanin had the deaths of
some twenty-six thousand persons on his conscience (Lipper 1951, 104–107).
At Vorkuta, the task of annihilating the Trotskyists fell to Kashketin.3 A special prison camp was
established at an abandoned brickworks. In the dead of winter, the surviving ex-hunger strikers
and all other hard-line Trotskyists in the surrounding prison camp system were settled there in
appalling conditions.
In the middle of the six-by-twenty-yard tent ... stood one gasoline drum in place
of a stove, for which one pail of coal per day was allotted, and in addition the zeks
would throw their lice in to add a little to the heat. A thick layer of hoarfrost
covered the inside of the canvas wall. There were not enough places on the bunks
and the zeks took turns lying down and walking. They were given ten and a half
ounces of bread a day and one bowl of gruel.... There was no water and they were
given pieces of ice as part of the ration. It goes without saying, of course, that
they were never able to wash themselves and that there was no bath. Patches of
scurvy appeared on their bodies (Solzhenitsyn 1975, 2:387).
These are the conditions in which the verbal newspaper, Truth Behind Bars was “published”!
This intellectual life of the imprisoned Trotskyists is one of the most impressive aspects of their
-9doomed struggle against Stalinism. Ante Ciliga – a leading Yugoslav communist who with
Victor Serge was one of the last oppositionists to escape from the gulag just before the mass
executions began – describes the Verkhne-Uralsk isolator in the early 1930s, where the “rightwing and centre” of the Trotskyist prisoners published a paper Truth in Prison, and the left-wing
Trotskyists published The Militant Bolshevik.
What a diversity of opinion there was, what freedom in every article! What
passion and what candour, not only in the approach to theoretical and abstract
questions, but even in matters of the greatest actuality. Was it still possible to
reform the system by peaceful means, or was an armed rising, a new revolution
required? Was Stalin a conscious or merely an unconscious traitor? Did his policy
amount to reaction or to counter-revolution? Could he be eliminated by merely
removing the directing personnel, or was a proper revolution necessary? ... These
newspapers appeared either once a month or every two months. Each copy
contained ten to twenty articles in the form of separate writing books. The ‘copy’,
i.e. the packet of ten to twenty writing books, circulated from ward to ward and
the prisoners read the notebooks in turn. The papers appeared in three copies, one
copy for each prison wing (Ciliga 1979, 199 and 211).
There could be resistance in the 1930s, but victories could only be temporary and
ultimately pyrrhic. For the vast majority of the imprisoned Trotskyists, their “convictions” were
in fact death sentences. Under Kashketin’s direction, the Vorkuta camps became the centre of
extermination for the core of the Trotskyist opposition. At the end of March 1938, the first 25
were called up for transit. This “transit” was to the tundra where they were shot and buried.
The executions in the tundra lasted the whole month of April and part of May.
Usually one day out of two, or one day out of three, thirty to forty prisoners were
called. ... One time, a group of nearly a hundred, composed mainly of Trotskyists,
was led away to be shot. As they marched away, the condemned sang the
“Internationale,” joined by the voices of hundreds of prisoners remaining in camp
(M.B. 1974, 215–216).
This was Vorkuta’s part in the complete destruction of the old Bolshevik party. According to
Berger, “the same system was followed in all three camps” (1971, 96), Vorkuta, Noril’sk and
Kolyma. Lipper’s evidence from Kolyma, cited above, provides confirmation of that, at least for
Kolyma. “By the end of 1937 hardly a member of the Trotskyist cadres was left in the three
camps” (Berger 1971, 98). Broué’s account for Kolyma-Magadan is the most detailed. July 12,
the oppositionists in the camp launched a hunger strike, a strike experiencing even more
obstacles than the one in Vorkuta. October 26, 27 and again on November 4, “87 hunger strikers
… were condemned to death and executed … and there were many other executions” beyond
these 87 (2003, 320, author’s translation). This extermination of the Trotskyists was the tip of the
iceberg. By the end of the Great Terror in 1938, all the different sections of the party – from
followers of Trotsky to followers of Bukharin to former loyal Stalinists had experienced mass
executions. According to Roy Medvedev, “the NKVD arrested and killed, within two years,
more Communists than had been lost in all the years of the underground struggle, the three
revolutions, and the Civil War” (1973, 234).
1.3. The Communist party of Anti-Communism
Stalin’s rise was opposed by the most class conscious Marxist workers and intellectuals, who
found themselves grouped in one of the various oppositions, including the Trotskyist. The last
- 10 acts of this opposition were the desperate hunger strikes in the far reaches of the Russian arctic.
The consolidation of Stalin’s power involved the physical elimination of the political
representatives of the Old Bolshevik Party, most particularly those who called themselves
“Trotskyists” who were killed almost to a person, many of them meeting their fate in the
abandoned Brickworks at Vorkuta.
The 1936-38 Vorkuta events were part of a counter-revolution, an elimination of earlier
traditions of workers’ control and the installation in power of a new regime of bureaucratic
control. Observers right and left made much the same point. On March 5th 1938 in an article in
Popolo d’Italia “Mussolini ... asked whether ‘in view of the catastrophe of Lenin’s system, Stalin
could secretly have become a fascist,’ and stated that in any case ‘Stalin is doing a notable
service to fascism by mowing down in large armfuls his enemies who had been reduced to
impotence’” (Cited in Souvarine 1972, 534). In the words of Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko the
1930s represented “the history of the counter-revolution ... an entire historical epoch during
which the vilest and bloodiest kind of evildoing flourished upon the earth” (1981, 40). He
graphically illustrates this counter-revolution, based on oral accounts by Anastas Mikoyan.
The cells of the smaller prison at the Lubyanka were full to overflowing ...
Among those lying on the floor was an Italian Communist. ... [who said] “you’ve
had a fascist coup.” “That’s not right,” they answered her. “What else, if they’re
shooting Communists?” “What are you saying? The Communist Party is still in
power.” The Italian woman [replied] ... “Why are you trying to trick me? This is a
fascist coup for certain. I know what one looks like.” ... The Italian woman was
shot in 1936. That was the year the end came for Zinoviev and Kamenev too.
Stalin was apparently afraid the death penalty might not actually be carried out
against his two former allies. He sent Voroshilov to observe. This is what
Voroshilov reported.
“They stood up in front of Stalin’s executioner.
Zinoviev (shouting): This is a fascist coup!
Kamenev: Stop it, Grisha. Be quiet. Let’s die with dignity.
Zinoviev: No. This is exactly what Mussolini did. He killed all his
Socialist Party comrades when he seized power in Italy. Before my Death I must
plainly state that what has happened in our country is a fascist coup (AntonovOvseenko 1981, 145)!
If 1917-1919 represented the partially successful attempt to install the rule of the working
class, 1936-38 represented the entirely successful attempt to consolidate the rule of the state
bureaucrats grouped around Stalin. Trotsky struggled with the relationship between revolution
and counter-revolution until his assassination by a Stalinist agent in 1940. To his death he
maintained that some remnants of workers’ power remained in Russia. Trotsky argued that
although distorted by Stalinism, the Soviet Union remained a workers’ state because the
Communist Party still controlled the state. “If the party were excluded from the Soviet system,
then the whole system would soon collapse. Freed from the control of the party, the trusts would
immediately be converted into first, state capitalist, then, private capitalist enterprises.”
However, inside this party on which all depended;
… there are dispersed the elements of two parties ... from the official party there
is emerging a party of the counter-revolution, ... A symmetrical process is taking
place at the opposite, at the proletarian pole of the party, above all, in the form of
the Left Opposition. ... The main question is: who will prevail? It will be
immediately decided, not by the economic statistics of the socialist and capitalist
- 11 economic tendencies, but by the relation of forces between the proletarian and
Thermidorean flanks of the present so-called party (Trotsky 1973, 44–46).
The events at Vorkuta – replicated in the even more remote camps of Noril’sk and Kolyma –
made it absolutely clear who would prevail. The party of counter-revolution physically
eliminated the Left Opposition. Following Trotsky’s own logic, that would mean the final act in
the destruction of any remnants of the attempt to construct a workers’ state. Trotsky did not, and
could not know, the scale of the destruction of the old Marxist cadres in the Soviet Union. The
eye-witness reports of the extermination camps only reached the West in the 1960s and 1970s.
But our generation does know the extent of the destruction of the Marxist opposition. With this
knowledge, it seems pretty clear that by 1936-1938, the counter-revolution was complete.
2. Arise ye slaves: Vorkuta 1947-1953
So the first point of this paper is clear enough – that the workers’ state was transformed into a
state of bureaucrats. The story of the liquidation of the Trotskyists at Vorkuta is simply further
evidence of the distance between the traditions of workers’ power which motivated the 1917
revolution and the reality of bureaucratic terror which came to dominate in the 1930s. The
second point is that this bureaucrat’s state, because of its inescapable insertion into a world
system of states, was driven to industrialize in order to compete militarily. The industrialization
drive under Stalin, brings us to the second wave of anti-Stalinism centred in Vorkuta, the revolt
of the slave labourers from 1947 to 1953.
