Editor's Introduction

Abstract

In early June 1962 the first documented workers' uprising since the 1920s broke out in southern Russia just above Rostov on the Don River. It was sparked by an unannounced, twenty-five percent increase in the centrally set price of meat, milk and butter that happened by chance to coincide with the decision by the manager of the local factory manufacturing locomotive engines to cut plant wage rates by thirty percent. The spontaneous demonstrations of protest (the factory manager, apparently inspired by Marie Antoinette, told the strikers to eat liver pies) led Moscow to send two top Communist Party leaders, Anastas Mikoyan and Frol Kozlov, to the scene. There thousands of strikers had taken to the streets, chanting "Khrushchev for sausage meat." The failure of Mikoyan and Kozlov to stem the rebellion presumably led Nikita Khrushchev to order the internal security troops of his Ministry of Internal Affairs to fire on the demonstrators, killing at least twenty-two and wounding at least thirty-nine. Probably out of deference to the symbolic usefulness to former President Mikhail Gorbachev of Khrushchev's memory as a destalinizing reformer, Nikita Sergeevich's name is scarcely connected to these events in the six pre-putsch articles on the Novocherkassk massacre published in this issue of Soviet Law and Government. In the aftermath 114 strikers were convicted of banditry and lesser crimes. Seven were shot. Only in the last weeks of Gorbachev's tenure were the secret burial places of the victims disclosed to local authorities. Forty-six of the convicted were rehabilitated. Knowledge of these events was extremely sketchy not only in the West, where Alexander Solzhenitsyn reconstructed them from word of mouth, but also within the Soviet Union where the rumor mills normally worked three shifts a day. Neither Nikita Sergeevich in his memoirs nor his son in his recently published remembrances were quite able to recall these events for readers.