Shortly after the Urals Ridge, our train turned right and headed straight north for Vorkuta. Having put up at a cheap hotel – in fact a railroad men’s hostel – near the railway station, I took a photo camera and went out to see the city. After a modern beautiful Salekhard, Vorkuta made a painful impression on me: a lot of abandoned buildings, broken roads, high piles of dirty snow and trash on the roadsides, and Lenin and Kirov standing on high pedestals, black from coal dust, as if they had just emerged from the mine.
Everything is here the way it was in the Soviet era.
But the city dwellers, especially women who are well-dressed and affable, willingly answered my questions.
I made an unexpected discovery on that day. When I noticed with surprise that the flat asphalt on pavements and sidewalks showed a neat pattern of low bumps, I asked an old man what it was. The man, a retired history teacher, explained: “Our city stands at the place of what once was known as Rechlag special-purpose prison camps that were fenced around with barbed wire. As the city was being built, camps were gradually torn down and the wooden poles that held the barbed wire were sawn off. And now, so many years on, permafrost began to squeeze the remnants of those sawn-off poles out through the asphalt…” Then he added: “Vorkuta is also called, quite aptly, the ‘capital of Arctic Young Communists’ [a pun on the deciphered Russian abbreviation that meant “prison inmate.” – Author].
“There were almost 40 coal mines here in the Stalin era, which ‘employed’ not only ‘enemies of the people’ but also some convicted fo-reigners, including the Japanese, Germans, Hungarians, Poles, Austrians, and the Chinese. For this reason, our Vorkuta is also called capital of the world. From 1944 on, the Vorkuta special-purpose camps held a half, or sometimes even more, of all the convicts that served their terms at USSR Interior Ministry prison camps.
“Most of those who did hard labor at the Vorkuta camps were participants in national liberation movements. For example, in 1953 out of over 38,000 Rechlag prisoners almost 17,000 were the so-called nationalists who had fought for their peoples’ independence. Go to our local history museum, and you will see and hear so much new.”
UPRISING IN THE BLOODY AUGUST OF 1953
After Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, Soviet political prisoners, especially former officers and soldiers, began to cherish a hope that their unfair convictions would be overturned and they would be set free. But this did not happen: hard labor was, as before, a way to destroy political prisoners, and prison camps remained exterminatory, rather than correctional, facilities even after the death of Sta-lin. As it was extremely hard to work at coal mines, convicts resorted to self-mutilation – they would even have their hands cut off in order not to go down the mine. They were fed with what can be called pigswill: a boiled mixture of rotten potatoes, cabbage, fodder beet roots, and onions.
In late July 1953 the Vorkuta camps were rocked by wildcat strikes that turned into a full-scale uprising. Especially active were inmates of the 10th camp department, who worked at the 29th coal mine in the valley Yur-Shor. Most of the rebels were the so-called Ukrainian nationalists. Accordingly, our compatriots, including Huk, Hryhorchuk, and Maliushenko, formed the majority of the strike committee. After clearing the camps of the guards, the rebels put forward only one demand: overturning the unfair court sentences by the USSR’s highest bo-dies of power and setting political prisoners free. The insurgents’ motto was: “Coal to the Fatherland, freedom to us!”
Moscow’s answer was “No.”
On Sunday, August 1, 1953, soldiers and officers of a security force punitive division, armed with automatic rifles and machine-guns, surrounded the rebels, and General Maslennikov gave them an ultimatum: “Immediately disclose the initiators of the rebellion! If you fail to do so, the inmates will be shot to death. You have five minutes to think this over.”
The black hand of the general’s wristwatch began to count off the 300 fatal seconds. The still living convicts were standing on the other side of the barbed wire. As the five minutes had ticked away, the loudspeakers blared out the command: “Fire!”
It was another inferno that humans created on Earth for other humans. The mustachioed tyrant Sta-lin had already lain dead next to Lenin in the Mausoleum, but the GULAG system he had established went on devouring those who were still living and fighting it.
TAKING PHOTOS IN THE VALLEY YUR-SHOR
Early in the morning next day I hitchhiked from Vorkuta to the valley Yur-Shor (“Death Valley”) in which there is a memorial cemetery of the rebels shot on August 1, 1953.
A low sun beamed its silver light onto the earth that had not a single green grass blade, which made the whole valley look dead. The wooden crosses bleached and polished by snowstorms stood out like white bones. My long shadow interwove with those of the crosses, my booted feet sank into a thawed-out soil, and I, still a living human, was suddenly conscious of blending with the dead people who lay in stone-solid permafrost.
I pulled out a little bag with Ukrainian soil, took a handful and spilled it over the graves. “As you, my dear compatriots, failed to come back to Ukraine from here, the holy earth has come to your graves from the land you fought and died for,” I said to myself.
I saw a trident-topped metal cross on a low hill. The stainless-steel plaque bore an engraved text: “Eternal memory to the victims of communist terror, fighters for the freedom of Ukraine. The All-Ukrainian Society of the Repressed.” Still lower is a long list of the names of the executed Ukrainians: Mykhailo Kostiv, Vasyl Huk, Yaroslav Bochevsky, Volodymyr Katamai, Ivan Levko, Volodymyr Dovbysh, Stefan Shkotyk, Fedir Duma, Myroslav Fyshchuk, Bohdan Chernetsky, Yakiv Pasheniuk…
The commemorative sign from Ukraine at the Yur-Shor memorial cemetery near Vorkuta was the first one on my way in the course of all my travels. Unfortunately, I saw no signs like this on the other side of the Urals.
From the third stage of the journalist project “Ukrainians beyond the Urals”