2.1. The transition to Forced Labour
There are two views as to the origins of the gulag system. One school of thought emphasizes “the
political imperatives of the Soviet regime’s attempts to eliminate its perceived enemies … and
not a response to the economic needs of industrialization” (Barenberg 2007, 20). By contrast, the
detailed research of the remarkable Polish author Stanisław Swianiewicz, very much situates the
gulag system in the context of the economics of forced labour and the needs of industrialization.
Each perspective would place the security service at its centre as enforcers of the Gulag system,
a security service known by various names including Cheka, OGPU, NKVD and KBG. But
according to Swianiewicz, “[d]uring the 1930’s the NKVD became not only a security police
with its own army … but also a huge industrial and constructional concern which organized
production under its own administration”. In addition, it also played the role of a “contractor
supplying labour force to enterprises”. Central to these roles was the constant “search for new
sources of manpower. The reign of terror which was a characteristic of the Stalinist period was to
a certain extent a result of the atmosphere created by this extension of the NKVD’s economic
sector” (1965, 15).
Compulsion was associated with both politics and economics from a very early period in
the Russian Revolution. From 1921 until 1923, a horrific famine swept through areas of what is
today the Ukraine. During this famine from “1.5 million to 2 million people died of starvation
and due to accompanying epidemics” (Serbyn 1988, 5). Some food aid, in the form of grain
shipments, arrived from the West to assist in feeding the starving millions. Nonetheless, in 1922
to much controversy, the Soviet government announced it was resuming exporting grain to the
West. Some rail workers, told to transport grain out of the country, went on strike. There were
acts of sabotage against trains and elevators containing grain for export. But the export went
ahead. While food was unloaded, in the port of Odessa, coming in as aid to the Ukrainian
hungry, grain grown by Ukrainian peasants was simultaneously loaded to be shipped to
- 12 Germany (Serbyn 1988, 9). Roman Serbyn argues that this policy had economic roots. The five
year old regime was seeking to industrialize. This required foreign exchange with which to
purchase the technology and other inputs needed in modern industry. But because Western banks
would not extend loans to the Soviet government, the only source of foreign exchange was trade,
and one of the only commodities Russia could sell abroad for cash, was wheat (1988).
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great survivor and historian of the gulag, identifies waves of
prisoners swept up and pushed into the camp system. Many do not get beyond his description of
what he calls the first wave, the wave which occurred under the watch of Lenin and Trotsky.
There is a great fear of tarring Lenin with the brush of Stalin. Ernest Mandel, in a major review
of the first of the three-volume masterpiece by Solzhenitsyn, wants to praise the book, but holds
back. “In The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn systematically attempts to demonstrate with facts
and figures that institutionalized terror began at the time of the October Revolution” something
Mandel condemns as “fundamentally counter-revolutionary” (1974, 53). Unfortunately, this
labeling of Solzhenitsyn has kept many on the left from reading and absorbing his books. Leave
aside the judgment by Mandel, and look at the evidence. It seems clear that Solzhenitsyn, in
large measure, got it right. He does argue that the first wave into what he calls his country’s
“Sewage Disposal System” began in the 1920s, but in that decade it was not yet a large wave.
The first big wave, associated with the first five-year plan, is sometimes called “dekulakization”
(getting rid of the so-called “rich” peasants or “kulaks) (Swianiewicz 1965, 114–121), the “great
turning point” (Applebaum 2003, 45) or probably most accurately, the “war on the peasantry”
(Viola 2005). Solzhenitsyn says that wave swept up 15 million people, but has largely been
ignored because the “peasants are a silent people, without literary voice”. The second wave, the
Great Terror, is somewhat more well known, because it “swept up and carried off to the
Archipelago people of position, people with a Party past, yes, educated people … [A]nd today
they are all writing, speaking, remembering. The third wave, the last mass wave, was the one
which swept up Solzhenitsyn, along with millions of other soldiers, veterans of the Great
Patriotic War, and national minorities – whether they be “a Crimean Tatar, a Kalmyk, a
Chechen” for whom the wave of 1948 and 1949 were harder to bear by far than the two
preceding waves (1974, 1:24–25).
In the 1930s, the decade in which the gulag exploded in size, grain for export was no
longer available in quantities sufficient for the Soviet Union’s foreign currency needs. In that
decade, “timber was to a very great extent made to take the place of grain … and extensive
exploitation of the forests became necessary in order to maintain a foreign balance. The forestry
reserves were, however, mostly in the remote northern regions where there was no adequate
supply of manpower”. The first five-year plan projected a need for 900,000 workers in the
forestry industry. But only about 50,000 became available through contracts with collective
farms. Into the labour supply breach stepped the security services, leading to hundreds of
thousands of prisoners engaged in forced labour in the “great timber industry run by what was
then called the NKVD in the extreme north of European Russia” (Swianiewicz 1965, 113–114).
It wasn’t just commodities for export that were produced by these forced labourers. If
gold could not be acquired through trade, it could be dug up from the ground. “Like Soviet
timber” gold from one of the most brutal of the camps, Kolyma, “would be sold directly to the
West, exchanged for desperately needed technology and machinery” (Applebaum 2003, 87).
It was the third category which was of interest to the prisoners in Vorkuta – that category
of energy inputs on which Soviet industrialization depended, above all the input of coal. The
story of Vorkuta is the story of coal.
- 13 2.2. The transition to coal
Russia industrialized; industrialization necessitated coal; coal was extracted in large part from
the slave labour camps in and around Vorkuta, and that extraction required thousands and
thousands of coal miners – part slave, and part “free”. During World War II, after the loss of the
Ukraine and its vast coal supplies to the German invaders, the drive to extract coal from the
mines in and around Vorkuta accelerated (D. Mandel 1991c, 196). That this was based on slave
labour was not atypical in the Soviet Union at that stage of its development. By the early 1950s,
the forced labour system in general, with its millions of slave labourers, had become central to
the Soviet economy. “Prisoners, who had been employed in the industrial ministries before their
arrest, estimated that half of the entire coal production of the Soviet Union and eighty per cent of
the wood supply is provided by forced labour” (Scholmer 1954, 212).
Unfree labour has often accompanied the early years of the development of a capitalist
economy, particularly during the period of what Marx referred to as primitive accumulation
(Miles 1987) – something we should more accurately call “primary accumulation”:
… a process which is “synonymous with the creation of a labour market and the
commodification of labour power. Marx’s analysis therefore emphasizes that a
labour market, and the exchange of labour power for a wage, are not universal
constants but are the result of human interventions in particular historical
circumstances”. ... Force or compulsion to this end are employed as a
precondition of moving from one mode of production to another, as it involves the
physical separation of pre-capitalist laborers from the means of production and
reproduction: “dispossession is not freely chosen by those who are its victims”
(Bakan 1991, 235–6).
There are two conditions in which many industrializing economies have resorted to
forced labour – when labour power is cheap and in plentiful supply and when economically
critical and labour intensive tasks cannot be accomplished without coercion. North American
capitalism, for instance, had an economically critical set of labour-intensive tasks to perform in
its early years – operating plantations to supply English textile mills with cotton, and European
dining room tables with sugar and coffee. However, the work on those plantations could not be
performed by free labour, as given a choice, the free labourers would to a person rather
homestead on their own land (which was also in plentiful supply), than break their backs in the
interests of international capital. But with a huge pool of cheap and available labour in Africa,
that problem could be solved through a centuries-long forced labour system that was more brutal,
more exploitative and longer-lasting than the forced labour system in Stalin’s gulag. In Russia,
similar conditions in a real sense were the material foundations of “High Stalinism”. There was
labour-intensive, economically necessary work throughout all of the arctic, its treasure-house of
natural resources eagerly awaited by industry in the south. And there was a massive pool of
millions of displaced peasants. Left to themselves, very few would have migrated to the far north
to work and die in the coal and gold mines. They were not left to themselves. Whole towns,
whole nations, were interred in the vast camp system and forced to use their labour to
accumulate wealth for Stalinist industrialization.
Vorkuta, in particular, became one of the most important areas in the entire slave labour
system. Joseph Scholmer, describing the situation in the early 1950s claimed that, “[t]he coal
from Vorkuta supplies the whole of Leningrad and Leningrad is the heart of Soviet industry, with
its factories making precision instruments, electrical equipment, optical lenses and engine parts”
(Scholmer 1954, 224). In 1950, coal-mines twelve, fourteen and sixteen in the Vorkuta complex
- 14 won “first prize for coal production for the entire industry in the USSR” (Buca 1976, 202). In
short, coal production had given the extermination city a new lease on life.
The town’s first incarnation was as the extermination point for the Marxist opponents to
Stalin. But its second incarnation, as one of Russia’s largest coal producers, has its roots in that
extermination process. The story of coal – the foundation of the second phase of Vorkuta’s place
in Russian history – is completely bound up with its first phase as an extermination site. The
findings of the seventeenth session of the International Geological Congress were published in
the Soviet Union in 1937. This dull, dry, professional text carries the usual Stalinist verbiage
about vast increases in production, breaking the limits imposed by the old Tsarist system, etc.
etc.
