Half a century of the Novocherkassk tragedy

50 years ago, on June 1 and 2, 1962, protest performances against a sharp increase in food prices were brutally suppressed in Novocherkassk. On June 2, activists of the Yabloko party honored the memory of the victims of the Novocherkassk execution. They laid flowers to the Solovetsky stone on Lubyanskaya Square in Moscow.

The unrest in Novocherkassk was out of the ordinary event in the country accustomed to humility. It all started with a strike at the electric locomotive factory, where the salary was reduced - against the background of increasing food prices by 25%. Workers and citizens took to the streets with the slogans "meat! Bread! Milk!" Fire was opened in the crowd. The bodies of the dead were not given to relatives, they were secretly buried in other cities. Later, the seven were sentenced to death. More than a hundred received the terms of imprisonment up to 15 years.

Among those who came to the Solovetsky stone are the deputy chairman of the Moscow "Yabloko" Galina Mikhaleva . In her opinion, the current government did not extract lessons from the Novocherkassk tragedy:

- When our president proudly declares that he is a Chekist, this indicates that he apparently admires these times. Pay attention to the last steps to tighten the nuts that our state makes. First of all, I mean all the so -called political reform, from which everyone expected liberalization, and it turned into a completely different one. On June 5, the second reading of the rallies law will be already making any citizens' performances and agitation for these speeches. This shows that the authorities headed for increasing pressure on society. This behavior is very dangerous. It’s the same as covering a pan with boiling water with a lid, ”Galina Mikhaleva is sure.

In the Soviet Union, information about the Novocherkassk events was silent, and yet it leaked. But not everyone wanted to possess this knowledge. Member of the Yabloko party Galina Egorova admits:

- When they came to me and informed me of what happened, I did not believe it and even asked not to go into details, I interrupted this conversation. After all, before that I lived in this city and studied at the Novocherkassk Polytechnic Institute. I thought, there can be no shooting in such a city. There are patriarchal morals, there are friendly people, there even the nobility survived. My aunt lived there - the daughter of the tsarist general. Therefore, I thought that some minor sorties occurred. Of course, now I am evaluating everything differently, ”said Galina Egorova.

And now the word to the associate of Galina Egorova Lyudmila Pisareva :

- In 1962, I was still very young, but I remember well that time. Official propaganda tried to distort the truth, but it became known thanks to the so -called "kitchen radio". This event of all shocked, in any case, in Moscow and other large cities. Perhaps only deaf and distorted echoes reached remote places. We knew about everything more or less reliably. People involved in the suppression of the uprising did not hold all this in themselves, conveyed the truth to relatives and acquaintances. And the total tension in the country then increased quite much. There were problems with food, even bread was not enough. The fact that the demonstration was dispersed, such a reaction of the party and the government did not surprise anyone and did not even indignant. It was shocked that so many people died, and then these sentences to the death penalty. This was the most terrible. Well, it would be, they just put them ... - says Lyudmila Pisareva.

About the sentences in the newspapers were one line, but still they were. The explanation is for the fact that they created an illegal situation, that they are provocateurs. Now we are faced with something very similar.