During the twenty-minute commute, workers going to the plant never discuss how, in 1962, the Kremlin ordered T-55 tanks to block the bridge to cut the plant off from the city. Nor the orders given to the commander of the mechanized infantry unit, a decorated World War II veteran, to open fire on the plant. Or the names of the nearly 30 people killed by gunshot wounds. At the ornate gates to the expansive factory grounds there is no sign describing events from 55 years ago.

Vilisov found out about this tragedy purely by accident when he was in high school. His grandfather Peter Grub, who used to work at the plant, mentioned that he had once almost been killed by machine-gun fire. Then, he told him the story of how Soviet security forces, who were supposed to protect the workers of the world from callous and predatory capitalists, instead opened fire on the Novocherkassk proletariat after they went on a general strike. The workers were protesting their poverty-level wages and managers’ demands for higher production.

“I had a happy Soviet childhood, like everyone else. For many years I did not know anything about the strike,” Vilisov said, as he pulled his bus up to the plant’s front gates. “Then I realized that we were not told everything in our Soviet schools. Not the terrible, shameful secrets, which this was.”

As recently as ten years ago, Russian officials acknowledged the tragedy, which was documented in a 1991 Soviet prosecutor's report showing that Soviet troops opened fire on protesters in the city, killing 22 people and injuring 39 others. In a 2008 visit to Novocherkassk, President Vladimir Putin even laid a wreath for the victims. But that was then. Now, the only plaque at the plant commemorating the events has disappeared. It’s unclear who removed it, or when. But it’s a vivid illustration of how historic amnesia infects Russia today, compounded by the perfidy of local officials.

The dramatic events took place over two days long ago, in the wake of a nationwide hike in meat and milk prices. That, coupled with a new order to increase production at the factory, prompted the workers in Novocherkassk to put down their tools and strike. Soon, thousands of angry citizens, fed up with substandard living conditions, were in open revolt from the factory to the city’s main square. In a series of emergency meetings that included premier Nikita Krushschev, the Communist Party Politburo ordered internal security troops, local police and KGB officers to Rostov to restore order by any means necessary.

Local survivors claim that many of those killed during the strike were buried in secret, with the circumstances covered up, so a full accounting of the death toll was impossible. Unofficial statistics show at least 26 people were killed and 87 others injured. After the protest was quashed, the KGB cracked down. Hundreds were arrested and dozens were convicted and sent to the Gulag. A terrible fear gripped the city.

Built in 1936, the plant was the birthplace of the Soviet Union’s electric trains, the locus of the young country’s massive industrialization plans. Novocherkassk locomotives traversed tens of thousands of miles across the vast Soviet territory, bringing raw metal to smelters, wheat to silos and prisoners to the Gulags.

Today, the Novocherkassk factory continues to churn out trains, but its managers have sanitized certain aspects of history displayed on the ground floor of the plant’s renovated and gleaming House of Culture. Inside, heavy maroon banners hang under glass next to copies of the Order of Lenin and the iconostasis of the Heroes of the Soviet Union. Yellowed newspaper articles bear the profile of Stalin on the front page. 

But among these paeans to the past, there is no mention about the strike. 

“We don’t talk about that,” explained the head of the museum, Galina Zakharova, to an inquiring visitor.

“It happened,” shrugged Zakharova. “But it is not customary for us to talk about revolts. We talk more about the glory of our laborers. This is what you need to raise this generation.”

On a stroll through the museum, only someone already versed in the plant’s violent past can pick out minor clues about those events. 

One is a photo of the plant director Boris Kurochkin, who uttered the phrase which is commonly believed to have worsened the situation. In the tense days leading up to the demonstrations, the factory’s beleaguered workers got news that their wages would be cut, and their hours increased. For those who couldn’t afford basic foods already, this was the spark that finally set them off. They set down their tools and launched their strike at the factory’s main gate. 

In a quintessentially Russified version of Marie Antoinette’s famous phrase, Kurochkin further incensed strikers by telling them that they should eat liver piroshkis, pies filled with the cheapest cut of meat, instead of demanding higher-quality food.