In connection with the enormous growth of the socialist construction and
exploitation of new regions reconnoitring perspective explorations and
prospecting operations were started in little explored territories where prospecting
has never been done before ... Beginning with 1932 estimates of the coal reserves
of prospective coal areas (The Tungus Basin, Lena field, Pechora and Bureya
basins) were also being taken into account in the grand total of resources ... Newly
obtained data confirm the presence there of enormous ... distributed coal reserves
(Prigorovski 1937, 4 and 7, emphasis added – P.K.).
But reading between the lines, a careful reader can glean a whole lot more from the text. The
authors talk of “newly obtained data” for this text published in 1937, the year the mass killings of
the oppositionists began. Of the 22 reports in the text, pride of place is given to the Pechora coalbearing region, the region which coincidentally was also to be the killing ground of the Left
Opposition. The Pechora district report is printed first in the book, in spite of the fact that it is the
district for which the authors have the least information.
The estimates of the reserves of the Pechora coals given in this article are but
preliminary and most approximate ones, since most recent data concerning this
question have not been received by the Commission in time for being included in
the manuscripts prepared for print. For the same reason no figures of the actual
and probable reserves of the region are given by us in this paper (Prigorovski
1937, 14).
So in all the detailed charts which pepper the collection, no statistics are given for the Pechora
coal bearing district, yet that district, of all the districts, is featured the most prominently. How
can we explain this very odd editing choice?
Begin by asking where the newly obtained data came from. The report claims that the
presence of coal in the region was first “established by geological explorations carried on there
in 1924-1930 by the Geological Service of the USSR. Nearly all the industrially important coal
areas of the basin presently known to us have been detected in the result of these works.” And in
fact, on the basis of this information, the first coal mine in Vorkuta began operation in 1934
(Negretov 1977, 569). But geological explorations in the 1920s were years and years before
1937. Data from these expeditions can in no way qualify as “newly-obtained data.” Turn to
Maria Joffe’s gripping account of her 29 years in the gulag. She describes one of her fellow
prisoners, a young geologist Gleb Elizavetsky. Like Joffe, he was imprisoned under Article 58 of
the criminal code for “Counter-Revolutionary Trotskyite Activities” a charge used quite liberally
to scoop up anyone suspected of being a potential problem for the regime. Elizavetsky was not
himself a Trotskyist, but rather a “non-party man” (Joffe 1978, 38). Like so many others,
however, once painted with the Article 58 brush, there was no reprieve, and he would meet the
- 15 same fate as if he had been a member of the Left Opposition. Early in 1937, Elizavetsky
announced to Joffe and others some important news, “he had got a permit to go outside the zone
to do geological research, outside working hours.” In his words:
‘There might be Devonian oil in one of the areas, but research would have to be
carried out as to whether it’s sufficient for industrial development. At the site of
the precipice – there are slight traces of pelitsipods (a kind of fossilised cockleshell sometimes preceding coal seams – M.J.) and this might mean coal’ (Joffe
1978, 17–18, emphasis added).
The discovery did not save the unfortunate Elizavetsky’s life. In spite of his findings, he was sent
off towards the death camps in Vorkuta. His friends tried to save him. The doctor found that his
report on coal was lying dormant in the camp chief’s office.
By special means available to him, the doctor got the paper registered, packed up,
sealed and speedily despatched with the rest of the mail to Vorkuta. Our doctor
had every confidence in the life-saving qualities of those ‘pelitsipods’. Moscow
was urging haste in the search for oil and coal and, except for Elizavetsky, no one
here knew of any possible locations (Joffe 1978, 38).
The pelitsipods did prove life-saving for the people and factories of Leningrad, but not for the
unfortunate Elizavetsky. Perhaps somewhere in the old NKVD records lies buried documents
showing that this Article 58 geologist was in fact the person who first discovered coal in and
around Vorkuta. His 1937 report, rushed from Vorkuta to Moscow, would certainly qualify as
“newly-obtained data”. What has been presented here is strong circumstantial evidence that that
might very well be the case. Whatever the truth, from being a death camp for Trotskyists,
Vorkuta was reincarnated as a slave labour camp for the production of coal.
2.3. The transition from slavery
He who opposes a dictatorship must accept civil war as a means. He would recoils
from civil war must give up opposition and accept the dictatorship (Koestler
2009, 214).
Industrialization was conducted in the context of incredible repression; that repression was
turned against the left, against the labour force inside industry and against national minorities
inside the Russian empire. All three of these “constituencies” – the left, national minorities, and
the thousands of slave labourers – found ways to organize against their jailers. That resistance
became mass when the national and other divisions inside the camps were overcome. And once
again, this mass resistance put Vorkuta at the centre of a wave of anti-Stalinism, centred on the
great mine workers’ strike of 1953, the second such wave since the triumph of Stalin in the
1920s.
The least studied, but in many ways the most interesting of these three component parts
of the anti-Stalinist resistance, is the left inside Russia itself. The contradiction between the
words of the regime’s rulers and the realities of life in a Stalinist society provided ideological
conditions which began recreating oppositional Marxist currents almost as soon as the old
opposition had been liquidated. These took clear form after World War II. In 1948, a manifesto
began circulating in Moscow written by a dozen Moscow students. Calling their group “Istinny
Trud Lenina” (ITL or Lenin’s True Works), they were very close in their analysis to elements of
the old Marxist opposition – in spite of that opposition’s physical liquidation. They argued that a
political revolution was necessary against a bureaucracy which was strangling the original ideals
- 16 of the 1917 revolution and that the foundation of a rebirth of real socialism would be a
regeneration of workers’ councils (soviets). Here they were very much reviving the framework
of Leon Trotsky. Others revived the framework of Group of Democratic Centralism or “Decists”
who in the 1920s had called the USSR a “system of ‘state capitaism’ where a new ‘Asiatic
despotism’ had destroyed workers’ democracy” (Broué 2003, 178–179, author’s translation).
Echoing this analysis, some of the young students referred to Russia as “state capitalist” arguing
that no vestiges of the old revolution remained. In underground conditions, their manifesto
circulated, allowing the ITL to grow to an organization of several hundred, with links to
universities in Leningrad, Kiev and Odessa (Gerland 1974, 222–224).4
In 1949, the group was broken by the Russian authorities. “In a single night, entirely
unexpectedly, hundreds of its members were arrested and condemned to twenty-five-year terms
at hard labor” (Gerland 1974, 225). But scattered throughout the gulag, these Marxist students
reconstituted an opposition – with anarchist students whose organization had been dispersed
shortly after theirs, and with oppositional currents they encountered in the camps. As Marxists,
they saw that the key to resistance lay in the collective action of workers.
The idea of a mass strike of forced laborers was popularized in the camp by the
Leninist students. ... The Leninists knew that only a strike which embraced at
least an entire forced-labor area that was important economically, such as
Vorkuta, stood any chance of success. And so they undertook, systematically and
patiently, to forge contacts between all the camps in the city of Vorkuta as well as
in the Vorkuta district itself (Gerland 1974, 227).
For a strike to succeed, the divisions between the prisoners – divisions cultivated by the
authorities – had to be overcome. There were two types of divisions that were the most intense –
among the “criminal” population, between collaborators (suki) and irreconcilables (blatnoy)5 and
among the entire prison population, between the Russian and the non-Russian prisoners. Before
the Leninist students arrived in the camps, the first remarkable steps at overcoming these
divisions had taken place.
Forty kilometres east of Vorkuta, in 1947, four small prison camps with about 5,000
prisoners in total contained the toughest of the “criminal” elements amongst the prison
population. Added to these were a group of former Red Army officers, including three named
Mikhtyiev, Nasarov and Malmyga. These three were at the centre of a conspiracy which
resembled nothing, if not the great Spartacus slave revolt in 71 B.C. inside the Roman empire.
They determined to kill their guards, seize their weapons, form an army from the prisoners in
their camps, march on the main camp system in Vorkuta proper, and once Vorkuta was
conquered:
...with an army of hundreds of thousands of prisoners, with food and weapons
from the camp stores, they planned to march down the railway to the west. Their
goal was nothing less than raising an army of the oppressed – prisoners, workers,
peasants – to overthrow the system and the great leader [Stalin] himself (Buca
1976, 174–175).
Faced with the possibility of resistance, the suki stopped collaborating with the prison
authorities, and threw in their lot with the blatnoy. This was “the first time the suki and the
blatnoy stopped fighting each other and allied themselves against the guards” (Buca 1976, 175).
The plan of course failed. But not until the rebels had killed all the guards in the four
camps, formed an army of several thousand, and begun a march across the tundra to Vorkuta
itself. The odds were stacked against them. Warned in advance, the Vorkuta authorities had
- 17 airplanes and machine guns with which to greet the slave-army, and massacred these latter-day
Spartacans by the hundreds. Few survived. But their example was to be key to the next round of
struggle.
Imprisoned in the worst of the work camps – the Istvestovy lime plant – 120 surviving
rebel blatnoy were one by one ordered to perform tasks that would violate their code of
solidarity, they each steadfastly refused, and one by one they were shot. But their heroic deaths
were witnessed by a group of other “irreconcilables”, in the same camp as punishment for being
uncooperative. One of these witnesses was Edward Buca. According to Buca:
Their solidarity was total. All to a man obeyed the blatnoy code, and refused to do
anything connected with the oppression of other prisoners. Their behaviour was
an example to the rest of us. Naturally, only a few of us knew the details of what
had taken place in the little zone, but most of us had an inkling – and this was
enough. The seeds of revolt had been sown. More and more suki in the camp
stopped persecuting the other prisoners, and eventually the blatnoy called a halt to
their struggle against the suki (Buca 1976, 178).
