Half a century ago, the Soviet authorities shot the insurgent workers of Novocherkassk. An unpleasant memory for all supporters of the Communist Party. And one more reminder for those who have forgotten what a real bloody regime is. Or someone can tell and remind where strikes and rallies were shot after 1990?
The Novocherkassk shooting is the name of the events in Novocherkassk of the Rostov region that occurred on June 1-2, 1962 as a result of the strike of workers of the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Plant (NEVZ) and other townspeople.
The performance was suppressed by the forces of the army and the KGB. According to official data, during the dispersal of the demonstration, 26 people were killed and another 87 were injured. Seven of the "ringleaders" were sentenced to death and shot, the rest were sentenced to lengthy prison terms. After the collapse of the USSR, all convicts were rehabilitated (1996). In the 1990s, the new authorities named the perpetrators, in their opinion, of the execution - members of the Soviet party leadership, their punishment did not take place due to the death of the latter.
By the early 1960s, a difficult economic situation had developed in the USSR. As a result of strategic miscalculations of the country's leadership and the inefficiency of the collective farm system as a whole, interruptions in the supply of food to the population began. In the spring and early summer of 1962, the shortage of bread was so significant that the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, NS Khrushchev, decided for the first time to purchase grain abroad.
At the end of May (30th or 31st), 1962, it was decided to increase retail prices for meat and meat products by an average of 30% and for butter by 25%. In the newspapers, this event was presented as "the request of all workers." At the same time, the NEVZ management increased the production rate for workers by almost a third (as a result, wages and, accordingly, purchasing power decreased significantly).
At the plant in the body-assembly shop in the spring of 1962, workers did not start work for three days, demanding to improve working conditions, and in the winding-insulating shop, 200 people were poisoned due to the low level of safety.
Now let's talk in more detail about the tragedy.
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On June 2, 1962, 26 people were killed, another died in the hospital. According to updated data, 87 people were injured. Seven were subsequently sentenced to death, 105 to prison terms.
The deputy commander of the North Caucasus Military District, Lieutenant-General Matvey Shaposhnikov, refused to throw tanks against the unarmed demonstrators and paid for it with his career.
Extremes could probably have been avoided if it were not for the arrogance and cowardice of the nomenklatura, who are accustomed to the slavish obedience of the "population" and did not want to talk to the people in a human way.
The performance was not a peaceful protest action: the participants destroyed several buildings and beat representatives of the factory administration. However, the excessive use of force, cruel sentences and concealment of information about the tragedy, according to the official authorities of post-Soviet Russia and the overwhelming majority of historians, turned the Novocherkassk events into a crime against humanity.
Russian communists often say that under Soviet rule, people in the squares were not dispersed with police truncheons. What's true is true. There was no need. When people once came out to the square, they were not dispersed with clubs, but swept away with machine gun fire. After that, for 40 years, it never entered anyone's head until the Central Committee of the CPSU itself announced: "You can."
Nikita Khrushchev condemned the Stalinist terror and significantly expanded the boundaries of freedom, but he painfully perceived the conservatives' reproaches that he "dismissed everyone" and "this was not the case under Stalin." The people who studied him could easily turn the mood of an impulsive leader in any direction.
The authorities constantly made it clear that despite any "thaw", they did not guarantee anything to anyone, the scope of what was permitted would be determined by itself and, if it deemed it necessary, would stop at nothing.
At one of the meetings with the creative intelligentsia, Khrushchev said: "Keep in mind, we have not forgotten how to plant!" As the Novocherkassk tragedy showed, the Bolsheviks also did not forget how to shoot.
In the early 1960s, a food crisis arose in the country, caused, in addition to an ineffective collective farm system and unbearable spending on the army and space, initiated by Khrushchev's "corn campaign".
In 1961, the Soviet government purchased wheat from Canada for the first time.
Unlike Lenin and Stalin, Khrushchev spent the currency on food instead of letting citizens starve to death. Nevertheless, white bread practically disappeared from stores, and rye bread began to be baked with an admixture of pea flour.
The people called this tasteless and sticky bread "Russian miracle", referring to the documentary of the same name, which was recently shot by East German filmmakers and widely shown in the Soviet Union.
