Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union: Novocherkassk, 1962

ISBN-13: 9780804740937 / Angielski / Twarda / 2002 / 264 str.

Samuel H. Baron

Opis

This is the first comprehensive study in any language of what Solzhenitsyn called 'a turning point in the history of modern Russia'. On June 1, 1962, triggered by a Kremlin announcement of a steep rise in the prices of meat and butter, thousands of workers in the city of Novocherkassk went out on strike. This book details the background to the strike, the course it took, the trials that ensued, and the government's successful cover-up, not least of the deaths that followed. The author shows how Novocherkassk played a significant role in the demise of the Soviet Union. Soviet authorities never again dared to raise food prices, and the ever-growing subsidies to agriculture became, in Gorbachev's words, 'a bottomless drain on resources'. Also, emerging revelations of the Novocherkassk repression in the late 1980s helped to destroy the legitimacy of the Soviet regime in the eyes of its citizens.