The majority of those who were born and raised in Soviet Latvia ascertained their country’s territorial borders right from childhood, based on family stories, which as a rule were rooted in the comparison of what life was like during the era of the first independent Republic of Latvia and how everything changed with the Soviet occupation. It would be no exaggeration to say that every Latvian family or clan was affected by the mass deportations of 1940 or 1949. Considering these tragic events in what was by now once again an independent state, there was a nagging unanswered question – how did thousands of people submit to certain death in exile or punishment camps without any attempt at resistance. However, one uprising that did occur at one of the countless Soviet labour camps, took place in 1954 from 16 May to 26 June in Kengira (Кенгирское восстание).
During the uprising, the prisoners gained relative control over the camp territory: they drove out the guards, laid down their requirements to the prison authorities, broke down the wall between the men’s and women’s sections, founded a self-government, and began to devise self-defence tactics. Parallel to these organisational activities, inmates of various nationalities searched for one another to talk about home; naturally, men and women met, fell in love, dance and sang, because autonomous folk groups even existed – until one night when armed guards in tanks invaded the camp. News about those killed and injured is imprecise. However, after this uprising, the camp regime relaxed and from 1955 political prisoners were gradually released.
Encounter has been created, based on documents, memory literature episodes, as well as interviews conducted with participants in the uprising Ausma Vērpe and Jānis Dzintars Austrins.
14 June 1954. 29th day of the inmates’ uprising. Four swans land in the courtyard of the concentration camp in the middle of the Kazakh steppe. The inmates manage to catch one of the birds and release it into freedom together with a note addressed to the outside world.
On windy nights, kites are launched from the camp territory into the sky: messengers, made from cigarette paper. A special mechanism up to the kite’s head carries the pack full of notes prepared by the inmates, which the wind scatters on the steppe outside the heavily guarded territory. The watchers have keen eyes and pick up the scattered notes. Information leaks are prohibited. Later, another kite, this time controlled by the watchers also takes flight – an interceptor. The aim of the camp watchers is to get both kites tangled up in one another and to drag them down to earth.
I am most grateful to my conversation partners Ausma and Dzintars, once inmates of this camp. The life story of both heroes is also related to the Corner House. Before deportation to Kazakhstan, they were both imprisoned in its basement prison cells and and taken for interrogation to one of the grilled rooms on the 6th floor.
Jānis Dzintars Austriņš in front of the former camp wall, Kengir, 1991