Six years later, Buca would be a key leader in the strikes which crippled the slave labour system.
This was not the first such Spartacus-like rebellion, but it is the best documented. Dimitri
Panin (on whom Solzhenitsyn based the character “Sologdin” in the his epic novel about the
camps, The First Circle (1968) (since 2012 available in an uncensored version, In The First
Circle (2012)) recounted from memory, in his memoirs, an eyewitness account of a similar revolt
in 1942. A small camp in the Pechora district (south and west of Vorkuta) near Ust-Usa was
headed by a disgruntled commander whose personnel responsible for the work-details were all
prisoners sentenced under Article 58. The commandant and the Article 58 prisoners imprisoned
the guards in the bath-house, stole their clothes and weapons, freed and armed the rest of the
prisoners, and began marching on the central headquarters for the Pechora district, located in
Ust-Usa. They liberated several camps on the way, and amassed a small “army.” It took weeks of
fighting before the Soviet authorities had suppressed this uprising. The insurgents were killed
virtually to the last man. The handful of survivors committed suicide (Panin 1976, 88–90).
In 1948, veterans (some perhaps belonging to or inspired by the underground veterans’
organization, “Democratic Movement of the North of Russia”) seized their guards’ weapons and
tried to take a town in the Noril’sk labor-camp region, east of the Urals. “The effort failed, and
they fled toward the mountains – reportedly over 2,000 strong – but were annihilated by the
Kremlin’s airpower. A similar revolt apparently occurred in the eastern Siberian region of
Kolyma” (Saunders 1974, 21).6
Through these uprisings – even though most ended in failure and death – the experience
was accumulating “that it was possible to wage an open struggle against the tyranny practiced in
Stalin’s camps” (Panin 1976, 319). The 1947 uprising, in particular, showed that the divisions
between suki and blatnoy could be overcome if resistance against their common enemy, the
prison authorities, was seen as possible. It also showed that the blatnoy were more than just
hardened criminals – they could constitute themselves as a fighting force.
Significantly, the type of resistance soon began to shift from the tactics of Spartacus, to
the tactics of the modern workers’ movement. In 1949 the Leninist students, in alliance with the
blatnoy attempted to organize a strike in one of Vorkuta’s most important coal pits, but met with
little response from the miners (Gerland 1974, 228). In 1951 in the hard labour camp near
Ekibastuz in the south west of the USSR a five-day work stoppage and hunger strike of 3,000
prisoners ended in a victory (Panin 1976, 309–320). These were the first rumblings of a storm
that was to explode two years later.
- 18 If collective rebellion could demonstrate the possibility of unity between blatnoy and
suki, a further and far more profound division confronted these activists in the preparation of
strike activity – the national divisions between Russians and non-Russians inside the camp.
Edward Buca describes the situation well.
One result of our desperate condition was increased hatred and strife between the
different nationalities, with each group trying to blame another for our plight. The
basic conflict was between Russians and Ukrainians. The Russians regarded the
Ukrainian nationalists and separatists as the real guilty men ... These Ukrainians,
the Russians said, were the followers of Bandera, were enemies of the Soviet
fatherland, aliens who didn’t deserve to be fed; they should be worked until they
dropped dead, and left to rot in the tundra. The Russian prisoners had picked up
these ideas from the NKVD officers and guards. When the NKVD noticed this,
they gladly encouraged it in order to keep the prisoners divided among themselves
(Buca 1976, 80).
So a highly complex and divisive situation resulted. On the one hand was Great Russian
chauvinism, a hatred by the Russian prisoners for the non-Russians, cultivated by the NKVD,
and captured perfectly by Buca. On the other was the bitter anti-communism, particularly of the
Ukrainian prisoners, whose experience of national oppression at the hands of the Stalinists made
them hate all things Russian and all things “communist”, and look to the Western democracies
for salvation. Among many of the non-Russians, this faith in the West made them distrustful of
any camp conspiracies. Waiting on Stalin’s death which they were convinced would lead to war
with the west and liberation from Stalinism, their main object was to stay alive and stay out of
trouble.
Activists on the largely-Russian left and among the non-Russian national minorities
worked hard to break down these divisions. For the left, it meant including demands for
“national minority rights” in their political slogans. The Leninist students:
... categorically condemned the Stalinist policy of nationalistic expansion. ...
[They] condemned all the annexations by the Soviet Union perpetrated after the
war, because these annexations run counter to the principle of national selfdetermination so passionately defended by Lenin (Gerland 1974, 224).
More concretely, activists organizing among the national minorities ensured that representatives
from all of “the nations of Vorkuta” were on their underground committees. When the young
Pole Edward Buca asked an old Ukrainian prisoner for advice on how to organize, he was told
“‘before you act, you must do everything possible to organize all nationalities.’” Accordingly, in
the initial work of pulling together clandestine groups, “it was arranged that each national group
would have its own leader; these latter would together select the supreme commanders” (Buca
1976, 198–199).
But it took outside events to force the pace, and make mass resistance a possibility. The
catalyst was the March 1953 death of Joseph Stalin. His death had four important impacts. First,
it raised expectations massively. According to the Polish nationalist, anti-communist Vorkuta
slave labourer Edward Buca:
I’ll always remember that morning. ... We were on our way to the mine when the
announcement came over the loudspeaker that ... Joseph Stalin, Marshal of the
Soviet Union, had died. We stopped in our tracks ... Some prisoners were
weeping, everyone was moved. This was like a great earthquake which could
- 19 affect even our lives. It was certain that one era in history was over and who could
know what the next would be like (Buca 1976, 229)?
According to the German communist Vorkuta slave labourer Joseph Scholmer:
When the actual announcement of his death came, bearded moujiks with tears in
their eyes went down on their knees and prayed. “I’ve been in this camp nineteen
years now,” said one of the Georgians. “But this is the best news I’ve ever heard.”
“God has saved the Jews,” a Polish Zionist whispered to me. ... “If he hadn’t died,
there would have been pogroms again as bad as anything at the time of the Black
Hundred, or Petljura, or Hitler” (Scholmer 1954, 187).
Second, the death of Stalin temporarily paralyzed the camp authorities who were unsure which
faction in the Kremlin would gain control. This was particularly pronounced after the fall of
Lavrentii Beria, long time head of the Soviet secret police, and, until overthrown in a palace
coup in June 1953 and eventually executed, presumed heir to Stalin’s power. An authoritarian
regime needs iron discipline from top to bottom. When a split opens up at the top, when it is
unclear who the final authority is, the entire system can be for a moment, paralyzed. Into this
paralysis and confusion, mass action which seemed unthinkable just days before can be on the
agenda.
Third, among the non-Russian national minorities, the death set in process a chain of
events which led to massive disillusionment with the Western democracies. “Churchill’s
statement that the new men in the Kremlin had to be given a chance to show their good-will and
work out their policy in peace ... caused the most profound dismay in the camps” (Scholmer
1954, 188). The national minorities had been reluctant to support resistance activities, banking
everything on Western intervention. With the West indicating its willingness to co-exist with a
post-Stalin Russia, thousands who had remained aloof from all talk of conspiracy and strike, now
were ready for action.
Fourth, and most importantly, all of these factors triggered the rise of a new workers’
movement in Eastern Europe – culminating in the massive East Berlin workers’ uprising, whose
example electrified the millions of slave labourers in Russia’s arctic. Anne Applebaum (2012)
gives a riveting account of the importance of these events. First, it was clear that there was
massive discontent even when Stalin was alive. This was not confined to East Germany. “The
Soviet ambassador to Prague had written of ‘near-total chaos’ in Czech industry in December
1952”. This chaos existed throughout Eastern Europe, and expressed itself as mass marches in
Czechoslovakia, strikes by tobacco workers in Bulgaria, and perhaps most significantly, a huge
population movement from East to West Germany. “More than 160,000 people had moved from
East to West Germany in 1952, and a further 120,000 had left in the first four months of 1953”
(Applebaum 2012, 436). Beria himself had a clear eye as to the reasons for this chaos, citing
amongst other causes, “the unwillingness of individual groups of peasants to join the agricultural
production cooperatives … and by the severe difficulties that the GDR [German Democratic
Republic, official name of East Germany] is experiencing with the supply of food products and
consumer goods” (cited in Applebaum 2012, 437). This crisis situation came to a head June 16,
1953, when East Berlin “witnessed its first major mass strikes since the war”, and the next day,
June 17, when thousands of construction workers marched through the city carrying banners
saying “Berliners, join us! We don’t want to be slaves to our work!” (cited in Applebaum 2012,
439). The demonstration did, in fact, become massive, and until put down by the brute force of
Russian tanks, spread throughout the country. “[D]emonstrations took place in all of the major
cities and industrial centres … especially those with a strong communist or social democratic
tradition: Rostock, Cottbus, Magdeburg, Dresden, Leipzig, Erfurt, and Halle. In total, about
- 20 500,000 people in 373 towns and cities went on strike in about 600 enterprises. Between a
million and 1.5 million people took part in demonstrations of some kind” (Applebaum 2012,
442).