People were especially outraged by the deteriorating food situation amid propaganda chatter. The portraits and lengthy speeches of Khrushchev did not leave the newspaper pages, and the merry song "Corn is not a burden, always gives a harvest!" Rushed from the radio receivers.
On May 17, 1962, the government issued a decree to increase retail prices for meat and sausage by 30%, butter - by 25%, starting from June 1, and explained this by "requests from the workers." The phrase "at the request of the workers" has since become part of Soviet folklore.
According to the KGB, various protests and posting of leaflets took place in Moscow, Leningrad, Donetsk, Dnepropetrovsk, Gorky, Tambov, Tbilisi, Novosibirsk, Chelyabinsk, Zagorsk, Vyborg and other cities. There were 58 spontaneous strikes and 12 street demonstrations.
But the main drama took place in Novocherkassk.
The management of the local electric locomotive plant (NEVZ) did not think of anything better how to coincide with the increase in prices, the increase in production rates, which was announced on May 31. In practice, this measure reduced the income of pieceworkers by 25-30 percent.
Elemental riot
In 1962, about 145 thousand people lived in Novocherkassk, of whom 12 thousand worked at the city-forming enterprise - NEVZ.
A significant part of the townspeople huddled in barracks, and the cost of renting housing was one third of the average worker's salary. They even stood in line for potatoes from one in the morning.
Probably, under Stalin, no one would have dared to utter a word, but the "thaw" gave rise to the feeling that "now is not the same time."
On the morning of June 1, about 200 workers of the steel workshop refused to start work, went out into the yard and began to discuss the sad question: "What will we live on next?"
At about 11:00, they headed to the plant management. On the way, they were joined by workers from other workshops, so that about a thousand people gathered in front of the building.
The director of the plant, Boris Kurochkin, entered into an argument with them and, seeing a woman selling pies, said: "Not enough for meat - eat pies with liver!"
According to some eyewitnesses, the director used the word "eat".
Perhaps the situation could still be "sorted out", but the bad phrase blew up the crowd. Kurochkin was booed, and he thought it good to retire.
Worker Viktor Vlasenko turned on the factory beep, for which he subsequently received 10 years. The strike covered the entire plant, the number of participants in the spontaneous rally reached five thousand.
To "attract Moscow's attention," the workers blocked a nearby railway and stopped the Rostov-on-Don - Saratov passenger train. On the locomotive, someone wrote in large letters: "Khrushchev for meat!" The slogans were hung on the electric poles: "Meat, butter, salary increase!" and "We need apartments!", painted by the factory artist Koroteev. The chief engineer Elkin, who appeared at the scene, was beaten.
Towards evening, the strikers nevertheless agreed to let the train pass, but the driver was afraid to go past the excited crowd and returned to the previous station.
By 16:00 the first secretary of the Rostov regional party committee Basov arrived, accompanied by all the local leadership. Loudspeakers were brought out to the balcony of the plant management.
Several hundred workers came to listen to their superiors, but Basov, instead of answering questions, began to read the well-known Appeal of the CPSU Central Committee on the rise in prices.
The workers booed him, and when they saw director Kurochkin on the balcony, they began to throw stones and empty bottles. Basov locked himself in his office and began to call the military, demanding the sending of troops.
The crowd broke into the plant management, beat several of the administration workers who came to hand, threw off the portrait of Khrushchev hanging on the building and set it on fire.
Between 18:00 and 19:00, about 200 police officers arrived, and a little later - three armored personnel carriers and five trucks with soldiers, but they did not intervene in what was happening. According to the researchers, the purpose of the appearance of the military was to divert attention to themselves while the KGB officers in civilian clothes removed the chiefs trapped in the building.
The rally continued. The workers did not have leaders and programs. We decided to go to the party's hill the next day. There was a proposal to seize the city telegraph office and "transmit the appeal throughout the country."
Khrushchev was informed of what was happening almost immediately. He called the secretary of the regional committee Basov, the chairman of the KGB Semichastny and the minister of defense Malinovsky and demanded to "restore order."