However, the museum’s display about Kurochkin conveniently leaves this notorious anecdote unmentioned.

The second photo shows Sergei Yolkin, the plant’s former chief engineer, who many survivors of the strike say tried to talk the workers back on the job. In his photo, Yolkin is wearing a fashionable Bologna jacket and a dark beret on his gray head, a style of clothing typical of Soviet scientific and technical elite — and something that immediately set them apart from the factory’s manual laborers, who favored much more informal clothes.

In the allegedly classless Soviet society, these distinctions were great. So when thousands of workers joined the strike wearing dirty undershirts, factory managers like Yolkin got scared. Elena Perova, Yolkin’s daughter, was seven years old at the time of the strike. Such shirts, she said, confirmed to the managers that the strikers were thugs and troublemakers. “Only hardened alcoholics in a drunken stupor would wear such clothing in public,” she said.

Elena says that beyond her father’s picture, the factory museum has nothing that depicts his or her mother’s role during those tense days.

Her mother, who was the economist at the factory, was frightened enough to take her children to their grandmother’s house on the opposite side of the city from the plant. The journey itself was terrifying. Elena, her mother and her brother crowded into a packed tram filled with panicked people also trying to get out of town. Her overwhelming memory is a frightening sense of being crushed by all the bodies. “I began to gasp in pain,” she said. “I still remember how scared I was.”

After dropping the children at their grandmother’s home, Elena’s mother went back to work. But children being children, Elena and her brother soon got bored. Together, they decided to run away. They walked all the way back to the city. The scenes remain etched on Elena’s memory: Huge crowds of workers in gray undershirts that matched their heavy mood and faces. A dead cat hung from a pole, beside a strike poster describing the factory: “Under Lenin she lived. Under Stalin, she withered. Under Khrushchev, she died.”

KGB officers, dressed in civilian clothing, monitored the crowds and secretly photographed the chief instigators of the rebellion, in order to build a criminal case against them.

According to Elena, the violence started because of a specific group of people: prisoners assigned to the factory to help decouple railway cars. They began to smash factory property, she said. Then, students from a vocational school next to the plant joined the vandalism. “They were to blame,” she said. “People say that father tried to persuade the workers to stand down and get back to work. Father tried to calm them down. He climbed onto a steam engine to address them, but then they pulled him out of there, tearing his shirt. Other workers started beating him.”

Yolkin’s role in the strike remained an unspoken, terrifying secret for his family. “He never said anything and ordered us not to say anything. My mother warned us ‘People in gray might come. So keep quiet.’ We lived all our lives in fear that my father would be taken away,” Elena said 

The vividness and violence of the memory still brings Elena to tears. In her fear for her husband’s safety, Elena’s mother forced Yolkin to take sick leave in the immediate days after the strike, hoping that his absence from work would save him from reprisals. She remembers her mother sewing her father’s shirt that was torn in the melee. 

Elena’s mother’s ruse worked. A few weeks later, Yolkin returned to his job and remained chief engineer until his retirement in 1984. He later spent several years teaching at an institute before he died from complications brought on by a stroke. He never talked about the strike, Elena says.

Piotr Siuda, a factory worker, wasn’t as lucky as Yolkin. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison for his role in the uprising. He served four years and was released early. In the 1990s Siuda championed the cause of the factory workers who had been shot during the strike. In the heady days of Glasnost, he started demanding an investigation into the incident. Then, a strange thing occurred. Siuda died after being attacked by robbers. His murder remains unsolved.

Around Novocherkassk, facts about the strike are nearly as opaque as the circumstances of Siuda’s death. Much of that is by design.

In Primary School No 31, which is located next to the factory, teachers are forbidden to tell children about the history that occurred down the street. The state curriculum ignores the history of the strike, and thus, so do the teachers.

Marina Rybalkina, the deputy director of the school grew up near the factory and both of her parents worked there. Her father participated in the strike of 1962 but ran away from the bullets and escaped injury. The family, however, didn’t escape the fear of retribution. 

“Many were arrested and everyone was scared that they would be next,” she recalls of the days immediately after the crackdown. 

