In 1962, Soviet police fired on a crowd of demonstrators in the industrial city of Novocherkassk. It was one of the biggest domestic disturbances over the 70 years of Soviet rule.
Yet, even today, for Russians, the event is shrouded in misinformation, rumor and myth.A
Our cab is headed into the center of Novocherkassk. We are on our way to visit the city’s museum dedicated to the 1962 riot. At first, our driver does not believe such a museum exists (it is rather small), but then he recounts the version of the “truth” as he knows it. Apparently, the father of a friend had been there that June day and had seen everything: the bodies stacked up like firewood, the blood flowing into the drains like it was raining, the kids who’d climbed up into the trees and who dropped like hunted birds. Of course, his witness has been dead for years.
“I hope they tell the real story,” he says, casually flipping an obscene hand gesture at someone who had cut him off.
We mention the work of researcher Irina Mardar, who has spent two decades working with a group of researchers to put together the truth – or the closest thing to it – of what happened. The best number she has come up with, after years of digging through documents, interviews with policemen, doctors, government officials, and even several clandestine excavations at secret cemeteries around Rostov region, is that 26 people died that day, with dozens more injured.
Our driver is unconvinced. He explains how in the Soviet Union there were never any airplane crashes, and that, officially, there were no maniacs running the streets, even as Andrei Chikatilo from nearby Rostov-on-Don murdered 52 people around the region and near Moscow. “I know this type of counting,” he says.
The Novocherkassk tragedy of 1962 remains one of the most neglected chapters in Soviet history. It was one of the rare cases of overt domestic dissent during seven long decades of systemic political repression. It was a moment when common workers took Soviet rhetoric about the workers’ paradise at face value, honestly believing that a peaceful demonstration was the best way not to overthrow or challenge their rulers, but simply to be heard.
On June 1, 1962, thousands of workers at the Budyonny Locomotive Plant on the outskirts of this industrial town walked off their jobs in response to price increases for meat and bread. The next day, bearing portraits of Lenin and led by Young Pioneers carrying flowers, they marched to Communist Party headquarters in the center of town to voice their demands. They were met there by units of Interior Ministry troops, who had been trucked in overnight. After a brief standoff, for reasons lost to history, shots were fired. There were 26 killed, another 59 seriously wounded. In the aftermath, 112 alleged “ringleaders” were rounded up and put on trial. Seven were executed.
In a way, it almost makes sense that it was in Novocherkassk that Soviet power faced its most serious domestic riot in 40 years. This small provincial city of about 180,000 is located just 25 miles from the region’s capital, Rostov-on-Don. It was founded in 1805 by Matvei Platov – the Cossack hetman who became famous in the war against Napoleon – as the new capital for the Don Cossacks.
The Cossacks were always an unruly element of Russia’s imperial rule. As free refugees from serfdom, they were a vibrant subculture on the empire’s edge, an uneasy part of the nation’s vertical power structure. Theirs has been a history punctuated with both violent revolts and fierce support of the tsarist regime against its enemies (see Russian Life, July/Aug 2006). During the Civil War (1918-1922), Novocherkassk was a center of White resistance. Soviet rule was not firmly established until January 1920.
During the 1930s, the city became an important industrial center. The population tripled as increasing numbers of former peasants found work at the city’s plants and factories. Among them was the Budyonny Electric Locomotive Factory, a sprawling operation 12 kilometers from the city center. The factory made railroad cars and employed thousands of workers.
Fast forward three decades. Khrushchev’s “Thaw” was hitched to a mindless political and economic optimism that did not reflect reality. By 1962, rising costs of production on collective farms meant that it cost these farms more to produce goods than the State was paying for them. So, the more they produced, the more money they lost. To surmount this deficit, Khrushchev and the Politburo decided – for the first time in decades – to raise food prices, by as much as 25-35 percent. Meanwhile, in an effort to boost economic growth, production quotas had been increased, leading to de facto wage cuts.
The price increases went into effect on Friday, June 1. Riots and strikes broke out all across the Soviet Union – in Murom, Alexandrovsk, Tbilisi, Novosibirsk, Leningrad, Dnepropetrovsk and Grozny. But nowhere were they as large – or would they turn as violent – as in Novocherkassk.
