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Quickly, a group of the rebels opened the camp storerooms and began distributing high-quality clothing and boots to the prisoners. These had been specially stockpiled by Retyunin, who called on the prisoners to join his uprising. Not all of them did. Some were afraid, some saw the hopeless-ness of the situation, some even tried to talk the rebels out of continuing altogether. Others agreed. By about five o’clock that afternoon, an hour or so after the rebellion had begun, a group of 100 men were marching in a column toward Ust-Usa, the neighboring town.

At first, the townspeople, thrown by the well-dressed appearance of the prisoners, did not understand what was happening. Then the rebels, by now split into two groups, attacked the town post office and the town jail. Both attacks were successful. The rebels opened up the jail cells, and twelve more prisoners joined their ranks. At the post office, they cut off communication links with the outside world. Ust-Usa had fallen under prisoner control.

At this point, the townspeople began to fight back. A few took up arms at the town militia building. Some rushed to defend the small airfield, where two small planes happened to be on the runway. Others sought help: one of the town policemen leaped on his horse and rode to the nearby lagpunktof Polya-Kurya. There, panic broke out. The camp boss, convinced that the Germans had arrived, immediately ordered all prisoners to remove their shoes, so that they could not escape. Fifteen armed guards began marching from Polya-Kurya to Ust-Usa, thinking they were heading off to defend the motherland.

By this time, open fighting had broken out in the center of Ust-Usa. The rebels had disarmed some of the town policemen, and had procured more weapons. They failed, however, to reckon with the spirited defenders of the militia building. The subsequent battle raged all night, and by early morning the rebels’ losses were serious. Nine were dead, and one was wounded. Forty had been captured. Those who remained alive resolved upon a new tactic: they would leave Ust-Usa, and head for another town, Kozhva. They did not know, however, that the Ust-Usa authorities had already wired for help, using a hidden radio transmitter in the forest. All of the roads leading in every direction were slowly filling up with armed militiamen.

Still, they had some initial luck. Almost immediately, the rebels came upon a village where they met no real resistance. There, they harangued the local collective farmers in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade them to join them. At the post office, they listened in on an open line and realized that the militia were heading in their direction. They left the main road, and headed into the tundra, hiding, initially, at a reindeer farm. On the morning of January 28, they were discovered there: another battle broke out, with heavy casualties on both sides. By nightfall, however, the remaining rebels had escaped—about thirty were still alive—and holed up inside a hunter’s shelter on a nearby mountain. Some determined to remain there and fight, although by now, having run out of ammunition, they had no chance. Others set off into the woods where, in the dead of winter, in open country, they stood no chance either.

The final showdown took place on January 31, and lasted a day and a night. As the militia closed in, some of the rebels, including Retyunin, shot themselves. The NKVD hunted down the rest in the woods, picking them off one by one. The bodies were placed in a heap: the militia, in a frenzy of hatred, mutilated them, and then photographed them. The pictures, preserved in the regional archives, show tormented, twisted bodies, covered in snow and blood. There is no record of where the corpses were buried. Local legend has it that the militia men burned them on the spot.

In the aftermath, the rebels captured earlier were flown to Syktyvkar, the regional capital, and immediately put under investigation. After more than six months of questioning and torture, nineteen received new camp sentences, and forty-nine were executed on August 9, 1942.

The death toll among the defenders of Soviet order was high. But it was not just the loss of a few dozen guards and civilians that worried the NKVD. According to the recorded testimony, Yashkin also went on to “confess” that Retyunin’s ultimate goal was the overthrow of the regional authorities, the imposition of a fascist regime, and, naturally, an alliance with Nazi Germany. Knowing what we know about Soviet methods of interrogation, it is fairly safe to discount these motives.