This massive upsurge in resistance to Stalinism galvanized the slave labourers in
Vorkuta.
Although official news of the rising in Berlin and the Eastern Zone on June 17
only appeared late and in a garbled form in the camps it wasn’t difficult to form
an objective picture of what had happened. ... Thus even the ordinary prisoner felt
instinctively that what had happened in Berlin and the Eastern Zone was a revolt
against the police system which had arrested, sentenced and enslaved himself
(Scholmer 1954, 196).
The inspiration provided by the Berlin workers and the bitter disillusionment with Western
democracies which had watched passively while the rising against Stalinism in the Eastern Zone
was crushed, caused the zapadniki – the West Ukrainians, Latvians and other non-Russians –
who had until then avoided activism, to begin to join the strike committees (Gerland 1974, 228
and 231). On July 21, 6,000 slave labourers in Pits No. 1 and No. 7 “where the Leninists and the
anarchists exercised the strongest influence” refused to go to work. Within two days, they were
joined by a further ten pits and an additional 30,000 workers. Feverishly working to spread the
strike, the committees “requisitioned all the available stocks of paper” and produced thousands
of leaflets, reading:
Fellow prisoners, you have nothing to lose but your chains!
Don’t expect to gain your freedom through anyone’s efforts but your own.
No one will help you; no one will save you; only you yourselves can change your
lot.
Down tools! The strike is our only weapon (Gerland 1974, 232)!
At its peak, many tens of thousands of strikers were actively involved throughout the entire
Vorkuta area. Scholmer says 10,000 (Scholmer 1954, 205). This is clearly too low, reflecting the
limited information that was available to Scholmer at the time, a prisoner in Camp No. 6 which
was not central to the strike. Gerland, whose information comes from Camps No. 1 and 7 where
the key organizing took place, says that by July 23, there were some 30,000 on strike, after ten
pits inside Vorkuta and on the outskirts joined the strike. That figure grew by unspecified
thousands within ten days, by which time “twenty big pits inside the city and its environs were
shut down tight” (Gerland 1974, 231–233). Whatever the numbers, given the conditions, what
the strike committees accomplished was remarkable. The camps were completely isolated one
from the other by the authorities. Nonetheless, news spread like wildfire from one struck camp to
another. “[T]his was accomplished in the main thanks to the aid of soldiers who sympathized
with the strikers and therefore incurred the risk of maintaining the contacts which had been
broken by the work stoppage” (Gerland 1974, 233). As well as camp to camp communication,
and the ongoing confrontation with the troops which surrounded the camps, the strike
committees had to maintain the existence of the strikers. To accomplish this, entire camps were
put under workers’ control. Edward Buca at “No. 10 camp section coal-mine no. 29” (Gerland
1974, 255), one of the more isolated camps, oversaw a strike committee which arranged for
maintenance of the abandoned mines, so that gas would not build up and explode, “staff the
bakery, which made bread for both guards and prisoners,” maintain a functioning hospital for the
many sick and disabled camp inmates and even run a laundry, again both for the inmates and for
the guards (Buca 1976, 244–247).
- 21 Not only was this self-organization a way of building the confidence of the strikers
themselves, it was a way of breaking down the hostility of the soldiers who surrounded the
struck camps. When the first batch of guards’ laundry had been washed in the worker-controlled
camp 29, “it was hung out in the sun to dry, and the guards, most of them simple peasant boys,
were impressed. ‘We’ll never fire on you,’ several of them said” (Buca 1976, 247).
But the strikers were vulnerable, if the prison authorities could find loyal troops.
In not one of the camps did the leaders make use of that form of strike which,
throughout the history of strikes, has always proved the most effective: the sitdown strike. They let everything be thrashed out in the camp itself instead of in
the pit. That is where the main battleground of the strike should have been, for the
simple reason that the pit is the exclusive preserve of the prisoners. None of the
guards ... would ever dare go down the pit for fear of not coming out alive again.
Inside the pit it would have been possible to carry on open and effective
strike propaganda. Small meetings, impossible in the camp because of the
informer system, could have been held. And the strikers’ shock troops could have
got possession of technical key points such as the main production lift and the
coal trucks, and from there have
By the end of July, the authorities had found soldiers willing to fire on the strikers. The
camps on strike were methodically surrounded by reliable troops. The most isolated camp, no. 29
under the control of Edward Buca’s multi-national strike committee, was chosen as the camp to
be made an example of. On August 1, the prisoners were given a forty-minute ultimatum to
surrender or face the consequences. Buca describes what happened next.
I asked those around me what they wanted to do. These were my closest
collaborators, and their decision was unanimous: they would not leave the camp,
even if it meant death.
Then I went from group to group, asking for their decisions. It was the
same everywhere: death rather than surrender (Buca 1976, 270).
The prisoners massed at the camp gates, linking arms, to confront the troops. They were first
attacked by a fire engine, “but before the hoses could be unwound” a wall of prisoners advanced,
“turning the vehicle out of the gate as if it had been a toy” (Buca 1976, 271). Then the massacre
began. Rudenko, Chief Prosecutor of the Soviet Union who had arrived at the camp to oversee
negotiations with the strikers, pulled out a pistol and shot one of the key striker leaders,
Ihnatowicz.
It must have been a signal. There was a salvo of shots from the guards, straight
into the mass of prisoners. But we were standing with our arms linked, and at first
no one fell, though many were dead and wounded.
Only Ihnatowicz, a little in front of the line, was standing alone. He
seemed to stand for a moment in astonishment, then turned round to face us. His
lips moved, but no words came out. He stretched out an arm, then fell.
As he fell, there came a second salvo, then a third, and a fourth. Then the
heavy machine-guns opened fire. ... Then the firing stopped. There was silence.
After waiting a few moments, I gave orders to stand up. Hundreds lay dead. ...
Some refused to go and turned back with some notion of trying to stop the guards
from entering the camp. Some tore off their ragged shirts and yelled at the guards,
‘Shoot, you red devils! Shoot!’
But there were no more shots (Buca 1976, 271–272).
- 22 We will never know how many died. Buca’s eye-witness account gives a figure of 400 killed on
the spot. Scholmer quotes the surgeon, Blagodatov, who after the massacre was ordered to camp
29.
“When I arrived at the camp,” he told me, “I found about 200 seriously wounded
still alive, most of them hit in the chest and stomach. ... Sixty-four prisoners had
been killed on the spot ... There wasn’t much chance of saving many of the
wounded ... We operated for a whole week. We did what we could, but they were
dying from their wounds all the time (Scholmer 1954, 227).
Remarkably this did not signal an immediate end to the strike. Even though Camp 29’s
massacre was known throughout the Vorkuta complex, the other strikers held out. In fact the
peak of the strike seems to have been reached after the massacre, not before. The pressure of the
strike led to Moscow making some remarkable concessions – allowing letters to be written home
twice a month instead of twice a year; allowing yearly visits from family members; eliminating
the hated identification numbers; and eliminating iron bars from barracks windows. The strikers
rejected these concessions out of hand as inadequate. Moscow responded with promises of better
food, higher pay, and shorter work shifts. Still the strikers held firm. General Derevyanko, who
had been one of those responsible for the massacre at Camp 29, then “resorted to a ruse”.
Members of the strike committee and of the central strike leadership were politely
invited to an interview at the headquarters, an invitation they naturally accepted.
They were cordially met at the camp gate by orderlies, who accompanied them to
the city; but not a single one of them returned from this talk (Gerland 1974, 233–
234).
Finally, Camp 7 was presented with an ultimatum along the same lines as Camp 29. The
strike leaders decided to march into the tundra as ordered to avoid a massacre. Once there, the
authorities arrested any strikers who were in anyway suspected of being among the leaders of the
strike, between 400 and 500 strikers in total. “This action in fact eliminated the entire strike
committee though they were not known individually. All the active elements in the camp were
now missing. The masses were leaderless. The morale of the strikers had been broken. Work
began in the pit again next day” (Scholmer 1954, 228). Some pits held out to November, for
more than three months, but “they finally returned to work only because the supply of food and,
what is even more vital in polar regions, the supplies of coal gave out” (Gerland 1974, 234).
While it is the one for which we have the best eye-witness account, the strike in Vorkuta
was not the only that year. Michael Solomon reports that in May 1953, a rebellion had taken
place in the Noril’sk area.
The organisers had managed to spread it to all the camps of the area, till it
involved some 55,000 prisoners. They struck for comparatively mild demands –
contact with their families, letters and parcels, regularisation of the ration system
and so on. ... the strike was eventually put down by force, with over 1000 dead.
Executions followed on a mass scale of ‘ringleaders’. The rebellion’s rank and
file were sent for special punishment to Kolyma. ... they were sent on to the
notorious mines of Kholodnaya. An old inmate describes them marching to their
trucks, shouting boasts and sneering at the meeker prisoners who had preceded
them and some of them even singing Ukrainian nationalist songs (Conquest 1978,
99–100; based on Solomon 1971).