She says she understood from her parents that many workers killed in the uprising were buried secretly and without an inquest. Families who had wounded relatives in the hospital also begged administrators to document the cause of the injuries as something unrelated to the strike.

It was a time of mixed emotions, the jumble of fear mixed with the euphoria of freedom from the experience of standing up to authorities. “The feelings during the uprising have long haunted me,” she said.

When Marina left Novocherkassk to study at the teaching institute in Kuban, she remembers a teacher rebuking her for being headstrong and rowdy. She thought it sounded like a curse. “The teacher told me: ‘You are from a rebellious city. Shut up!’ That silenced me at the time, and I am still silent now,” she said.

She takes pride in small acts of defiance that she sees in the younger generation, especially their ability to speak out about the past. She recalls a favored student who gave her a detailed recitation about a question she posed to her class about the most memorable historical events in Novocherkassk. The student told the others of the anecdote about liver pies, about the shooting of the workers and the violence. “I was impressed by how well the children know the history of their city,” she recalls. But even this pride is tinged with the miasma of fear. “But, still. I felt I needed to caution him. I said to this student that he should be careful about such stories. Shooting and blood are not topics that are good for a young child’s mind,” Marina said.

For those willing to take on the authorities, more about the strike can be learned in a locked, forgotten room on the ground floor of the city’s Museum of the History of the Don Cossacks. A small exhibit about the events of 1962 is housed there — but it doesn’t appear on the official museum catalog or map.

Museum director Natalya Sedinko has an unwritten order to the museum staff: keep it locked and keep it off limits. The only person who disobeyed the order, Valentina Vodyanitskaya, was dismissed as a museum guide three years ago. 

“It was too popular,” Vodyanitskaya said of the exhibition about the strike. “Nobody really cared to look at information about ancient kings. Instead, they came to listen to this story.”

On a recent day at the museum, one visitor’s persistent pleas finally wore down a reticent guide, and she eventually unlocked the door to the exhibit.

At first glance, there was little to see, as the room was full of dozens of recently blown-up balloons. 

“We are preparing for Victory Day,” the guide explained as she started inflating another batch. One balloon suddenly popped, causing a red pedestal to spin around and reveal a display of people killed and wounded in the strike — Alexandra Moskalchenko, 23 years old, whose foot was amputated; Valentina Kobeleva, 15 years old, injured in the leg. Vitya Savchenko, 12 years old, who also sustained leg injuries.  

In another corner, death certificates showed some of the people shot in the square but whose official cause of death was changed in favor of something less provocative. Another wall displayed photos of strikers who were sent to prison, including Valentina Vodyanitskaya.

Suddenly, the illicit tour stopped as quickly as it had started when a second tour guide burst into the room.

“You will spoil our decorations for Victory Day,” she screamed. She locked the exhibit and pushed the visitor out of the museum, back to the main square, the same place where the town’s workers were gunned down 57 years ago.

Outside, all was peaceful. Children played ball games and mothers walked by with strollers. Like those inside the museum, they all appeared inured to the ghosts of their past, unaware of the solitary monument left in Novocherkassk: a dense gray stone in the center of the square etched with a cross and the year 1962.

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• Bunya Barkina, 40 years old
• Esfir Barkina, 9 years old
• Larisa Belitskaya, 12 years old
• Raisa Alperovich, 57 years old

The Nazis executed an estimated 27,000 Jews, prisoners of war and others in Rostov on Don, Russia, during their occupation, mowing down most of them in unmarked graves in an area in the western outskirts of town called the Snake Ravine. Since 1975 a hulking monument has stood on the lonely grassy hillside to commemorate what is considered the worst Holocaust-era crime in Russia. To activists, the statue is cold and inhuman, as it provides visitors no insight into the individuals murdered nearby. Indeed, no signs mark the mass graves where they died and many of the names of those exterminated have been lost to history.

Rashka is the self-described archivist of Rostov’s Jewish community. His congregation from the Rostov Soldiers’ Synagogue along with the Russian Jewish Congress have been working for years to compile a full list of the Rostov Holocaust victims so they could add them to the Soviet-era memorial already in place. So far they have confirmed only around 6,000 names, mostly of Jewish victims, and they have raised money to pay for a new plaque to display them.

