The Kengir uprising was a prisoner rebellion that occurred in Soviet labor camp for political prisoners, during May and June of 1954. The revolt was the first of its kind in the Soviet Gulag system and is one of the few known examples of a prisoner uprising in the history of the gulag system. The rebellion’s causes can be traced back to a large arrival of ‘thieves’ – the accepted slang term for the habitual criminals who were also imprisoned in Gulag along with the political prisoners.
About Kengir uprising in brief
The Kengir uprising was a prisoner rebellion that occurred in Soviet labor camp for political prisoners, during May and June of 1954. Its duration and intensity distinguished it from other Gulag rebellions during the same period. Prisoners all over the Gulag, for this reason and others, were becoming increasingly bold and impudent during the months preceding the rebellion. After 40 days of freedom within the camp walls, intermittent negotiation, and mutual preparation for violent conflict, the rebellion was suppressed by Soviet armed forces with tanks and guns on the morning of 26 June. According to former prisoners, five hundred to seven hundred people were killed or wounded by the suppression, although official figures claim only a few dozen had been killed. The story was first committed to history in The Gulag Archipelago, a work by former prisoner and Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The rebellion’s causes can be traced back to a large arrival of ‘thieves’ – the accepted slang term for the habitual criminals who were also imprisoned in Gulag along with the political prisoners. With the thieves absent, the politicals began to unite as national, religious, and ethnic groups, causing them to distrust each other. The prisoners organized strikes and organized strikes before on a smaller scale they began murdering campers and informing the camp administration. The revolt was the first of its kind in the Soviet Gulag system and is one of the few known examples of a prisoner uprising in the history of the gulag system. It was also the first time that the prisoners had been able to form a government, which lasted for an unprecedented length of time and resulted in novel activity, including the formation of a provisional government by the prisoners, prisoner marriages, the performance of religious ceremonies, and the waging of a propaganda campaign against the erstwhile authorities.
The camp authorities were rapidly losing control of their charges, with hunger strikes, work stoppages, large-scale insubordination, and punitive violence becoming more and more common. The prison authorities hoped that these thieves would help reverse this trend, as they had in the past, but they had only established the camps during the early 1920s, only during the 1950s were the political and ‘Thieves’ finally separated into different camp systems. In May 1954, about 650 thieves entered the approximately 5,200-strong body of political prisoners at KengIR at the beginning of May. This infusion of thieves into the camp was specifically for this purpose, as the camp authorities had hoped that they would help these thieves help reverse the trend as they were becoming restless. But instead, the prisoners colluded with each other to keep their identities secret and denounced each other, causing other prisoners to distrust them to other national groups. In the end, the prison authorities were forced to quarantined the camp and effectively quarantine it from the outside. This situation lasted for a year and a half, during which time the prisoners built intricate defenses to prevent the incursion of the authorities into their newly won territory.
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This page is based on the article Kengir uprising published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 20, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