The workers at the Budyonny factory were angry about the price increases. A small group went to management to complain about the situation. Eyewitnesses have said the origins of the events were spontaneous – subsequent Soviet propaganda made much about the plotting that preceded the events. During a meeting with management (notably, the factory boss had recently been changed from someone the workers liked, to one who was widely seen as worthless), it was clear that no progress was forthcoming. In exasperation, when workers said they couldn’t even afford pirozhki with meat at the price it was being offered in the factory cafeteria, one manager replied, a la Marie Antoinette, that they go enjoy a pastry with liver (pirozhki c liverom), an expensive treat out of reach of the increasingly strapped workers.
The knot of workers called a strike, and, within a matter of hours, it spread to various parts of the factory. Workers threw down their tools, walked away from the production lines, and began to gather and mill around the open courtyards between the factory’s buildings. Managers exhorted them to get back to work, to no avail.
Throughout the day, plant managers frantically called the local Communist authorities. But the real turning point took place halfway through the afternoon, when a group of strikers broke down a nearby fence and blocked a major rail artery that linked Rostov with Saratov. That event, more than anything else, got the Kremlin’s attention.
By the end of the day, the strikers’ ranks had swelled to several thousand and limited attempts by local KGB troops to put down the riot were unsuccessful. Yet, as darkness fell, the workers had no real sense of how best to proceed, and so they went home. Overnight, troops from the Interior Ministry and Red Army began to arrive, along with the KGB. The authorities identified who they suspected were the “ringleaders,” and began arresting them around town.
On Saturday, many of the workers again gathered at the plant. Still unclear about how to proceed, they opted to march on the Party headquarters, which was located in the former Hetman’s Palace of the Don Cossacks in the center of town, about 12 kilometers away.
The spirit of the march was festive. The workers carried portraits of Lenin, and were led by schoolchildren carrying flowers. They made their way along the main thoroughfare. It was unclear how many actually set out, but it was likely over 1,000. The first sign of trouble came on a bridge over the Tuzlov River, where regular troops of the Red Army had been ordered to set up a blockade with tanks. The marchers supposedly greeted the soldiers as comrades, urging them to “make way for the working class!” The military commander on the scene was Matvei Kuzmich Shaposhnikov, deputy commander of the North-Caucasus Region, who reported to his superiors that “he couldn’t see the enemy.”
The demonstrators forded the river or climbed over the tanks on the bridge, and headed along the city’s main thoroughfare, Moskovskaya Street, soon arriving at the tree-lined square in front of the squat former palace. In front of the building was a large cordon of heavily armed Interior Ministry (MVD) troops, bussed in from Chechnya and Ingushetia (it was thought that troops from other regions would be less likely to sympathize with the locals).
What happened next is unclear. The official version that would come out later was inherently flawed, and the versions that were passed along as hearsay and rumors for decades are not much better. It seems that at some point, some of the protesters broke into the Hetman’s Palace, which had been abandoned earlier in the day. They may have rifled through some offices and possibly destroyed some furniture.
But in the midst of it, at some point, troops fired into the crowd (later reports would indicate that most of the shooting may have been by KGB snipers). Children who had been hiding in the trees watching jumped down quickly, the group scattered back onto the main streets. A 23-year old woman from a nearby village, Alexandra Moskalchenko, had just stepped out of a hair salon and was hit by two bullets in the leg, which had to be amputated. In the end, 26 people were killed on the square, and another 59 were seriously wounded. Three died later from their wounds.
The chaos gave birth to countless rumors. All of the kids jumping down from nearby trees led to the belief that the troops had tried to fire warning shots and accidentally slaughtered many children. The fact that no children were among the dead did not assuage the rumors – a large orphanage is located nearby, and many just assumed that the dead were orphans that no one was looking for.
Another persistent rumor, heard in various forms through the years, is that one of the MVD officers was so distraught when he saw what had happened that he began shouting at his troops in rage, and became so upset that he shot himself in the head. Researchers have been unable to find any proof that this happened.
The police made quick work of the square. The bodies were gathered up onto trucks and rushed away, and the square was washed down by fire trucks that had been on hand throughout (the stains, Lady Macbeth-like, would not wash out, however, and the street was hastily repaved). Meanwhile, the injured were rushed to the city hospital, which was inundated. Already the heavy hand of the state was at work, KGB agents were visible everywhere, keeping their ears open for any potential dissent.
Word of the events instantly became the talk of the region, and the news somehow managed to get to the wider world as well. Radio Free Europe and the BBC began broadcasting reports about the massacre. A briefing paper from the Central Intelligence Agency dated June 1963 reported that health authorities had closed the entire province to outsiders, alleging a cholera outbreak. The airport in Rostov-on-Don was taken over by the military, and the province was sealed off for the rest of the month. In October, Time magazine reported an exaggerated variation of the rumor in a brief article describing “a wild night of rioting and pillaging,” killing “several hundred” students and workers.