But the quest to commemorate the dead has run into a wall of unsympathetic authorities.

Rostov’s city administration, which oversees the memorial, say the have denied permission for the plaque of victims because the activists have not had their list of names properly attested and verified by the Russian state archives. Yury Dombrovsky of the Russian Jewish Congress says this is an impossible bureaucratic feat because the state archives doesn’t have a list of victims  -- which is why the activists are working to complete the task on their own.

Rostov’s city administration denied permission for a plaque of the Rostov Holocaust victims

For outsiders it may seem inexplicable that Russian officials would stand in the way of a chance to mark the crimes of a Western country upon their own citizens, especially given the current political climate in Moscow. Activists believe that the real motivations to the authorities’ intransigence is because their work to remember the dead raises troublesome questions about how history is remembered and taught in today’s Russia.

The extermination of Rostov’s Jews occurred due to widespread collaboration with the Nazis, a history that has been whitewashed out of the state-sponsored narrative of World War II. The Rostov massacre also raises key questions in today’s Russia about the value of individual lives in a political culture that values loyalty and social unity. And it underscores feelings among many local Jews that anti-Semitism is still alive and well in their country.

“The cult of informing was always around in Soviet times. But now no one speaks about this or talks about it in school books or on television,” said  Rashka in a recent interview.

Rostov’s massacre is one of the least understood chapters of the Holocaust, in large part because of the fickle attitudes that Soviet -- and now Russian -- authorities have had toward their citizens. During World War II about 15 percent of the Soviet population died, many in battle, others from starvation and some from the Soviet regime.

In 1943 after the liberation of Rostov, the Soviet government established a special commission to investigate the Nazi atrocities and executions. The report, filed away by the Soviet secret police, was briefly made public by a Russian documentarian in the mid-1990s, but it is no longer in the public domain.

In the 1970s, Soviet authorities erected a monument to the victims, and in line with the ideology of the time, the plaque at the site emphasized communal suffering and ignored the names, ethnic and religious backgrounds of those killed. The same thing happened at Babi Yar in Ukraine, where over 100,000 residents of Kiev, mostly Jewish, were killed by Nazis.

In Rostov, this whitewashing of history means that today, even some of the most basic facts of the Holocaust-era crimes are in dispute. Dombrovsky of the Rostov Holocaust Memory Foundation says that 27,000 people were killed, and around half of the victims were Jews, numbers apparently taken from the Soviet archival statistics. According to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Center in Israel, 15,000-16,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis in Rostov-on-Don from August 1942 to February 1943. It doesn’t state statistics for other ethnicities or nationalities.

In the early years of the Soviet Union, Rostov was home to a diverse and thriving Jewish community, and in 1939 Jews made up 5.4 percent of the city’s population. Yet more is known about those responsible for the killing due to the reports made by Soviet investigators after the Red Army liberated the area from the Germans, rather than the victims.

Rostov’s extermination of Jews was supervised in a chillingly organized campaign by Kurt Christmann, a 35-year-old Obersturmbannführer, according to German archives.

On Tuesday, August 11, 1942, an announcement published in the name of the Rostov’s Jewish Council of Elders, a Nazi-approved organization, ordered the city’s Jews to leave their homes so they could be moved to safer locations after a series of crimes had been committed against Jewish individuals. In reality, the order was a pretext for mobilizing the city’s Jews for their death.

Individual members of the Elders’ Council were responsible for gathering the families living in various Jewish districts of town. On the prescribed morning, fathers carried suitcases to the central meeting point. Mothers held their children’s hands. Schoolteachers helped assemble children.

From there, people were separated into two groups. Families were loaded onto tarmac-covered trucks and driven towards Zmievskaya Balka, the Snake Ravine, while men aged between 16 and 55 were taken to Zoological Street.

On the outskirts of town, trucks unloaded their unwitting passengers. Local Rostov men joined German army soldiers in pushing families toward two large pits dug towards the edge of the ravine. When the soldiers opened fire, the force and violence of the bullets hurled the victims’ corpses directly into the deep holes.

