Appeal of the Commission of the USSR MVD and the USSR General Prosecutor’s Office to the Insurgent Prisoners of the Kengir Camp

Abstract

The armed uprising in Kengir in Steplag (16 May – 26 June 1954) was one of the most prominent and dramatic uprisings of political prisoners in the Gulag and represented the culmination of the crisis in the camp administration system. Ukrainians and Lithuanians played the most significant role in the Kengir uprising as initiators, organisers, and active participants (former members of anti-Soviet resistance predominated: partisans, couriers, and supporters), most of whom had been sentenced to long prison terms. The Lithuanian lawyer Juozas Kondratas was one of the principal leaders of the uprising. According to incomplete data, six Lithuanians were killed and fourteen wounded during the suppression of the uprising.
The document published here – a previously unpublished record of the repressive structures (an appeal of the commission of the USSR MVD and the USSR General Prosecutor’s Office to the insurgent prisoners of the Kengir camp) – is an informative and significant source that will help specialists study the Steplag uprising. The document was compiled on 20 June 1954 [not earlier], when negotiations between the government commission and the prisoners’ representatives had reached a deadlock. The compilers of the source (Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR Sergei Yegorov, Head of the Gulag Ivan Dolgikh, his deputy Viktor Bochkov, and Deputy Prosecutor General of the USSR Afanasy Vavilov) were the principal members of the Soviet government commission authorised to conduct negotiations with the Kengir rebels and the organisers of the suppression of the uprising.
The document reveals not only how the leaders of the USSR MVD and the Gulag interpreted the uprising and what they focused their attention on, but also the arsenal of psychological and mental influence (manipulation of facts, prisoners’ emotions, the instinct of survival, etc.) they used in their attempt to end the prisoners’ ‘mass disobedience’.