Some might say the prisoners at Kengir embarked on a fool’s errand when they rose in righteous fury against the regime that tormented them. Their heroism was not in vain.
Read MoreThe Biggest Mutiny of the Gulag Archipelago
The Heroic Kengir Uprising
By Lawrence W. Reed
Whoever said “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God” deserves a posthumous Pulitzer. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin are associated with the phrase, but neither has been indisputably identified as the author.
In any event, the stirring sentiment expressed is, in my estimation, sacred. We are each endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When a despot attempts to take those precious things away for no better reason than power, all victims have the right to arise and strike the bastard down—no ifs, ands, or buts about it. And we ought to remember and celebrate those occasions when they do.
Today (May 16) marks the anniversary of the beginning of one of those occasions, albeit one mostly forgotten and unsuccessful. It’s known in history as the Kengir Uprising. It happened in 1954 in one of the hundreds of sordid camps of the Soviet Union’s notorious prison system. The great Russian author and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn labeled it “the biggest mutiny in the history of the Gulag Archipelago.”
The camp at Kengir, a village in the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, housed about 6,000 men and women at its height in the mid-1950s. Most were political prisoners, though it was customary in the Soviet gulag for common criminals to be mixed in with the population.
When Joseph Stalin died in March 1953 and his secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria was executed a few months later, a wave of hope spread throughout the camps. Inmates thought that with the demise of those rotten tyrants, perhaps freedom would soon come.
(Allow me to digress long enough to point out that as evil a killer as Stalin was, he merely expanded a prison system that Solzhenitsyn rightly pinned on his predecessor Vladimir Lenin, founder of Soviet Bolshevism. “This ideology bears the entire responsibility for all the blood that has been shed,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in 1973. The monster Stalin was not an “aberration” as some Soviet apologists suggested; he was the Frankenstein that Lenin made possible.)
Unrest at the Kengir camp exploded on May 16, 1954, as prisoners commenced tearing down a wall separating parts of the complex. Guards fired on them, killing or wounding more than 50. That only infuriated and emboldened the inmates. Within days, they forced the guards and prison officials to flee. Armed with makeshift knives and other crude weapons they fashioned themselves, the prisoners controlled the place for 40 days. For many, it was their first taste of freedom in years, and sadly, it would be their last.
Two thousand miles to the west, patience in Moscow quickly wore thin. Unhappy with the inability of the local authorities to regain control, the communist government dispatched troops and tanks in mid-June. On June 26, the armored vehicles spearheaded the assault on the camp. Historian Anne Applebaum writes,
They ran straight over a group of women, who had locked arms together and stood in their path, not believing that the tanks would dare kill them. They ran over one newlywed couple who, holding on to one another tightly, deliberately threw themselves in their path. They destroyed barracks, with people sleeping inside. They resisted the homemade grenades, the stones, the picks, and other metal objects that the prisoners threw at them…[W]ithin an hour and a half, the soldiers had pacified the camp, removed those prisoners who had agreed to go quietly, and put the rest in handcuffs.
When the smoke cleared, hundreds lay dead or wounded. The insurrection was over. Communism triumphed for the moment, but its clock was ticking. Only a quarter-century later, the Soviet Union imploded, relegating communism to a few of the world’s backwaters such as Red China, North Korea and Cuba, and the pampered faculty lounges of many American universities.
Some might say the prisoners at Kengir embarked on a fool’s errand when they rose in righteous fury against the regime that tormented them. They lost, so what was the point?
Those brave men and women didn’t know it, but they would inspire Solzhenitsyn, the first to recount what had happened. The world read of the uprising and many other Soviet horrors in his magnum opus, The Gulag Archipelago. When the system came apart in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Solzhenitsyn’s seminal work was cited as a crucial element in that happy ending. Soviet communism had become indefensible to all but blind, evil, and stupid leftists.
Like a stinking mackerel in the moonlight, the pickled corpse of Lenin still lies in public view in a mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square. We should hope for the day when a mob yanks it out into the street, stomps it to smithereens, and burns it to dust. A hundred million victims of communism, including those of the Kengir Uprising, will appreciate the justice of it.
And I’ll be on the first plane to Moscow to celebrate it.
For additional information:
Remembering Solzhenitsyn: Observations on the Gospel, Socialism and Power by Lawrence W. Reed
The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum
How the Prisoners Behind the Kengir Uprising Fought Back Against the Horrors of the Gulag by Morgan Dunn
https://allthatsinteresting.com/kengir-uprising
(Lawrence W. Reed is President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty at the Foundation for Economic Education in Atlanta, Georgia. He blogs at www.lawrencewreed.com.)