After the city had been “cleansed” of Jews, the members of the Elders’ Council were also executed in Snake Ravine.

Once the war ended the KGB arrested ten men for collaborating with the Nazis in Rostov. They were convicted and executed for treason.

The names of the victims have never been published in school books or by the state. For now, they only remain alive in an archive run by  Rashka.

The local campaign to memorialize the victims takes on greater urgency as the years pass and fewer Rostov residents remain alive to remember those days of terror.

With local authorities’ animosity toward the project running high, for now the tales of loss and local betrayals lives on as oral histories told by the city’s elderly.

Valentina Barkina, 67, remembers the exact address from where her aunt and cousin were taken away to Snake’s Ravine: 46 Bratsky Lane. She was always told that their neighbors betrayed them to the Nazis. “After the war the Soviet authorities would only put ‘passed away’ in the victims’ death certificates, not ‘shot,” said Barkina. “That’s why today we can’t prove that our relatives were executed.”

“After the war the Soviet authorities would only put ‘passed away’ in the victims’ death certificates, not ‘shot.” 

Valentina Barkina

A short drive away on Pushkin Street, Natalia Petrova says her great-grandmother hid with her daughter in the basement of the building, hoping to escape the Nazi patrols. Both were also killed in the ravine after their neighbors informed on them. “I used to play with the kids of these two traitors and I never knew what they had done,” Petrova said. “It was only decades later that my relatives told me about the tragedy.”

On the other side of the building a former police investigator Erem Nazayan, 84, recalled two sisters in his building rumored to have worked in what had been euphemistically called an “officer’s club,” which everyone understood was a brothel for German soldiers during the occupation.

Dombrovsky of the Russian Jewish Congress says local media outlets as well as officials never discuss these local memories of collaboration and killing.

Instead, whenever they raise the subject of the Holocaust massacre, they emphasize the fact that some Jews of Rostov collaborated with the Nazis notably Gregory Lourie, who led the Elders’ Council.

These days, when driving through Snake Ravine, visitors pass the crumbling remains of a Soviet summer home used by the KGB, a gas station and car wash. There is no sign of the mass graves.

Resurrecting the identities of those killed here is a moral imperative, says Raksha.

“Not a single individual should be lost to history, which has continued to erase names of people as if they never existed,” said Raksha.

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Moiseyev is the chair of the local prisoner of war association in Rostov-on-Don, and he had come to a military base in this southern port city that was previously a Nazi-run POW camp. It was the international day marking the liberation of POWs from German-run concentration camps, and he was preparing to pay tribute to the thousands of Soviet prisoners who died here.

Moiseyev was himself a prisoner at the base, when he was just 15 years old, witnessing a catalogue of horrors, including mass starvation and even medical experiments on some of the Red Army soldiers held there.

Yet, as he made to go inside, the guards blocked his way.

“How can this be happening?” said Моiseyev, addressing fellow veterans and a group of schoolchildren who he had invited to come in with him. The guards looked uncomfortable as they explained that these were their orders. “This isn’t right,” Moiseyev countered. “We were imprisoned here, waiting for our deaths and they won’t let us through.”

Moiseyev had come up hard against the Russian government’s policy of trying to block out moments in the country’s history that it regards as embarrassing or shameful. The story of the nearly three million Russian and other Soviet POWs held in German camps during the war is one of them. He had come up hard against the Russian government’s policy of trying to block out moments in the country’s history that it regards as embarrassing or shameful.

Even though many were captured during celebrated moments like the Battle for Stalingrad, they are seen as a stain on the otherwise glorious narrative of victory. Stalin himself denounced them as “traitors,” sending hundreds of thousands to the Gulag prison camps.

Today, the base is a major training center for the Russian air force, where at least 10,000 personnel work. But there is nothing to indicate that it was once a camp for Soviet POWs, and Moiseyev has been fighting to keep their memory alive. It’s been a long and dispiriting battle.

As he argued with the guards, Moiseyev, who is now 91 years old, grew increasingly agitated. And then he fainted.

There used to be a small memorial inside the base complex to the 9,000 soldiers who died there — even though the state didn’t want to acknowledge the POWs. And Moiseyev and his “Society of Former Russian Prisoners in Rostov” regularly came to pay their respects.

