The Kengir Uprising

Sixty-seven years ago, five thousand prisoners overpowered their abusers and seized control of their own prison. In the months of May and June of 1954, an uprising occurred in the Soviet labour camp of Kengir, in modern Kazakhstan.

For forty days and forty nights, freedom flourished in the siege that followed. Stalin had been dead for a year, but the machinery of his terror-state kept ticking. In a network of high security prisons and forced labour camps, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens continued to suffer in unbearable conditions.

Crammed into unsanitary bunkers. Forced to perform back-breaking work 18 hours a day in freezing winters and humid, mosquito infested summers. Starved on inadequate rations, suffering from every sickness and denied medical care. It was Hell on Earth, a place of dehumanization.

Many of them had been deported here for trivial crimes — unproven accusations of seditious behaviour. Very few of them were criminals in any real sense; they were people who had spoken their minds too loudly; people who were simply unlucky.

Their overseers were monsters disguised as human beings. The average prison guard was vicious, violent and sadistic. They raped, tortured and executed without restraint. They separated men from women and worked them to death in separate facilities. Malnourished, mistreated and abandoned, the people trapped in Kengir held out hope that someday things would change.

Then came the influx of Thieves.

The Thieves were an ancient and feared brotherhood of lifetime criminals. They had sworn an oath to never work, to never cooperate with the government or police, and to always make their living through illegal activities. They ruled the shadowy cracks of Soviet society unreachable to the spies and informers of Stalin’s terror police.

Their bloody code was one of silence. In the gulags, they ruled; to cross them meant a guaranteed and miserable death. Heads and hands removed with hacksaws. Most notoriously, a practice involving holding a man down so that a railroad spike could be fit into his mouth, and hammered into the ground, pinning the wretch to the floor where he could sputter his last pitiful gasps of air and blood.

For years, in the misery and Hell that was the gulags, the Thieves maintained their own order — protecting their people and imposing their will, respecting no hierarchy or law but that of their own. Even the guards knew to fear them. Everyone feared them.

No one more so than the political prisoners of Kengir.

Anyone who had served the political machine which had placed them all here; to the Thieves, such people were disdainfully referred to as Bitches. Throughout the system of forced labour camps, they existed in a state of practical war. If a man had served the police, the army, the bureaucracies of state — in any way; he was a target. The Thieves considered such men traitors to their own people; predisposed towards collaborating with guards and informing on their fellow prisoners.

Except, in Kengir; they couldn’t have been more wrong.

The political prisoners of this gulag had organized themselves along strict lines of resistance. They had created leadership hierarchies of command and communication, between all the various ethnic groups and languages which made up the camp population. They were preparing for a day of reckoning. The snitches and informers among these prisoners had all been rooted out and killed. Anybody willing to rat out their comrades to the brutality of the guards in exchange for a dog’s reward of extra food and comfort had long ago been strangled or stabbed.

The Thieves were impressed by what they saw. These Politicals were no Bitches at all; they were starving dogs, waiting to be unleashed. All they needed was a push; a charge of the vanguard to inspire them to act.

The Thieves began to wonder what might come about, should they put aside old bigotries. And so in secret, they began to meet. Shrunken former government officials, shaking the tattooed hands of merciless killers; a mutual respect and resolve developed. The wit of the Politicals and the raw strength of the Thieves could be the shock that rocked this prison off its foundations. Thus they laid their plans.

They attacked the camp lights with slingshots at sundown, plunging Kengir into darkness. The Politicals breached the gates and walls which separated their living quarters using battering rams, breaking through key control points and beginning an assault on the wall that divided the men and women’s camps. Hearing them, the women joined in the effort.

The Thieves meanwhile attacked the guards, charging them with reckless courage as the panicked camp authorities fired their weapons. 13 fell dead, another 43 wounded, but it was enough to send the guards fleeing, abandoning their posts and retreating to an exterior line of prisoner quarantine. To everyone’s shock, their uprising had succeeded. They were in control of their prison.

The long-hated dividing wall between the male and female sections of the prison camp was torn down. Inmates from both camps embraced each other with emotion. Some who had been exchanging notes with great difficulty for many months now finally met each other face to face for the first time.

The guards’ barracks were thrown open, where the prisoners discovered all of their stolen possessions; their clothing from when they’d arrived in this wretched place, their watches and wallets and personal effects. Men and women who had shivered and suffered for years in rags now clothed themselves once more in leather boots and fur coats, restoring their dignity and pride. They were prisoners no more. They were citizens of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and they demanded to be treated with civil rights and human decency.

They were human, no matter what the guards had done to them. No matter how much they had starved them and terrorised them and treated them like animals. They could feel now with their hands, with their senses; they were human and they were alive. And this spirit of life took hold.

