The Riot at Temir-Tau

"Things are bad, very bad!" shouted Nikita Khrushchev last January, summarily firing Nikolai Belyaev, his viceroy for the virgin-lands region of Soviet Kazakhstan. But just how bad things were on the Soviet's wild rontier is only now evident. The fact is that last October 3,000 young Communist pioneers staged a strike that turned into a small rebellion.

The "disruption," as Belyaev's successor euphemistically called it in an otherwise frank speech last month, took place in the city of Temir-Tau (pop. 54,000), where some 3,000 Komsomol pioneers had been assigned to build a huge steel plait. They were members of that army of 500,000 young zealots who have volunteered in the last four years to go and work in Soviet Central Asia for the greater glory of Khrushchev. But long months of abuse had disillusioned them. Instead of promised new quarters, they were still living in tents. The food was bad. They got only 30-c- pay a day while local laborers pulled down ten times as much.

One night a band of 50 angry Komsomols set fire to their communal eating shack, marched on a sort of marketplace a mile away and began looting stores and kiosks. They set up barricades, and their ranks quickly swelled to 1,500 irate young Communists. They caught and hanged the local police chief at his station door, next morning ambushed three truckloads of troops hurrying up from Karaganda and snatched their arms.

For two days the embattled Komsomols stood off troops rushed in by the authorities. Midway through the third afternoon, a doctor at the local hospital reported that 91 people had been killed and hundreds wounded. That afternoon the troops pulled back briefly while 2,500 unarmed members of the "Workers' Militia" brought in from nearby factories advanced toward the rebels' department-store headquarters to persuade them to surrender. When the Komsomols responded with stones, the militia withdrew. But the troops returned that night, smashed all resistance.

Moscow rushed in a new security chief, sacked local party and trade-union officials, ordered emergency shipments of felt shoes, fur hats, overcoats, tea and bread. The pioneers of Temir-Tau also got a modest raise in pay.

It was the biggest defiance of authority in the Soviet Union since the workers at Moscow's Kaganovich ball-bearing plant struck for higher wages and better working conditions just after the 1956 Warsaw and Budapest risings.

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