The inevitable roundups began. Hundreds were arrested and put on trial at a nearby military base, facing charges of treason, coup plotting, liaisons with foreigners, and hooliganism. The authorities produced piles and piles of photographs. KGB agents had thoroughly infiltrated the group of protesters, and took thousands of photographs of people in the crowd. In a chilling touch, photos were produced at the trials of small groups of people with ominous “X’s” marked throughout. Agents testified that the workers were overheard slandering Soviet authorities, and inciting people to riot and property damage. In the end, 112 so-called “ringleaders” were given prison terms, and seven were executed.
Many arrests were arbitrary. Valentina Vodyanitskaya (see photo, page 42) was a 19-year-old worker at the foundry who had recently moved to the city from the provinces. She was hardly a troublemaker: she claimed she showed up at the city center late in the day, and only came to the demonstrations as a way of “reporting to work.” In the aftermath of the shooting, she was arrested and accused of vandalism for breaking into the party building and destroying some pictures. She was sentenced to 19 years in prison, but was released a few years later, after Khrushchev fell from power.
Today, Vodyanitskaya is a volunteer at the museum. Clearly, the events shaped her distrust for Soviet authority permanently, even though she still refers to the marchers in the third-person. “They wanted someone to listen to them,” she said. “But the government was afraid.”
When I visited the museum last summer, it was a quiet day. One visitor arrived, and struck up a conversation with Vodyanitskaya about the events. He said he had come to the city shortly before the events to attend the Polytechnical Institute. He and some friends had been on the square for a little while that afternoon, and had left to get lunch when the shooting started. He laid the blame for everything squarely on Khrushchev, whose inept handling of the economy had sparked the unrest in the first place, and whose paranoid overreaction was unwarranted. Vodyanitskaya disagreed, saying that Khrushchev simply believed what he was told: that a gang of bandits and troublemakers were running riot in the city. The blame, she said, belongs to local authorities and the security services for lying.
Officially, according to Soviet authorities, the event never took place. But the memory of what happened persisted in those living in or near Novocherkassk. Through the years, the magnitude of the crime seems to have gotten worse, with more and more people recalling hearing (from someone who is now dead) about bodies stacked like cordwood, about rivers of blood, about children being shot in the trees.
The cover-up began just after the shooting started. In the chaotic aftermath, the authorities couldn’t figure out what to do with the bodies. They were taken out of town and left buried in heaps of hay. Summer had already arrived, with temperatures over 30 degrees. And when dogs began to get at the bodies, the authorities realized they needed a more permanent solution. They had the bodies buried in unused portions of existing cemeteries around the province. The work was done in the middle of the night, with the gravediggers hiding from passing headlights when they passed.
The event lived on in murk and confusion. It appeared briefly in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s epic account of Soviet crimes, The Gulag Archipelago. One local man, Peter Siuda, ran a one-person campaign to tell the truth. Siuda was an employee at the plant who was among the planners of the first day’s events. He was arrested while on his way home that night, and was charged as a ringleader. He spent years in prison, and for the rest of his life was obsessed with the events. He claimed that he had compiled an extensive oral history of what happened, but it vanished, allegedly taken when he was attacked in the street in spring 1990.
It wasn’t until the 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost began to loosen the ties of state secrecy, that people began to demand answers. Among them was Irina Mardar, a journalism student in Rostov who later worked at Novocherkassk Polytechnical Institute. In the spirit of getting to the bottom of a local secret, they assembled stories of eyewitnesses in a student journal called Covered Yard, dedicated to the 1962 tragedy. It appeared in 1988, and sold out almost immediately.
In 1990, she and a group of historians, frustrated by the continued official silence, decided to take matters into their own hands. Along with historian Tatyana Bocharova and archaeologist Mikhail Kraysvetny, they wanted to dig further. In the face of bureaucratic opposition, they decided to seek physical evidence to force authorities to acknowledge their work. That meant digging, literally. With modest information, they were able to identify some of the cemeteries where they believed the bodies had been interred.
Wherever possible, the group tried to get official permission for their work. Once, when Mardar and Bocharova showed up to search for remains in Tarasovka, north of Novocherkassk, the official in charge was baffled. His first instinct, as a Soviet bureaucrat in good standing, was to simply say “no.” Surely things could not have happened as they claimed; they were just rabble-rousers. But, on the other hand, he had lived in the region for years, and had heard all the stories. In the end, his curiosity got the better of him, and he granted them permission.