With a handful of guns, the people of Kengir fortified their prison camp — seizing the watchtowers and walls for themselves. They could see from the heights that the soldiers were already pouring in by truck and tank — surrounding the camp perimeter and setting up lines of containment. A standoff with the authorities would now be endured.

However hopeless things seemed, nothing could dull their newfound thirst for life, liberty and dignity. That night they took it in shifts to guard the walls, while people sang, feasted and drank. This was freedom. The Soviet government proceeded with caution for the sake of their own control. They could not afford a bloodbath — to make martyrs of these rebels or risk a mass-breakout. Overwhelming force would be brought down upon them. But first, tactical precision would be required to minimize the consequences, and so empty negotiations were initiated.

The people of Kengir allowed high-ranking officers under the white flag of peace, to sit and discuss their demands inside the camp, which were simple.

They did not even demand outright freedom. Only decency.

Eight hour maximum work days, improved conditions, blankets and mattresses, decent clothing and food. Most importantly: full reviews of all their cases, many of which deserved to be thrown out entirely. They wanted to write and receive letters from their family again. They wanted access to doctors again. They wanted assurances that arbitrary beatings and sexual assaults would come to an end, that the guards responsible be fired and investigated. To every one of these demands the negotiators acquiesced. But they would provide nothing in writing; nothing which would be made public. The prisoners could see through this ruse and despaired. There would be no sincere negotiating. No settlement. Only buying for time, while more tanks were brought up.

Coming doom meant nothing to the people of the camp, now mingling in the buzz of something close to normal life. An aristocrat had located the guards’ coffee supply and was now operating a popular open air cafe. Former artists displayed their latest works for the cultured to critique while florists and barbers plied their trade with whatever tools availed them. Theatrical plays and poetry readings were organized, amidst candle lit stages of milk crates and rain tarps. Debates and sock puppet shows, singing and seances, every flavour of religious ritual and even marriages; the people of Kengir determined to thrive.

To the intense frustration of the besieging authorities, this situation showed no signs of changing. They had counted on the conditions within the camp worsening to a point they could exploit. Instead they were seeing just the opposite. The camp grew stronger by the day, its walls taller and thicker, its defenses more stout. Their morale and resolve showed no signs of weakening. The prisoners soon became the citizens of Kengir, sovereign to the rights of their own republic which they established under the auspices of an elected government. This included robust administrative departments, employing experts with prior civilian experience. Food services, security, defense and technical engineering concerns were all managed and delegated in a manner which perplexed the observing besiegers.

Every time the gulag authorities attempted to infiltrate and demoralize the people of Kengir, they failed. They attempted to prey on people’s fear and bigotry by stirring rumors of coming race riots and pogroms against jewish inmates, to turn the uprisers against one another. Not one of these initiatives took root. Hate speech and fear mongering were punished internally by the prisoners, who had established their own prison for rule-breakers and naysayers.

The engineers and scientists meanwhile were busy trying to devise a way to seek help. Many of them were still loyal communists, firmly believing in the morality of their state. They believed that if they could simply make contact with the people of the surrounding communities, the ensuing public outcry would tip the balance of this confrontation.

Their challenge was in getting a message across a fortified siege perimeter of Soviet soldiers, trucks, machine guns, barbed wire and tanks, all poised to descend on their nascent republic at any moment. Escape on foot through this encirclement was impossible. They would need to devise more sophisticated tactics. Their efforts included the construction of hot-air balloons with slogans and messages written on them; Chechen kites, specially made to travel long distances with letters attached, and even a number of carrier pigeons with notes were released to try and desperately communicate with people in the outside world.

Every one of these was shot down by the surrounding soldiers.

Attempting to control the public perception of this uprising, the government decided to manufacture propaganda to paint the prisoners as nothing but monstrous criminals. Actors were posed on camera, in prison camp uniforms, staging scenes of sexual assault. It was an attempt to discredit the uprising as nothing but wild debauchery, launched in the name of raping the female prisoners.

The people of Kengir fought this demoralization campaign with vigorous counter-propaganda of their own, including one very popular female prisoner who organized a mock radio programme on the camp intercom system, conducting fake interviews and newscasts and hurling satirical abuse towards their oppressors.

Laughing, resisting, existing together; free, alive and human. The people of Kengir laughed and refused to give in. They cried, and refused to back down. They screamed, and refused to be silent.

Lies, violence, propaganda and coercion would not bend them. They could all swear with certainty; “I will not surrender!”

But they could not hold out forever.

Those people could not protect every section of wall with courage and laughter.

All their love and humanity could not save them from the tear gas and bullets of men who did not care.

And so the short lived republic of Kengir was ended by force after 40 days and 40 nights.

Many of them died.

And this is their story.