Almost half of the members of the Presidium (as the Politburo was called then) of the CPSU Central Committee urgently flew to Novocherkassk: Frol Kozlov, Anastas Mikoyan, Andrei Kirilenko, Leonid Ilyichev and Dmitry Polyansky, as well as the Secretary of the Central Committee Alexander Shelepin, Deputy Chairman of the KGB Pyotr Ivashutin and urgently recalled Isa Pliev, Commander of the North Caucasus Military District. For the eldest was Kozlov, who at that time was considered the second person in the state and the most likely successor to Khrushchev.
None of the Moscow bosses addressed the people. After the shooting, the local radio played the recordings of short speeches by Mikoyan and Kozlov, who blamed the incident on “criminally hooligan elements” and argued that the troops acted in response to “workers' requests” to restore order.
At about 19:00 on June 1, Malinovsky called the district headquarters in Rostov-on-Don, Pliev, who was on the way to Novocherkassk, did not find him and gave him the order: “To raise the formations. To clean up. Report!"
At about three o'clock in the morning, several tanks drove into the square in front of the plant management and, without opening fire, began to maneuver, displacing the crowd. The workers knocked on the armor with stones and sticks, but in the end they were forced to disperse.
In the morning, subdivisions of the 18th Panzer Division entered Novocherkassk and guarded the post office, telegraph office and a branch of the State Bank. Armed soldiers appeared at all enterprises. The demonstration of force only led to the outraged workers refusing to "work at gunpoint", joining the strike of their comrades from NEVZ, and began to flock to the city center. On the walls there were inscriptions and leaflets criticizing Khrushchev.
Rumors spread that 22 rioters had been arrested overnight. It became clear what to demand. A crowd of 4-5 thousand people moved from the industrial area to the building of the city party committee and the city executive committee. Among the demonstrators were women and children. Some carried portraits of Lenin, as on January 9, 1905, portraits of Nicholas II.
On the way, they had to cross the Tuzlov River, the only bridge across which was tightly blocked by tanks. Some of the demonstrators wade across the shallow channel, while others, seeing that the tankers were not firing, climbed over the combat vehicles.
When the head of the crowd appeared on the main street of Novocherkassk, Moskovskaya, the metropolitan authorities located in the building of the city committee fled to a military town.
A double line of machine gunners lined up in front of the city committee under the command of the head of the Novocherkassk garrison, Major General Oleshko, but some of the demonstrators entered the building from the rear and began to destroy furniture, telephones, chandeliers and portraits.
Oleshko and the chairman of the city executive committee Zamula demanded from the crowd to disperse into the microphone, but these were clearly not the words that the angry people wanted to hear.
Suddenly, automatic fires were heard. People rushed back, but a shout was heard: "Do not be afraid, they are shooting blanks!" And then fire began to kill.
Napoleon said that if the need arose to use weapons against the crowd, it was necessary to shoot live ammunition immediately, then it would scatter and there would be fewer casualties, and to shoot first blanks, then with combat ones, was a provocation.
At the same time, at the nearby city police department, the crowd tried to free the strikers detained the day before, but they had already been taken to another place. One of the attackers snatched the weapon from the hands of Private Repkin. Serviceman Azizov, who was standing nearby, killed him with a machine gun.
Puddles of blood were washed out of hoses and washed with brushes, but they could not completely destroy the traces, and the square was asphalted again.
The bodies of 26 people were secretly buried in various cemeteries of the Rostov region by order of the government commission. From the participants in the funeral, called a "government special assignment", they took a nondisclosure agreement. Relatives were given only the remains of Leonid Shulga, who died in the hospital.
The authorities did not try to disperse the crowd with truncheons, tear gas or other non-lethal means, and it is not known whether such an option was discussed. According to many researchers, they sought not only to restore order, but to teach the people a lesson.
Local historian Tatyana Bocharova, who has been investigating the circumstances of the tragedy for 20 years, suggests that the special attitude of the communists to Novocherkassk as the former capital of the Don Army could play a certain role.
“Even Lenin said: 'We must drive a stake into the nest of the counter-revolution.' This is it about Novocherkassk. The then ideologists knew that the Cossack capital was a special city,”the expert notes.
The tanks on the bridge across Tuzlov were commanded by Matvey Shaposhnikov, a participant in the battle at Prokhorovka and the Victory parade, Hero of the Soviet Union
Having received an order not to let the crowd into the center of the city and to use tanks, if necessary, he replied: "I do not see an enemy in front of me who should be attacked with tanks."