During World War II, the Germans reportedly told local people that the complex was a hospital, when in reality it was a concentration camp for thousands of Red Army soldiers and anyone else the Nazis captured. Doctors drew blood from prisoners to send to wounded German troops elsewhere. They kept wounded prisoners in rotting bandages for months. The camp complex was lined with trenches for mass graves.

However, in the late 1970s, the base expanded, and the memorial was demolished. City officials promised that the remains of any prisoners that were found would be reburied in a nearby cemetery.

But years later, there was still no sign of any grave being set up to mark them. Whether by design or neglect, the authorities had in effect managed to hide the memory of the POWs.

The truth, though, if anything, was worse — and it was the authorities who helped reveal it. When they announced a new round of construction at the base in 2011 — to turn it into a pilot training school — they admitted that the remains of prisoners who had been found in the 1970s had actually been dumped in a mass, unmarked grave inside the grounds of one of the city’s prisons. The authorities admitted that the remains of prisoners who had been found in the 1970s had actually been dumped in a mass, unmarked grave

“I want to assure you that all soldier remains were moved to a different cemetery,” said the head of the city’s veteran committee Valentin Gerbach. “This whole, unpleasant story has surfaced only to benefit some obscure people trying to blacken the work of our committee.”

Moiseyev and other local activists were furious. “It turns out that the remains of the prisoners of war were just thrown out along with some dirt to where criminals serve out their sentences,” said retired Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Shevkunov, a member of a local patriotic organization.

But they still didn’t believe what they had been told. For years, Shevkunov and other activists have been finding bone fragments in parts of the base that are no longer in use. Shevkunov sent some of the remains off to a laboratory, which confirmed they dated from the years of World War II.

Neither the base nor the city administration have yet acknowledged his findings. “We do not have war graves,” said unit commander Alexander Pankin. And from talking to officers training there, it seems clear that most have no idea that this was once a Nazi-run POW camp.

Nationwide, it’s a similar story. While monuments to victory over Hitler’s Germany are eagerly funded by the state, efforts to memorialize other less-glamorous chapters of the war’s history, including the treatment of POWs struggle to receive any official support.

When Moiseyev collapsed outside the base last year, the police were called. He had regained consciousness by the time they arrived and they asked him for identification.

The elderly veteran told me how he rolled up his shirt sleeve and showed them a tattoo on his left forearm. “‘This is my camp number 75,949,’” he remembered telling them. “‘I didn’t have a name. Only a number.’”

When the policemen arrived, they reported to their superiors that Moiseyev was now conscious but stood back and avoided approaching the veteran and his school-age supporters.

“We were tortured in German camps,” Moiseyev continued, “And now they are torturing our memory.” But that incident at the camp gates was such a shock that this past April he couldn’t face going there again on the day of remembrance.

“By what right have they usurped our memory?” Moiseyev said when we met. A small group of people decides for all of us how to interpret the events of the Great Patriotic War,” Moiseyev said. “Politicians have seized the ideological memory of our generation.”

Moiseyev continues speaking out for greater recognition for the camp and its former prisoners but local journalists who report on his activity have been threatened with legal action by Gerbach’s Committee of War Veterans.

Former Lieutenant Colonel Shevkunov puts it another way. “It’s easier for our country’s patriotic organizations to deal with fireworks and songs,” than handle the legacy and stories of Soviet POWs. “It’s easier for our country’s patriotic organizations to deal with fireworks and songs,” than handle the legacy and stories of Soviet POWs. Lieutenant Colonel Shevkunov

And yet the stories and memories of base have not vanished entirely. One young officer at the base, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that while doing repair work at the base his team had found fragments of blood-stained bandages. When he told his superiors, he was reprimanded.

“Even though I am a military man, I had a strange feeling when I visited these barracks,” he said. “There was some kind of presence, then the doors opened by themselves. And when you told me about this terrible camp, I understood everything.”

Images by Polina Efimova, Alexander Olenev, and the Archive of the Academy’s Veteran Committee.

This article first appeared in Russian on Coda.ru

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