- 23 We can draw several conclusions from these remarkable events in 1953. By using the
strike – the classic tactic of the international workers’ movement – the Vorkuta strikers had
indicated that there was a new force to be reckoned with in the Soviet Union. In the 1930s, the
Vorkuta inmates had only moral power on their side. The heroic hunger strikes of the 1930s
Trotskyists had no hope of winning. They were a magnificent statement of a dying generation.
By the 1950s, however, the slave labour inmates of Vorkuta had, in additional to moral
power, economic power. Two students who had been in Leningrad during the Vorkuta strikes,
ended up in the Vorkuta pits two months after the strikes ended.
“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.” ... The strike soon became
popular in Leningrad. The news brought by the drivers of the coal trains was
quickly passed round (Scholmer 1954, 234).
Without question this flexing of new-found economic muscle hastened the demise of the
forced labour system in the Soviet Union. “New strikes kept breaking out through 1954 and
1955, until finally a general amnesty of political prisoners was granted and the camp system
partly dismantled” (Saunders 1974, 22). With the demise of slave labour, increasingly the
Russian working class, in its work and experience, differed in no essential way from the working
class in the West. That the strikes could have this impact, was possible because of the changes
that had taken place in the Russian economy over a generation. By the 1950s, the conditions
which made slave labour economically “rational” for the Russian economy, were increasingly
disappearing. Once the mines had been opened, the canals dug, the dams built, the roads cut
through the tundra, the economically-necessary labour for the next stage of industrial
development was less suited to slave labour than the stage of “primary accumulation.”7 A higher
technical level required higher skill levels on the part of the working masses, and hence greater
use of consent rather than coercion. In addition, the pool of cheap labour represented by the
millions of peasants displaced by war and civil war, was by and large used up.
So the events of 1953 represented an economic transformation. Most importantly,
however, the 1953 events represented a human transformation, the transformation of the mass of
slave labourers into a collectivity of industrial workers. The working class is in part formed
objectively by capitalism. But it arrives as a class when it subjectively begins defining itself as a
class that can act in its own interests. That began to happen in Vorkuta in 1953.
In Scholmer’s words, “the most important thing about the strike was that it ever took
place at all” (Scholmer 1954, 234). At the end of the fourth day of the strike, Buca wrote:
I sat outside one of the huts – out of sight of the guards – and talked and joked
with the prisoners, and thought about the changes that had taken place inside the
camp during those four days: we had become human beings again.
Anyone who saw those prisoners, from those in the hospital who had no
hope of surviving to those who were exhausted from their brutal work, could
never doubt that the attempt we had made had been worth while, however it might
turn out. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but, despite my fears, I was
happy (Buca 1976, 259).
The Vorkuta strikes of 1953, then marked the end of one era and the beginning of the
next. They marked the end of the era where industrialization was and could be conducted on the
backs of millions of slaves. It marked the beginning of an era where industrialization would
increasingly have to rely on wage labour, as in the West. And it served notice that these wage
labourers would make an effort to put their imprint on the future of this vast, industrial economy.
- 24 It is to this era, that we can now turn in examining the third and last wave of anti-Stalinist
struggle in which Vorkuta once again played a central role.
3. Gravediggers of Stalinism: Vorkuta 1989-1991
The vengeance of history is more terrible than the vengeance of the most
powerful General Secretary (Trotsky 1941, 383).
If the 1953 events were precipitated by paralysis at the top of society after the death of Stalin, the
1989 events were precipitated by a paralysis deeper and more thoroughgoing – the political crisis
represented by “glasnost” and “perestroika” whose background was a decade of slow growth in
the 1970s, a half-decade of stagnation from 1980 to 1985 and the beginning of negative
economic growth at the end of the 1980s. As always, paralysis at the top of society created
political openings at the bottom, and the mid to late 1980s were marked by unprecedented
political ferment inside the Soviet Union. In this atmosphere, what David Mandel has rightly
called the “rebirth of the Soviet labour movement” took place between July 10 and 24, 1989 (D.
Mandel 1991c, 51–78).
3.1. Perestroika from Below
The depth of the economic crisis gripping the USSR in the 1980s is now well-known. Later we
will provide some statistics. This created the conditions for a vast proliferation of economic
grievances inside the working class. The regime’s response, represented by Gorbachev, was to
reintegrate the economy with the West even if that meant allowing non-competitive firms to go
under. This restructuring was known as perestroika. But restructuring in the context of falling
living standards was likely to produce social unrest. Perestroika then, was accompanied by
glasnost, or openness. The intention of the bureaucracy was to legitimize its economic strategy.
Perestroika was largely a state initiative that meant ‘openness for intellectuals and discipline for
workers’” (Friedgut and Siegelbaum 1990, 5). The state wished to open up the political process
just enough to allow a greater feeling of participation on the part of the masses, without
conceding anything in terms of control and power. The problem with such schemes is that they
can easily get out of control. Millions of people took Gorbachev at his word, and perestroika
from above became redefined as perestroika from below. Small groups of perestroika enthusiasts
began organizing from the mid-1980s on. “In each small group, a start had to be made in
introducing democratic change and civic activism. Perestroika had to reach up from below to
meet the efforts initiated from above” (Friedgut and Siegelbaum 1990, 17). In particular, the
workers’ movement began pressing its economic demands through initiatives outside the control
of the state and a Stalinist union movement that was completely bound to that state. In the words
of worker activist Aleksandr Utkin, “it was obvious to everyone that the old unions were not
defending us. When we sat down for negotiations with the government, the official trade-unions
sat with the government opposite us” (D. Mandel 1992, 148).
In the first half of 1989, these factors resulted in two-million worker-days lost to strikes,
“an average of 15,000 workers on strike each day” (D. Mandel 1991c, 55). These strikes began
to raise the possibility, for the first time since the 1920s, of working class organizations
independent of the state. But at first, so long had the traditions of independent working class
struggle been buried, that the numbers who looked to independent labour action were tiny
indeed.
The strike of 400,000 coal miners in July changed that dramatically, a strike which ended
up engulfing the four major coal producing areas of the USSR. In the coal fields, the grievances
- 25 were real and numerous – overcrowded dormitories and buses, a shortage of day-care spaces and
schools, miserable life expectancy (“life expectancy among miners is under 50 years”), work
conditions, industrial pollution, run-away inflation, the scheduling of holidays, and the arbitrary
power and corruption of the local officials. On July 10, after negotiations had broken down, these
grievances exploded in strike action in Mezhdurechensk (3,000 kilometres east of Moscow, less
than 400 kilometres from the border with Mongolia). By July 15, the strike involved 158 mines
and 177,000 workers. On July 15, the workers in the Donbass in the Ukraine, more than 3,000
kilometres east of the original strikes, began to go out on strike. In all “100 mines struck in the
Donbass with up to 90,000 miners out on a single day. ... On July 20 the strike spread to the
other mining centres of the Ukraine.” As the strikes were reaching their peak here, the Pechora
district, 2,500 kilometres north and east of the Donbass, exploded, thousands going on strike
from July 19 to July 24 (D. Mandel 1991c, 52–57). A new force in Russian society was
discovering its power.
Everywhere the picture was the same. The miners occupied the central squares in
permanent meeting. Worker detachments maintained order. In Donetsk [in the
Donbass], veterans of the Afghan war played an important role in this. ... In
Kemerovo [near the original centre of strike activity in Mezhdurechensk], crime
declined by 52% during the strike. The strike committees stopped the sale of
alcohol, sealed liquor stores and set up drug inspection points on the main roads.
In Donetsk two miners were dismissed for appearing drunk on the central square
(D. Mandel 1991c, 56).
The strikes were relatively short-lived and ended in each case with partial but real
victories. In Vorkuta, “the miners won concessions from the Government that included an
increase in supplies of soap, fresh meat, refrigerators and leather shoes. In addition, the miners
were promised pay increases for certain work shifts and some sort of profit sharing” (Fein 1989).
More important than these concessions was the increase in confidence and level of organization.
These were the first, sustained, widespread incidences of working class collective action since
the 1953 prison camp strikes. And different from the 1953 strikes, the organizations once formed
did not have their leaderships dispersed into the prisons of the gulag. “[W]ith the end of the
strike, the strike committees did not disband but transformed themselves into workers’
committees, whose main task was to monitor the execution of the agreements” (D. Mandel
1991c, 58). For the first time since the 1920s, organizations based on the working class,
independent of the state, and powerful enough to avoid instant repression from the regime, were
operating in the Soviet Union. A silence more than three generations old was ending.
Eighteen months later, the coal miners were again to lead a nation-wide coal strike
against the regime. Between the two outbreaks, smaller but nonetheless significant strikes in the
coal fields put working class struggle front and centre in the unfolding drama of glasnost and
perestroika. In response to the July 1989 explosion, Gorbachev attempted to virtually ban strike
activity. Vorkuta workers responded with illegal, wildcat strikes. October 25, 1989, a strike by
“16,000 of the 24,000 miners in the northern Vorkuta region forced the closing of four of the
area’s 13 mines” (Fein 1989). The strike lasted just 24 hours, workers deciding to return after
“the local mine association had threatened legal proceedings against 90 to 100 leaders of the
strike, accusing them of breaking the new law on resolving labor disputes”. However, a return to
work did not mean an end to the struggle. A spokesman for the miners said that they “would
resume the protest if their demands were not met by year’s end” (Dobbs 1989a). Their strike was
part of a wider series of actions by miners in other parts of the Soviet Union. November 1:
- 26 [N]early 100,000 miners in the Soviet Union’s largest coal-producing region
staged a two-hour ‘warning’ strike … In addition to routine economic demands,
the strikers in Donetsk in the Ukraine called for abolition of the leading role of the
Communist Party and direct election of the Soviet President. Similar political
demands have been made by miners in the northern city of Vorkuta” (Dobbs
1989b).