In the case of using armored vehicles, according to Shaposhnikov, the number of victims would be in the thousands. In 1966 he was retired, and a year later he was expelled from the party for "anti-Soviet talk." In 1989, the journalist of the Literaturnaya Gazeta Yuri Shchekochikhin told about the officer's act. Fortunately, Matvey Shaposhnikov lived to see the time when he was given his due.
Who ordered?
Following a custom dating back to the Civil War, Soviet leaders avoided writing down their decisions on sensitive issues on paper. There was no written order to open fire, how the discussions took place is not known.
The main source of information is the memoirs of Mikoyan, who naturally tried to absolve himself of responsibility.
“Arriving in Novocherkassk and finding out the situation, I realized that the workers' claims were quite fair and the discontent was justified. Just a decree was issued to raise prices for meat and butter, and the fool-director at the same time raised the norms, reacted boorishly to the discontent of the workers, not even wanting to talk to them. He acted as if some kind of provocateur, because he lacked intelligence and respect for the workers. As a result, a strike began, which acquired a political character. The city was in the hands of the strikers."
“Kozlov stood for an unjustifiably tough line, called Moscow and sowed panic, demanding permission to use weapons, and through Khrushchev received sanction for this 'in case of emergency.' "Extreme" was, of course, determined by Kozlov."
“Why did Khrushchev allow the use of weapons? He was extremely frightened that, according to the KGB, the strikers had sent their men to neighboring industrial centers. Moreover, Kozlov exaggerated the colors … Such a panic and such a crime are not typical for Khrushchev, Kozlov is guilty, who misinformed him so much that he obtained, albeit a conditional, permission,”wrote Mikoyan.
The text was published when neither the author nor Khrushchev and Kozlov were alive.
In 1992, the main military prosecutor's office of the Russian Federation laid the blame primarily on Kozlov.
“Fulfilling the illegal order of FR Kozlov, the officials not established by the investigation gave the order to open fire to kill,” the materials of the criminal case said.
None of the authorities were punished, with the exception of the director of the plant Kurochkin and the secretary of the party committee Pererushev, who were kicked out of their jobs. The secretaries of the city committee and the chairman of the executive committee got off with party reprimands.
On June 3, the hunt for people began in Novocherkassk. The basis was the operational photography of the KGB. They arrested those who walked in the front rows and, judging by the photographs, behaved most actively. The brothers came at night, as in 1937. Many assured that they got under the lenses by accident.
In total, during the unrest and in the following days, about 240 people were detained. Several lawsuits took place. Seven - Alexander Zaitsev, Andrei Korkach, Mikhail Kuznetsov, Boris Mokrousov, Sergei Sotnikov, Vladimir Cherepanov, Vladimir Shuvaev - were sentenced to death, 105 people were sentenced to imprisonment in strict regime colonies, mainly for terms of 10 to 15 years.
Since participation in the riots, resistance to the police and the destruction of property did not draw on such sentences, the defendants were held under the articles of "banditry" and "an attempt to overthrow Soviet power."
“On June 2, I did not have time to enter the factory gates when they slammed shut right in front of me. Then it was considered as follows: who got to the plant - those law-abiding, and who was outside the gates - rebels, - says the former crane operator of NEVZ, now an employee of the Novocherkassk Museum of the Cossacks Valentina Vodyanitskaya. “A few days later, they allegedly summoned me to a medical examination. I took my three-year-old son with me, I didn't even think that I would be arrested. At the medical unit, strangers tore the child out of the hands, and they pushed me into the car. My son stayed on the street, much later I learned that he ended up in an orphanage. At the trial, two witnesses in military uniform stated that a woman who looked like me tried to break the connection established for Anastas Mikoyan's speech. Investigators said there would be a suspended sentence, but they gave him 10 years."
At the trial, 19-year-old Nikolai Stepanov dared to ask: "Who gave you the right to use weapons against civilians?" Received 15 years.
After the removal of Khrushchev, most of the convicts were released after serving half of their sentence, but they did not leave home alone. KGB officers regularly held preventive conversations with them, recommending not to say too much and to meet less comrades in misfortune.
