Only Dialogue between People and Powers Can Prevent Repetition of Novocherkassk Tragedy, Those Commemorating Anniversary of 1962 Massacre Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 1 – Sixty-three years ago, Soviet troops shot and killed more than 20 workers in the southern Russian city of Novocherkassk who were demanding that their wages be increased following price rises for basic foodstuffs. The Khrushchev regime sentenced the leaders of the strike to death, and Moscow threw a blanket of secrecy over those events.

            But since Gorbachev’s time, Novocherkassk’s people and leaders have held memorial meetings each year on the anniversary. Although 2025 is not a “round” year, this year’s meeting included an important and apparently new message about the continuing shadow of the 1962 events.

            Speakers drawn from officialdom and from the diminishing number of survivors of the shootings said that the only way that tragedies like the Novocherkassk events can be prevented is by regular dialogue between the people and the powers (novochvedomosti.ru/novosti-novocherkasska-2/v-novocherkasske-pochtili-pamyat-zhertv-tragedii-1962-goda-2/).

            At a time when those who seek to remind Russians about Stalin’s crimes are regularly subject to repression, those remembering Khrushchev’s are allowed to proceed, at least in Novocherkassk, where they are joined by officials. But to no one’s surprise, Russian leaders in Moscow did not mark this date by anything but silence.

            Given how many crimes the Soviet state committed both before and after Stalin’s rule, that could become a model for people in other places who may be far freer to call attention to what Soviet leaders before Stalin and after him did even at a time when Putin seems to want to again throw a veil of secrecy over all crimes of all Russian rulers.