In July 1990, 100,000 mine workers in the Ukraine, Siberia and Vorkuta struck again, with
expressly political demands.
The strike coordinating committee in the Donetsk basin of the Ukraine issued an
appeal that expressed total lack of faith in the government.
“We are of the view that [Soviet Primer Minister Nikolai] Ryzhkov’s
government in the year since it was set up has failed to come up with an effective
concept of getting the country out of its present economic crisis,” the statement
said.
“We cannot sit and wait any longer until our government and the party
apparatus dictates its will … and leaves us with nothing but hunger, poverty and
devastation”.
In addition to demanding the resignation of Ryzhkov and his ministers, the
miners called for the nationalization of all Communist Party property and the
elimination of all party political cells in the government, the army and the KGB
(Schodolski and Shanker 1990).
3.2. The independent union movement
The dozens of activists seeking to rebuild independent working class organization after the 60year nightmare of Stalinism, now had an audience of hundreds and thousands. Boris Kagarlitsky
commented on the initial stages of building independent unions
There are a lot of small groups trying to organise independent trade unions. But
the only serious possibilities lie with Sotsprof [Federation of Independent
Socialist Trade Unions] ... which was launched in the summer – and the strike
committees themselves. ... There are about 5,000 members of the initiative groups
for Sotsprof and the aim now is to develop it in provincial working class areas
(Kagarlitsky 1989).
Sotsprof was was by no means the only attempt at forming independent working class
organizations. In the coal fields, for instance, a more important role in 1991 was probably played
by the Independent Miners’ Union (IMU) which had “approximately 55,000 members, though its
real influence among the miners was much broader” (D. Mandel 1992, 141). Given the 60-year
absence of independent working class politics, this re-emergence of independent trade unions,
however small, was extremely significant. But for all of these independent unions, 1991 was to
be a turning point in their history, and for all it was to represent, for the moment, the peak of
their ability to influence Russian politics.
In retrospect, this should have caught no one by surprise. Boris Kagarlitsky in 1989
warned enthusiasts in the West:
You mustn’t exaggerate the level of class consciousness of the working class.
We’re only going through the first steps of the working class movement
(Kagarlitsky 1989).
- 27 3.3. The legacy of the past
It is impossible to calculate the extent to which working class consciousness was destroyed by 60
years of Stalinism. Unable to organize independently, punished at the slightest sign of
independent activity, unable to put forward independent political parties, provided with no
forums to discuss, debate and hammer out ideological viewpoints, the working class throughout
the Soviet Union was driven to an extremely low level. The 1989 awakening of the class could
not but be marked by this legacy.
The negative aspects of the legacy showed themselves in different ways. First, the
miners, while extremely militant and politicized, remained isolated from much of the rest of the
rest of the working class. Second, the vacuum of ideas created by Stalinism left the miners open
to illusions in Boris Yeltsin and his market-friendly programme of reforms. Isolation and
“Yeltsinism” meant that this initial attempt at forming independent organizations was to prove
incapable, in the short term, of creating stable, mass organizations.
March 4, 1991 at the Bolshevik Mine in Novokuznetsk, what was to have been a one-day
walkout in solidarity with striking Ukrainian miners, quickly spread to at least one-third of the
country’s 580 mines, including those in Vorkuta, and settled in to being a massive, generalized
challenge to the regime (Schmemann 1991a). Not only was this strike larger and more sustained
than the 1989 strikes, it was also more expressly political. “In 1989, it was only the coal miners
of Vorkuta, in the Russian Polar region, who combined radical political principles with their
economic demands. But now … almost all of the strikers have proclaimed radical change in
political leadership as central to their position” (Remnick 1991). Increasingly, however, this
political opposition to the state, transformed itself into political support for new Russian
Federation president Boris Yeltsin. In May, in the third month of the strike, Yeltsin “received a
hero’s welcome at every stop from miners” during a tour of the Novo-Kuznetsk mines. “‘At the
first rally yesterday the miners formally endorsed Yeltsin,’ said Aleksandr Kolesnikov, a
member of the strike committee” (Schmemann 1991b). By 1991, continued economic decline
was making life grim for the miners, and it was making a mockery of the “liberals’ promises of a
bright future from market reform.” The decline in their living standards dragged many workers
into apathy, and the apathy paved opened the door for Yeltsin and his promises of market reform
in a way that was much more pronounced than 1989 (D. Mandel 1991a, 161).
The enthusiasm for Yeltsin soon became tempered when it became clear exactly what he
was offering. April 23, he had been one of the signatories of the Accord of Ten” which “called
on the miners and all other strikers to return to work and to make up the losses, declaring that it
was ‘unacceptable to try to achieve political goals by inciting to civil disobedience, strikes and
appeals to overthrow the political authorities” (D. Mandel 1991a, 186). Yeltsin, speaking at a
miner’s rally, praised their strike to the heavens. “The miners have turned out to be the initiators
of the destruction of the old command-administrative system and creators of a new system of
economic management”. However, Pavel Vashonov, a key member of the Yeltsin camp,
expressed a quite different view. “‘This wave of strikes cannot give birth to any normal political
system’ … The workers are motivated only by their instinctive reaction to having been ‘robbed
and deceived’” (Sneider 1991)
In confusion, the strike movement – whose activists had increasingly looked to Yeltsin as
an alternative to Gorbachev – in city after city, pit after pit, came to a halt. “The initial reaction
among many of the miners’ leaders ... was one of shock and betrayal.” Strike leader Aleksandr
Kriger said “I think that Yeltsin betrayed us” (D. Mandel 1991a, 187). Betrayal or not, Yeltsin
seemed like a better choice than Gorbachev to many in the movement. In Vorkuta, the strike
ended when an agreement was reached to transfer the control of the mines from the USSR and
Gorbachev to the Russian Republic and Yeltsin (D. Mandel 1991a, 186). The workers, in other
words, even if disillusioned by the Yeltsin-Gorbachev rapprochement, were looking to Yeltsin
- 28 and his programme of market reforms as a solution to their deep economic and social grievances.
This expressed itself in August when hundreds of thousands of working people took to the streets
to defend Yeltsin against the reimposition of bureaucratic control in the abortive coup.
Yeltsin has, of course, proven to be a false saviour. According to Nikolai Preobrazhensky
of the Petersburg Party of Labor, his
...“low intensity” attack on rights and living standards of working people is
demoralizing enough. Planned massive price rises have reduced everyone but the
privileged to desperation. Salaries are next to worthless. Pensions are simply not
paid on the grounds of a manufactured “shortage” of money, while “before our
eyes, our systems of free medical care and free universal education are being
dismantled without our permission, with no legal basis” (Cited in Greeman 1993).
The workers movement, starting from a very low point, proved capable of only
momentarily breaking out of its isolation in the mining centres. Except for an explosion in
Minsk, “the movement failed to embrace the largest Soviet cities, and the miners’ attempts to
expand the movement in their own regions met with very limited success” (D. Mandel 1991a,
193). In the vacuum of ideas that was the legacy of 60 years of Stalinism, in opposition to
Gorbachev, the workers turned to Yeltsin and his pro-market “alternative.” In the wake of the
privation and poverty this has led to, the independent union movements of 1991 have retreated
for now from the stage. In the words of Richard Greeman, “for the moment, we have stasis –
which the Greeks understood as a violent and degenerative paralysis of a polity in the middle of
an unfinished class war” (Greeman 1993, 61).
Conclusion: ‘They are their sons and daughters’
In the years since 1993, the situation has been much more than one of stasis. If economic decline
was the background to perestroika and glasnost, what followed in the transition to neoliberalism,
was economic catastrophe. It is extremely difficult to actually measure the state of the economy
in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Government statistics were notoriously unreliable. Working
with the statistics we do have, by the most basic measure of the health of an economy – output
per capita adjusted for inflation – declined 1.27 percent in 1988, 1.47 percent in 1989, .76
percent in 1990, and then a precipitous 14.6% in 1991 (CIA 1987; CIA 1989; CIA 1990; CIA
1991). That is the kind of decline experienced by Greece in the wake of the 2008 Great
Recession. No wonder there was such a major strike wave in 1991. However, the years following
were even worse. Figure 1 takes the same criterion – output per capita adjusted for inflation –
and tracks the performance of the U.S., the U.K. and the Russian Federation from 1991 until
2011, output per capita in 1990 for each country calculated as 100. In the U.S. and the U.K.,
there is economic weakness in 1991 and 1992 in the context of the recession which opened up
the decade. But from that point on, their economies grow steadily. By 2007, just before the Great
Recession, inflation-adjusted output per capita in the U.K. is 48 percent greater than in 1990, in
the U.S. the figure is 38 percent.
