We commemorate the anniversary of the bloodily suppressed uprising in Vorkuta in July

One of the largest uprisings in the history of the Gulag broke out in July 1953 and culminated on July 22, when 1,500 prisoners refused to go to work. The largest coal mines in the USSR were opened in Vorkuta in the first half of the 1930s, and Gulag prisoners became the main workforce. In the appalling climatic and living conditions, the annual mortality before 1944 was up to 15.5% of the total number of up to 70,000 prisoners. After the war, so-called "special camps" (in Russian "Osoblagy") began to be established in the Soviet Union, where political prisoners convicted of alleged espionage or anti-Soviet propaganda were sent. It was in one of them that the so-called "Vorkut Uprising" broke out in July after the death of Stalin and the arrest of Beria. You can read the details in the newly published article in our virtual museum.