Their work was also aided by the uncertain lines of authority of a Russia in chaos. Bocharova determined that, if things were not officially forbidden, they would go ahead and do their work anyway. Usually, no one stopped them. But inevitably the local KGB would make an appearance in the form of a mysterious Volga car that drove back and forth past the digs.
Finally, possessing evidence – the remains of unaccounted for bodies, Mardar and Bocharova decided to present them to the State Prosecutor’s Office in Moscow (local prosecutors insisted they couldn’t reopen the case). Bocharova left for the capital with stacks of photos and human remains in her luggage. In the end, she convinced the authorities to open an investigation. Once that process was underway, she and her team were able to extract more information from the Interior Ministry about locations and trials. The KGB never opened their files, but the researchers suspect that the KGB did pass some of its information along to the public via the MVD.
In the end, the investigation turned up 26 people in three cemeteries around the province. Twenty-four of the bodies were identified as belonging to individuals whose death certificates had been doctored. Two remain unidentified. Yet to this day, many insist that there were many more deaths.
Photographic evidence from the KGB and MVD might illuminate that claim, but those sources are not forthcoming. Indeed, the number of photographs the KGB and MVD produced at the trials suggest that this may have been the most photographed public event in the nation in 1962, and credible rumors that a full film of what happened is buried somewhere in the KGB archives are impossible to dismiss.
The path to discovery was also harder than it needed to be. The investigators wanted to secure pension increases for those who were wounded that day, which would be very simple to prove if they were able to check the hospital’s medical records from that time. Yet, strangely, a doctor at the Novocherkassk hospital took stacks of records with him when he retired, including details about who was wounded and how. And although approached several times by the team of researchers, he declined to relinquish them, for reasons he would not reveal. The team had to bring doctors from Rostov to “confirm” that the participants’ injuries were caused by gunshot wounds 40 years previous.
They also received help from an unexpected quarter. Early in their work, the investigators tracked down former police officials, to get their first-hand accounts. At the time, policemen who were involved in the events had been required to sign a release stating that they understood that, if they ever spoke out about their role in the cover-up, it would be considered a capital offense. But when the researchers caught up with them, most expressed relief, saying they had been waiting decades for someone to ask them about what had happened.
Interestingly, as prosecutors were in the early stages of convincing officials to open an investigation, they got an unexpected boost by the reformist mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, who visited to look over their work, along with a young aide, a former KGB man named Vladimir Putin.
Throughout the 1990s, the investigators were lucky and probably learned as much as the authorities were willing to allow. But, beginning in 2000, the archives slammed shut, and they have been unable to gain much more information. So the group began to think about ways to preserve and shape the memory of what happened. Applying for and receiving a grant from the Open Society Institute, they opened a museum.
Today, the museum fills two ground-floor rooms of an old building on Karl Marx Street, overlooking the square where the shooting took place. It faces the former Hetman’s Palace, which itself is a museum to Cossack history. The exhibits are rather simple – one room is dedicated to the research effort, the other to the events themselves. There are copies of articles about the incidents, including a lengthy article from 1989 that appeared in the huge-circulation Moscow daily Komsomolskaya Pravda, from which most Russians first learned about the events of 1962. Along the walls are photos of the dead and injured and cards that tell their stories. One ghastly display shows personal items like bullets and buckles that were pulled from the graves; another wall chronicles life in the Soviet prison system for those who were sentenced.
The museum’s director is Yelena Gubanova, a schoolteacher who met Mardar in 2000 in connection with a history project she was organizing in schools. Gubanova estimates that the museum receives about 2,000 visitors each year, most of them school groups from the surrounding region.
Yet Gubanova said she fears that an interest in the past is ebbing. She recalled how, in the summer of 1990, she and a huge crowd of people stood stock still on a train platform in Rostov, listening to the proceedings of the first freely elected Congress of People’s Deputies on someone’s transistor radio. It was, she said, “a very interesting time, because all kinds of things were starting to come out.”
But today, it can be hard for Gubanova and others like her to recreate the excitement and inquisitiveness of those times. High schoolers, she said, once they start getting worried about exams and the future, have little interest in what happened decades ago. So Gubanova aims for younger students. Ninth grade is ideal, she said. Even so, many students come to the museum with little more than stereotypes about the past. They accept without question the Soviet Union’s heroic role in the Second World War, but have few critical thoughts about the Soviet experience in general. Without a connection to the people and narratives of the time, “for them, [what happened here] is just irrelevant.” RL
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