But the story in the Russian Federation through the 1990s is catastrophic. Inflationadjusted output per capita drops so precipitously in that country, that by 1998, it stands at just
58% of the 1990 figure. That represents an economic decline of 42%, an economic decline
reminiscent of the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930s. A slow recovery begins
the next year, but it is only 2006 when output per capita returns to 1990 levels.
- 29 Figure 1. Output per capita, Russia, U.S., U.K., 1991-2011 (1990=100)
(Author-created, derived from data available in UNdata 2012a; UNdata 2012b).
Perhaps even more dramatic as an indicator of economic weakness, is the trade balance of the
Soviet Union and former Soviet Union in that most basic of commodities – wheat. “Bread, Peace
and Land” was the organizing slogan of the October Revolution, and by the late 20th century, the
key component of the first of these – bread – could not be produced in sufficient quantity to feed
the people of the Soviet Union. Figure 2 shows this graphically. From the mid 1970s on, the
Soviet Union imported more wheat than it exported. By 1984, the trade deficit in wheat stood at
a staggering 25 million tonnes. We now know that this was an understatement. After the collapse
of the Soviet Union, a revision of statistics revealed that the actual deficit that year was 40
million tonnes. It is not until the 21st century that the former countries of the Soviet Union began
exporting more wheat than they were importing.
- 30 Figure 2. Net Exports, wheat (tonnes), USSR and Former USSR, 1961-2010
(Author created, derived from data available in FAOSTAT 2013)
Throughout the 1990s, as is often the case in periods of deep and prolonged economic crisis, the
entire energy of the poor and the oppressed turned to survival. Class struggle receded into the
background, and the promising beginnings of 1989-1991 in terms of independent workers’
organization became a distant memory.
But we are not at the end of this story. There will be a fourth chapter. The sea change in
world politics which the years 1989 to 1991 represented, were accompanied by a sea change in
working class politics in the countries of the ex-Soviet Union, a sea change with roots in
previous generations of struggle. The re-emergence of the working class as a class for itself in
1989-1991 is a tremendous achievement. The August 1991 coup attempt, when hard-line
Stalinists attempted to re-establish “communist” rule, was stopped in large part by striking
workers throughout the USSR including “striking miners in most of the Soviet coal fields” (Gray
1991). Without any question, the confidence to strike against the golpistas would not have
existed without the preceding years of intense class struggle.
And again, as in the two periods looked at previously, throughout 1989-1991, it was the
miners in Vorkuta who were the quickest to press political demands, the most ready to take
direct action, and in the forefront of establishing independent union organizations. According to
David Mandel, during the July 1989 awakening of the Russian workers’ movement:
[t]he Vorkuta miners called for the removal of the coal minister and of the
chairman of the Union of Workers of the Coal Industry ... The level of
politicization did vary from one region to the other, it being the highest in
Vorkuta. (The demand to rescind article 6 of the constitution [which alloted the
Communist party a monopoly of power in the state] was proposed by the
- 31 chairman of the Vorgashorskaya mine strike committee, himself a party member
for over ten years) (D. Mandel 1991b, 60).
Boris Kagarlitsky, when asked why it was the Vorkuta miners who were the most militant and
the most politicized in November of 1989, responded:
“They are very aggressive. Even though the leaders of these strikes are under a
great deal of pressure they are very resolute. It’s important to know that these
miners are the sons and grandsons of Stalin’s victims. No one other than those in
the labour camps ever worked in the mines.” Kagarlitsky said today’s miners
were aware of the Trotskyists who were forced to work in the Vorkuta labour
camps during Stalin’s purges. “They are their sons and daughters. No one ever
moves there, so these are the second and third generation” (Rees 1989).
This was indeed the revenge of history. The centre of the fiercest repression against the left and
the workers’ movement had, by 1989, 1990 and 1991 become the most advanced centre in the
reconstruction of that left and that workers’ movement.
Vorkuta chapter is the story of the class conscious revolutionary socialists who called
themselves Trotskyists, and their brutal extermination, almost to a person. In the wake of that
Great Terror, the level of struggle, the level of consciousness, the traditions of struggle of the
working class throughout the Soviet Union were driven down to abysmally low levels. The
tremendous intellectual and organizational achievements, from the days of Plekhanov and
Zasulich, to Lenin and Bukharin, to Trotsky and Rakovsky, were almost completely erased.
Nonetheless, resistance re-emerged in Vorkuta chapter two, at first with traditions that had been
thrown back 2,000 years, to the slave revolt tactics of Spartacus in the Roman empire, but
culminating in absolutely classic forms of working class struggle. The strikes which
characterized Vorkuta chapter three represented an enormous leap forward, independent working
class organization being put on the agenda for the first time since the 1920s.
The depression of the neo-liberal 1990s drowned the 1989 wave in a tsunami of misery.
But this time, the set back has occurred in a context where it will be possible for activists
involved in the 1989-91 strike wave to organize, discuss and learn the lessons of those years.
And – that economic depression is over. Slowly, tentatively, the economies throughout much of
the former Soviet Union have returned to growth. Undoubtedly, new forms of resistance and
organization are gathering themselves in preparation for chapter four. If the working class in the
countries of the ex-Soviet Union has many obstacles to overcome, as it certainly has, it is a class
which has covered a tremendous amount of historical epochs in a very few years. While it took
the western labouring masses almost 2,000 years to progress from slave rebellions in 71 B.C. to
the struggle for democracy in 1848 A.D., in modern Russia, a mere 40-50 years separated the
Spartacus style revolts of the 1940s and working class struggle for democracy in the late 1980s.
The fact that this struggle for glasnost, for democracy, quickly generated ideas and the initial
attempts at independent working class organization, points to a future in which lessons from past
struggles can be generalized with much greater rapidity than was the case for the European
working class movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We cannot know in advance
the outcome of these struggles, but we do know that they will come. Then we can write chapter
four. Or better still, read a chapter four written by the workers themselves.
- 32 Notes
1
Formerly the Komi Autonomous Republic of the Russian Federation. It declared its sovereignty
in 1990 and changed its name to the Komi Republic.
2
Conquest estimates that between 2-1/2 and 3 million perished at this camp complex alone.
3
The anonymous Bolshevik-Leninist whose samizdat account reached the west in the 1970s,
seems to have conflated the two personalities, Kashketin and Garanin. He writes that Kashketin,
before he began his work at Vorkuta, “annihilated more than fifteen thousand Communists at
Kolyma” (Anon 1974, 172). Personalities notwithstanding, it is clear that the executions did take
place in both camp systems.
4
Given the similarity of the ITL programme to the analysis of the 1930s Left Opposition, it is
hard not to speculate about there being a “physical link” between the two. We do know that some
of the children survived the exterminations in Vorkuta (those under the age of twelve) and we do
know that the hellish conditions of their parents’ death could not have but had a radicalizing
effect on them. Evidence for this is the fact, cited above, that some children were involved in the
hunger strike in Vorkuta of 1936/37. We also know, as of the 1970s, that some Left
Oppositionists survived the purges, and lived to publish their experiences in Samizdat form.
Saunders speculates along these lines, but given the paucity of the evidence can say no more than
that: “[m]any of these young Leninists had been children of ‘enemies of the people,’ i.e., their
parents had been prominent in the party, government, and military but had been purged in 193638” (Saunders 1974, 15–19).
5
This is my best attempt at transliterating these fascinating categories. The words of Ivan, a
Vorkuta “blatnoy”, make the definitions clearer. “[T]he underworld has its own traditions and
strict codes. The first rule is that no member of it is ever allowed to co-operate in any way with
the authorities. When a criminal is in a prison or camp, he can work with an axe, a pick, a
hammer or a spade, but never in administration or the kitchen. Nor must he ever take part in
building anything to be used against the prisoners, such as fences, watch-towers or isolation
cells. He isn’t allowed to take any part in supervising other prisoners. Those of us who follow
these rules are called blatnoy. But there are traitors among us who co-operate with the
authorities, and betray their own brothers, and we call them suki – bitches. They’re already dead
men, sentenced by the rest of us, and at the first opportunity some blatnoy will kill them. We
have our leaders and our courts” (Buca 1976, 59–60).
6
For a report on the Kolyma battle see Varlam Shalamov, “Major Pugachov’s Last Battle”
(Shalamov 1994, 241–256). The Kolyma revolt was more on the scale of a break-out than a
collective rebellion.
7
The unwillingnes to acknowledge the use of slave labour was not confined to those on the left
who had illusions in Stalin. Henry Wallace, then Vice-President of the United States, visited
Kolyma during the war. He admired the very roads and canals described here, whose
construction was the purpose of the slave labour system. “‘Such is the return of the exiles to
Siberia – they are pioneers of the machine age, builders of cities.’ ... He also admires the threehundred and fifty-mile Kolyma Road that runs from the port northward over the mountains ... He
does not say – or does not know – that this highway was built entirely by prisoners and that tens
of thousands gave their lives in building it.... Would these words bear repetition when the
mounds of frozen corpses under the snow are one day disinterred to testify to what the Soviet
Union really is?” (Lipper 1951, 111–116)
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