Soviet Union. Kengir Gulag uprising in Kazakhstan. The camp revolts. It’s the gulag where Alexander Solzhenitsyn is. The zeks (prisoners) now move freely from one area to another. The authorities are relenting. If all this had happened two years earlier, with Stalin still alive, the military, if only out of fear that he would find out, would have machine-gunned the zeks from their turrets, and if it had been necessary to eliminate all eight thousand of them, Solzhenitsyn writes, they wouldn’t have flinched. But now, in 1954, Moscow is in a new light. Then, on June 25th, the T-34 tanks and machine-gunning planes arrive, followed by the special forces. The dead and wounded number approximately six hundred. In the fall of 1955, the survivors are tried behind closed doors. As Robert Burns says: an uprising cannot end in triumph; if he wins he is given another name.
