Word: vorkuta
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...Your article was a very good account of life in that part of Russia. I should know; I was there in 1940-building the railroad to Vorkuta, by no means voluntarily, but as a prisoner of war having been captured by the Russians during the Russo-Polish...
...consumer-goods program had failed; 3) there was a nationwide food shortage. There were some other failures he did not have to point up: the first suggestion of relaxed control had been followed by the East German riots and by a ten-day strike of slave laborers in the Vorkuta prison camps. Attempts at "honest art," e.g., Novelist Ehrenburg's The Thaw, merely confused Soviet writers accustomed to writing propaganda, including Ehrenburg himself, and honesty in art was incomprehensible to painters of the approved anecdote...
...wall-Pravda, the prisoners read of the insurrection in East Germany. Resistance was so open that on July 22, 1953 Vorkuta Commander General Derevyanko made a speech in one troublesome barracks. A Lithuanian interrupted: "I am sick of just working, working until I drop dead in the pit or the tundra sucks me up." Said Derevyanko: "You do not need freedom in order to live. As a citizen you are only on file [an expression frequently used in Soviet bureaucracy], but as a worker you live." The prisoners made a slogan of the general's words, shouted...
...strike spread. Despite threats and promises, and the pleas of frantic Vorkuta officials, the revolt lasted ten days. In almost every camp the strikers maintained perfect discipline, and there was amazing unity among the prisoners, regardless of nationality. When prisoners chased officials from one camp, an officer gave the order to shoot. Two prisoners were killed, but there was no general riot...
Despite frantic appeals for instructions, Moscow was mysteriously silent for several days before word arrived that Deputy Minister of the Interior Maslennikov was on his way to Vorkuta by plane. The news sent a chill of fear through both the prisoners and guards. Strikers drafted eleven demands to present to him. At the first camp he visited, Maslennikov made a "fatherly" speech and promised a few concessions: unlocked barracks, more letters and a few rubles' pay. One by one the camps returned to work until finally there were only a few holdouts. At 10 a.m. on July...