Meat, but­ter, pay rise!

Novocherkassk is a small town in the South of Rus­sia, also known as the unof­fi­cial cap­i­tal of the Cos­sacks, the Slavic mil­i­tary com­mu­nity. Unfor­tu­nately this town was the place of a huge tragedy, when in 1962 the civil­ian demon­stra­tion was opened fire on.

The tur­moil started on June, 1 when the Soviet gov­ern­ment announced the gro­cery price increase of about 30 per cent. The riot began at the pro­gres­sive elec­tro loco­mo­tive fac­tory: just before the price increase, the salary had been low­ered, which already was below the liv­ing min­i­mum (about a hun­dred rub­bles). The work­ers demanded an expla­na­tion, and threat­ened to strike. Faced with an ulti­ma­tum, the CEO Kurochkin mounted the plat­form and demanded that peo­ple went back to work. ‘If you do not have enough money for meat, buy the liver pie’ answered Kurochkin with the snarl.

This phrase sparked the unrest. The news about the riot quickly spread through the fac­tory, so more and more labour­ers stopped their work. Some­one made a fire using the por­traits of the coun­try leader Nikita Khrushchev as fuel. At the same time the fac­tory illus­tra­tor drew some posters with the work­ers’ claims. Later, for writ­ing four words “Meat, but­ter, wages increase” on the poster he was impris­oned for 12 years.

Novocherkassk Mosaic Wall

The strike lead­ers sent the rep­re­sen­ta­tives to other fac­to­ries of the region – so a large meet­ing was sched­uled for the day after.

By the evening the army entered the town, headed by the vice-minister of inter­nal affairs, as well as a huge group of gov­ern­ment rep­re­sen­ta­tives. The order to arrest the riot insti­ga­tors was issues, but it failed to stop peo­ple from protest­ing – by now, the crowds were approach­ing the town cen­tre and the City Coun­cil offices.

Per­haps the tragedy could have been avoided if the Sat­ur­day was not a work­ing day. Peo­ple came to the fac­tory and gath­ered in front of the fac­tory build­ing. With the red ban­ners and por­traits of Lenin in their hands, the march to the town cen­tre had begun. While they were mov­ing through town, a lot of stu­dents and ordi­nary city dwellers joined the demon­stra­tion – mainly because of idle curios­ity. No one could imag­ine that it may turn to car­nage, may­hem and years in prison.

The crowd came to the main town square and broke into the City Coun­cil build­ing: off the bal­conies speeches were being made addressed to the pub­lic and the Soviet gov­ern­ment, demand­ing wage increase and bet­ter price policies.

Mean­while the army troops kept arriv­ing from the neigh­bour­hood regions. The sit­u­a­tion was labelled as coup – it is still unknown whether the order to open fire was issues by Khrushchev him­self, but the real­ity was that it was very unlikely with­out his approval.

About fifty sol­diers of spe­cial troops tried forc­ing peo­ple back. First some sol­diers made the warn­ing one-off shot in the air. Imme­di­ately there was a shout from the crowd that it was blank shoot­ing – so the peo­ple made a move at the sol­diers. That moment the fire was opened.

Peo­ple rushed in all direc­tions caus­ing chaos. Sev­eral dozens of peo­ple were on the ground, with blood all over. The whole thing did not last an hour.

Right away the fire fight­ers were called to wash the blood off the square and posters with a promise of a dance party for the fol­low­ing day were put up to make the cit­i­zens for­get about the tragedy

The news about shoot­ing quickly spread around the town. The spon­ta­neous protest meet­ing of out­raged peo­ple con­tin­ued in the night after the tragedy. Intro­duc­ing a cur­few the army troops forced peo­ple to leave the square. The next few days were the real chal­lenge for thou­sands of cit­i­zens who were afraid that they had been caught by the KGB pho­tog­ra­phers dur­ing the march. That time the gov­ern­ment lead­ers dis­cussed var­i­ous options to pros­e­cute the peo­ple involved in the unrest. Some of them even pro­posed to deport all the town cit­i­zens to the Mid­dle Asia.

The Soviet gov­ern­ment feared that the news about the riot in a small town would spread around the coun­try and around the world. To pre­vent this, the KGB attracted sev­eral spe­cial machines to con­trol the radio fre­quen­cies which could trans­mit the infor­ma­tion about the tragedy. All the mail sent from the town of Novocherkassk was opened and looked through.

Novocherkassk Riots Memorial

Long after the unrest the KGB offi­cers found the leaflets with claims and slo­gans about the protest. The tragic out­come was 33 per­sons lost and 90 injured. 122 peo­ple were arrested where 7 were blamed for ter­ror­ism and were later exe­cuted. The major­ity were impris­oned for 10 – 15 years for par­tic­i­pat­ing in abortive riots.

The cases were revised after the resign of Khrushchev. Some peo­ple were later released, but it was poor con­so­la­tion for fam­i­lies of the killed civilians.

Related posts:

1. Best of Win­ter 2009  –  2010
2. May, 1^st: Soviet Labour Day.
3. Soviet Brands: The Scent Of Com­mu­nism. Part 1 of 2
4. Soviet Cars: His­tory of the Copy-and-Paste Indus­try  —  Part 3 of 3
5. Soviet Cars: His­tory of the Copy-and-Paste Indus­try  —  Part 1 of 3

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