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Some of the prisoners refused to go out to work . . . something about the food being rotten. The administration of course acted with vigor. Fourteen of the ringleaders, twelve men and two women, were shot. The executions took place in the camp, with all the prisoners lined up to see the show. Then details from every barrack helped dig the graves, just outside the barbed-wire fence. Not much chance for another riot as long as the memory of this one remains fresh . . .⁷⁰

But even the prospect of certain punishment—and the awareness of certain death—could not eliminate every prisoner’s urge to rebel altogether, and later, following Stalin’s death, some of them would do so en masse. Yet even during Stalin’s lifetime, even during the toughest, most difficult war years, the spirit of rebellion lived on—as the remarkable story of the Ust-Usa uprising of January 1942 well illustrates.

In the annals of the Gulag, the Ust-Usa rebellion was, as far as we know, unique. If there were other mass breakouts while Stalin was alive, we do not yet know about them. About Ust-Usa we know quite a lot: garbled versions of the story have long been part of the Gulag’s oral history, but in recent years it has been carefully documented as well.⁷¹

Oddly enough, this rebellion was led not by a prisoner, but by a free worker. Mark Retyunin was, at that time, the chief administrator of the Lesoreid lagpunkt, a small logging camp within the Vorkutlag complex. The lagpunkt held about 200 prisoners, more than half of whom were politicals. Retyunin had had much experience in the camp system by 1942: like many minor camp bosses, he was a former prisoner, having served ten years for alleged bank robbery. Nevertheless, he was trusted by the camp administration, one of whom described him as a man “prepared to sacrifice his life for the productive interests of the camp.” Others have remembered him variously as a drinker and a cardplayer—testimony, perhaps, to his criminal origins. Still others describe him as a poetry-lover and as a “strong character” with a tendency to boasting and brawling—testimony, perhaps, to the legend he left in his wake.

Retyunin’s precise motives remain unclear. It seems that he was deeply shocked when, following the outbreak of war in June 1941, the NKVD passed an edict forbidding all political prisoners from leaving their camp, even those whose sentences had expired. Afanasy Yashkin, the only one of the original co-conspirators to survive the rebellion, told his NKVD interrogators that Retyunin had believed that all of the lagpunkt’s inhabitants, prisoners and nonprisoners alike, would be executed when the Germans began advancing deeper into the Soviet Union. “What do we have to lose, even if they kill us,” he had urged them. “What’s the difference: we drop dead tomorrow, or we die today as rebels . . . the camp authorities are going to shoot all of those with counter-revolutionary sentences, even us, the free workers who are being held here until the end of the war.” This was not a completely paranoid sentiment: having himself been an inmate of Vorkutlag in 1938, he would have known that mass murder was well within the capabilities of the NKVD. And despite his high status as boss of an entire lagpunkt, he had only recently been refused permission to return home on a holiday.

No other details of the preparations are known. Not surprisingly, Retyunin left behind no written documentation. Nevertheless, it is clear from the events themselves that the rebellion was carefully planned. The rebels made their first move on the afternoon of January 24, 1942. This was a Saturday, and the day on which the camp’s armed guard planned to use the camp baths. They dutifully filed in. The camp bath attendant, a Chinese inmate named Lu Fa—who was in on the conspiracy—quickly locked the doors behind them. Immediately, the rest of the conspirators disarmed the remaining guards, who had been left standing sentry at the vakhta. Two of them fought back. One was killed, and the other wounded. All of their weapons fell into the hands of the rebels, twelve machine guns and four revolvers in all.