page_title: Kengir uprising
section_title: Changes in the Gulag
hierarchical_section_title: Kengir uprising / Background / Changes in the Gulag
caption_attribution_description: A group of political prisoners in Kengir, part of the Soviet Gulag system. Lithuanian Aleksandra Kišonaitė (Miknevičienė) is in the last row on the right. She was arrested in May 1949.
context_page_description: The Kengir uprising was a prisoner uprising that took place in the Soviet labor camp for political prisoners Kengir in May and June 1954. Its duration and intensity distinguished it from other Gulag uprisings in the same period.
  After the murder of some of their fellow prisoners by guards, Kengir inmates launched a rebellion and proceeded to seize the entire camp compound, holding it for weeks and creating a period of freedom for themselves unique in the history of the Gulag. Following a rare alliance between the criminals and political prisoners, the prisoners succeeded in forcing the guards and camp administration to flee the camp and effectively quarantine it from the outside. The prisoners thereafter set up intricate defenses to prevent the incursion of the authorities into their newly won territory.
context_section_description: A year before the uprising, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin died. His death raised great hopes among the prisoners of amnesty or, failing that, prison reform, and this hope was further emboldened by the subsequent downfall of Stalin's right-hand man and state security chief, Lavrenty Beria. Beria, who was the chief of the entire Soviet security and police apparatus and architect of some of the most hated policies relating to the camps, was declared an "enemy of the people" and executed by those who succeeded Stalin. Beria's newly besmirched name became a liability to others in both the upper and lower echelons of the Soviet hierarchy, and anybody who had been associated with or spoken too much in favour of Beria was similarly at risk of being denounced as a traitor and persecuted. The camp administration were not excluded from this risk, and this fact in turn significantly weakened their position vis à vis the prisoners. Writing about the strikes which were taking place at the time, Solzhenitsyn described this issue:
  Prisoners all over the Gulag, for this reason and others, were becoming increasingly bold and impudent in the months preceding the uprising, with hunger strikes, work stoppages, large-scale insubordination, and punitive violence becoming more and more common. In Kengir in particular, camp authorities were rapidly losing all control over their charges, and the communiqués periodically sent by commanders up the camp hierarchy, in which they expressed their horror at the frequent incidents of unrest, powerful underground organizations, the growing "crisis" afflicting their network of informants, and their desperate attempts to reassert control, attest to this.
caption: A group of political prisoners in Kengir (1949–1956)
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