Victims' Mistake

Tens of thousands of slave laborers first heard the news from crewmen on cargo vessels plying Siberia's 2,800-mile-long Yenisei River: the Kremlin was downgrading late Dictator Stalin and rectifying the abuses of his regime. Counting themselves noteworthy victims of Stalinist repression, the prisoners (working on a project to divert the Yenisei into a vast inland sea for irrigating arid Kazakstan) saw a new day dawning.

Then last March several hundred Geor gian prisoners arrived at the camps. They had been arrested in Tiflis for taking part in a demonstration when the authorities failed to observe the third anniversary of Georgia-born Stalin's death (March 5). This seemed proof of the river boatmen's reports that the new regime was genuinely anti-Stalin. On April 3 at Mirnoye camp, some 600 miles north of Tomsk, "Stalin's victims" sent a delegation to the camp commandant asking for an amnesty in the light of the Kremlin's new policy.

The commandant's answer was to pull a pistol on the delegates, killing one. But before he could fire again the delegation had disarmed him, shot him dead with his own weapon. Word spread through Mirnoye and to two nearby camps. Prisoners revolted, disarmed the guards. On April 4 MVD security troops from the Arctic Circle towns of Norilsk and Igarka, armed with heavy machine guns, fought a battle with armed prisoners. Some 200 prisoners and twelve guards were killed. When prison order was restored, an estimated 80 prisoners were found to have escaped into the desolate countryside.

The Russian slave laborers had erred in thinking that a rewrite of the Stalin hagiography necessarily involves a revision of Stalin penology. The only inmates of the camp to benefit from the Kremlin's post-Stalin policy were seven Austrian P.W.s who (after eleven years in Soviet slave labor camps) were released a fortnight later in fulfillment of a Soviet promise to the new Austrian government. In Vienna last week one of the Austrians, telling the story of the Mirnoye revolt, gave the West a useful reminder of the unchanging reality behind the redecorated Soviet fac,ade.

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