Ukrainians and Lithuanians led Kengyr camp uprising

Western Ukrainians and Lithuanians were the main organisers of the 1954 Kengyr uprising, an armed revolt by political prisoners in Kazakhstan’s Steppe Camp. LRT reports that the prisoners sought better conditions and made political demands.

The uprising took place in one section of the special camp near the settlement of Kengyr in May and June 1954. Historian Mindaugas Pocius of the Lithuanian Institute of History and colleagues from Ukraine and Kazakhstan have recently published a collection of documents about the revolt.

The prisoners were highly organised. They drew criminal prisoners to their side, armed themselves and tried to send news beyond the camp using kites and a homemade shortwave radio transmitter. Pocius said they sought talks with a representative or secretary of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and aimed to change Soviet penal policy.

Many prisoners had been sentenced to 15 to 25 years of hard labour for “counter-revolutionary crimes”, a label applied to people who resisted the occupation or Sovietisation of their countries. Pocius said the sentences offered little hope of survival: after several years of camp labour, prisoners could become disabled and die before regaining their freedom.

The revolt followed hopes for change after Joseph Stalin’s death and an amnesty under Lavrentiy Beria that freed about half of the prisoners serving shorter sentences. But, Pocius said, political prisoners saw little change in the Gulag system and were prepared to risk death in an uprising rather than continue their sentences.

Soviet forces crushed the revolt, but the regime in the camps later eased, special camps were abolished and most political prisoners were eventually released. The uprising’s organisers included former partisans and couriers from western Ukraine and the Baltic countries, according to Pocius.