In the early days of summer in 1962, a monstrous tragedy broke out in the city of Novocherkassk, the details of which were hushed up until the time of Perestroika. This event - the bloody suppression of the "anti-Soviet rebellion" - became the flip side of how the CPSU established "the unity of power and people."
The tragic events were initiated by two factors. In the late spring of 1962, prices for milk and meat rose in the USSR. For residents of Novocherkassk, the new food program coincided with a decrease in wages at the electric locomotive plant, a city-forming enterprise (NEVZ), where more than half of the urban population worked. Two pieces of news received by the workers of the plant on the same day put the enterprise on the brink of a strike. “What should we live on? How to feed their families ?!”- with such questions people came to the management of the plant on June 1, 1962.
Perhaps the tragedy could have been avoided if the management had shown understanding, but, as they write in the press, “the spark from which the gunpowder flared up” was the rude answer of the plant director: “No money for meat? Eat liver pies. These words of the chief angered people even more, the workers could not bear such an insult, and a strike began at NEVZ. By nightfall, a crowd of four thousand gathered at the plant.
The organization of the "anti-Soviet rebellion" was immediately reported to Moscow. In the morning of the next day, Nikita Khrushchev, who was at that time the Secretary General, received a telegram: “… by three o'clock in the morning after the introduction of military units, the crowd, numbering by that time about 4 thousand people, was successfully forced out of the plant. The plant was taken under military protection, a curfew was set in the city, 22 instigators were detained.
The tragedy unfolded on the morning of June 2, when a demonstration of many thousands of indignant workers and other residents of the city with red banners and portraits of Lenin headed to the city center to the building of the city party committee. At the same time, a detachment of militia and soldiers of the Novocherkassk garrison were summoned there. But the latter came unarmed and joined the strikers.
However, the city authorities did not want to speak with the demonstrators; instead, several machine-gun rounds were fired into the air, and, shooting into the air, the machine gunners hit the children who were looking at the rally from the trees. The panic began.
Promotional video:
Then something happened that, according to eyewitnesses, defies reasonable explanation: submachine gun fire was transferred to the crowd - to civilian unarmed residents. A few minutes later, there were mountains of corpses on the square … Women, old men, children lay in pools of blood … An unknown officer could not give his soldiers the command to shoot civilians and he shot himself in front of the formation … Later the bodies were taken away and thrown into an abandoned mine, blood from the square washed away with cannons.
Later, seven "instigators of the riots" were shot, the rest were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 10 to 15 years in a strict regime colony. Information on the Novocherkassk case was kept in the secret archives of the KGB for a long time, although it was only revealed in the early 1990s, when the first publications about the June tragedy appeared in the press.
In May 1992, the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, having condemned the actions of the authorities in those events, decided to urgently ensure the rehabilitation of all those accused, and pay a cash allowance to the families of those killed and shot. In 1996, Russian President Boris Yeltsin visited the city and signed a decree on the rehabilitation of the victims of 1962 and the construction of a monument to them. However, this will not return the lives and years of deprivation taken away, and the “Novocherkassk tragedy” will remain a “black spot” of Soviet history.
