Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union: Novocherkassk, 1962

by Samuel Baron

This is the first complete story, long hidden by the Soviet Union, of the attack by government forces on striking workers in 1962, resulting in 21 dead and hundreds of others wounded or imprisoned. Only with the advent of glasnost in the 1980s did the tight lid of secrecy placed on the entire episode by the Soviets begin slowly to lift.

Genres: Russian History

241 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Rhuff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Samuel Baron has engaged in a forensic reconstruction and postmortem on the strike-demonstration in Novocherkassk, Russia, in 1962. Explored from all angles, incorporating witness testimony from strikers, soldiers, and officials, he's presented the only comprehensive account likely to appear in written English. Solzhenitsyn is credited with first bringing this tragedy to the outside world, which is not exactly true: Russian-American author Maurice Hindus encountered rumors of it in a 1960s field excursion in south Russia - only to have his informant plucked bodily from a restaurant table!

Baron compares this event to predecessors in Russian history: an 1861 demonstration by freed serfs, and most especially to the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1905. But there were important differences, which he also expounds. For Khrushchev and Mikoyan the most immediate precedent was Hungary in '56; in both scenarios, an originally tolerant policy was superseded by panic as events spun out of control, with bloodshed ensuing in Rostov Oblast as in Budapest. Baron does not pursue any relevant connection in public awareness between the two. That it occurred in Rostov Region - the former HQ of the Don Cossacks, known for their anti-Red, anti-Muscovite militance in the civil war - is another aspect left hanging. Why didn't workers in Volgograd or Tula do the same?

One might also compare it to the contemporary gunning-down of demonstrators in Sharpeville, South Africa, yet there was one major difference - South African blacks knew they were non-citizens without rights, a fundamental status they wished to change. In the USSR, these strikers were convinced that as Soviet working citizens they already possessed the inherent right to strike and demonstrate against wage cuts and price hikes. One might call them naive for so believing and acting, as Baron does: but no more so than Americans shocked at police violence on the Edmumd Pettus Bridge at Selma in 1965.

Baron also sees this event as playing a limited yet longterm role in the demise of the USSR; most specifically, in the state's refusal to amend state food subsidies. Certainly it was one of the longest nails in Khrushchev's political coffin. That the Soviet state was being stretched beyond its means by subsidies of all kinds by the '80s was true; yet maybe, if not for the blatant corruption running through Soviet society like a cancerous tapeworm, the transformation might have been gradual. We'll never know.

This was not the first demonstration, nor the last, in the history of the Soviet state. Bigger strikes erupted in 1918, 1921, and in 1930; there were also numerous peasant revolts, But their memory had been effaced from public consciousness. In the post-Stalin "thaw," however, gunning down unarmed citizens in the streets of a Soviet town could not be hushed or swept aside: already they were becoming too much like us. And by the glasnost period, too many witnesses left living.

A worthy examination of a tragic episode of Russian history, and its relevance to the transformations post-1986.