The authorities of the USSR completely shut up the Novocherkassk events. For a long time, the correspondence of residents was reviewed, those leaving the city at work were warned that they should keep quiet. Some of the materials in the KGB archives are still inaccessible to researchers.
In an effort to erase the tragedy from memory, even the letter "N" ("Novocherkassk") in the name of the electric locomotives produced at NEVZ was replaced with "VL" ("Vladimir Lenin").
Citizens who learned about the massacre from foreign radio broadcasts called it the "Novocherkassk festival" by analogy with the widely publicized Moscow Festival of Youth and Students.
Of the 87 wounded, only 45 people sought medical help. The rest chose to be treated with their own means, fearing persecution.
The curfew and the "do not gather more than three" rule were in effect until 6 June. Monstrous rumors circulated around the city: that the entire population would be sent to Siberia, or even Novocherkassk would be wiped off the face of the earth (“they will finish us off and test the rocket at the same time”). After the execution, people expected anything from the rulers.
The frightened workers on the very first day fulfilled the quota by 150% and themselves offered to work off the "skip" shifts on Sundays, but the authorities did not support the initiative.
The Novocherkassk execution is surrounded by rumors based on the words of eyewitnesses, but not documented.
There is a version that the soldiers on the square in front of the city committee fired only blanks, and the KGB snipers hiding on the roof killed people. It is known that on June 1, 27 "musicians" were accommodated in the local hotel "Don", who did not perform anywhere and disappeared to no one knows where. However, if they were intelligence officers, they could be engaged in surveillance and photography.
Other well-known stories are not supported by solid evidence: about an officer who, having received the order to shoot at the crowd, shot himself; about a distraught young mother who walked around the city until evening with a baby killed by a stray bullet in her arms; about children of 8-10 years old who, under fire, “fell like peas” from the trees on Moskovskaya Street.
In any case, not a single name of the deceased child is known, and according to official figures, the youngest victim was 16 years old.
Curious boys really sat in the trees. One of them was the future general and presidential candidate of Russia Alexander Lebed. Today 20 repressed and 14 wounded residents of Novocherkassk are alive.
The first to draw attention to the long-standing tragedy was Petr Siuda, who at the age of 25 participated in a strike, received 12 years, of which he served six, and during perestroika became an activist of the human rights movement.
On May 5, 1990, Siudu was found unconscious on Novocherkassk street. He died in the hospital without regaining consciousness. The investigation named a heart attack as the cause of death, but relatives and colleagues of the human rights activist suspected that the case was unclean and claimed that his portfolio with some documents had been stolen from him.
In 1992, the Main Military Prosecutor's Office opened a criminal case against Khrushchev, Kozlov, Mikoyan and eight other people on the fact of the Novocherkassk shooting, which was terminated in connection with their death.
All those convicted in the Novocherkassk case in the 1990s were rehabilitated by the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation.
The public fund "Novocherkasskaya tragedy" and the military prosecutor's office established the resting places of the 26 victims, and on June 2, 1994, they were solemnly reburied at the city cemetery. Monuments were erected at the grave and at the place of execution, and at NEVZ - a memorial plaque with the inscription: "Here began a spontaneous uprising of desperate workers, which ended on June 2, 1962 with the execution in the central square of the city and subsequent repressions."
On June 8, 1996, President Boris Yeltsin issued a decree “On additional measures for the rehabilitation of persons repressed in connection with participation in the events in Novocherkassk in June 1962”. Relatives of those killed and shot were paid one-time cash benefits, and pensions were raised to the surviving wounded.
Participants of the tragedy and human rights activists were not invited to the 75th anniversary of NEVZ, which was celebrated in 2011. “We honor the memory of those events, but we do not advertise them and do not really deal with them. An episode in the history of the plant is not a good one, this is an ungrateful topic,”the press service of the enterprise told reporters.
About half of the 560 participants in a telephone survey conducted in the city at that time about their attitude to the events of 1962 either refused to answer or said they knew nothing about them.
Representatives of the local youth, in a conversation with a correspondent of Rossiyskaya Gazeta, wondered why the workers did not leave the factory and start their own business if they were paid little?