Before and after the shooting

And again a story that begins with the words “A man came to the museum of the Sakharov Center...” And again an elderly visitor stood in front of one of the exhibition stands. He stood there for a long time and... confused. He came to us with a question that had been tormenting him for several decades, but he couldn’t find an answer with us either.

The stand is dedicated to the history of the camp uprisings that swept through the Gulag after the death of Stalin. The Kengir uprising of 1954 was not the longest (40 days), but it ended in the bloodiest massacre, crushed by tanks. The visitor is the nephew of one of the leaders of this uprising, Engels (in the camps he was called Gleb) Sluchenkov. On the stand is a photograph of his uncle. In this photo he is 31 years old, but he looks older. Gleb Sluchenkov filmed on death row.

The nephew saw this last photograph of his uncle for the first time. It is muddy, re-shot from a bad original, but he asks to make a copy for him. He collects grains and shares part of what he collects with us. Now in the collections of the Sakharov Center there is a photograph of a sad, thin boy in a cap that is jauntily twisted to one side - this was 19-year-old Engels Sluchenkov, born in 1924, a native of the village of Borki, Shatsk district, Ryazan region, Russian, 8th grade education. The photo was taken in 1943.

Photo: Sakharov Center

He went to the front - straight into a penal company - from prison, because even before the war, young Enya went down a slippery slope and got involved with criminals. And in June 1944 he will be captured and there he will make a choice that will predetermine his entire future fate. Engels Sluchenkov joins the Russian Liberation Army - the army of General Vlasov. He fights with partisans in the Balkans. The next step is a German intelligence school. And a few months before the end of the war, ROA second lieutenant Sluchenkov, immediately after being deployed to the rear of the Soviet army, would fall into the hands of SMERSH and be sentenced to 10 years in the camps. His journey will begin through special regime zones - Dallag, Ozerlag and finally Steplag, Kengir.

Special regime - prisoners with numbers. A dangerous “Molotov cocktail” mixture of “political”, former prisoners of war, criminals, Vlasovites, Banderaites, “forest brothers”, sectarians. People for whom everything was their beliefs (very different, often opposite), and people who believed only in strength. Very strong, firm, determined people.

Lev Konson, who met Sluchenkov in the camp, left in his memoirs an expressive portrait of an extraordinary man who knew how to stop an impending knife fight with one quiet word, and was also capable of sending his comrade to kill a person whom he himself considered a provocateur. “Gleb considered himself a Christian. But he believed somehow wonderfully. He liked Nekrasov’s poem, in which God forgives the sins of a robber because he kills a cruel master.”

In Kengir, Gleb Sluchenkov headed the internal security service of the camp “government” and until the end insisted on defense, on the suicidally tough position of the rebels. To compromise for him meant to submit. He could not help but understand the price at which he bought freedom and dignity, and he paid this price with his life and the lives of others. The Kengir uprising is a tragedy of Shakespearean depth, an incredible phenomenon neither from the point of view of its participants, nor even more so from the point of view of the state. The explosive human mixture, exploding into a spontaneous rebellion, gave birth not to lawlessness and self-destruction, but to internal organization, discipline, and conscious demands. People, the differences between whom seem transcendental, could only be united and united by an idea that stood above any differences. It was the idea of ​​one's own humanity. Against violence, in response to the senseless execution of prisoners, the idea of ​​human rights and the slogan “We are for Soviet laws, but against those who pervert them” were born. The Kengir prisoners, having captured the camp, did not try to escape; they waited and demanded justice. Probably, the generals who arrived from Moscow - Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of the USSR Sergei Egorov, the head of the Gulag Ivan Dolgikh and the head of the Directorate for Supervision of Places of Detention of the USSR Prosecutor's Office Nikolai Vavilov themselves did not believe their eyes - they were negotiating with people like whom they were accustomed to perceive as camp dust. But in order to break them, it was necessary to bring tanks into the zone. In Kengir, it was not the prisoners and the administration who stood against each other, but two principles - Man and the State, both brought to the utmost clarity, to the concentration of a pure symbol.

The suppression of the Kengir uprising was the last battle won by the Stalinist state. Very soon he will be gone.

The leaders of the uprising were taken alive. They were tried by the Supreme Court of the Kazakh USSR. According to official information, Engels Ivanovich Sluchenkov was executed on September 12, 1956. However, another leader of the Kengir uprising, Kapiton Kuznetsov, who was convicted along with him and actively collaborated with the investigation, had the death penalty replaced with 25 years in the camps, and soon, in 1960, he was completely rehabilitated and lived out his life in freedom.

And Sluchenkov’s mother and his aunt received letters for many years - from Engels, as they thought. And they themselves wrote in response, sent parcels, and their parcels were not returned, finding their addressee somewhere. Who did they keep in touch with? Twenty-four years after the alleged execution of Sluchenkov, in 1980, a KGB officer came to his aunt, demanded all his letters and took them away.

The unknown has arrived. The nephew does not believe in Sluchenkov’s death in ’56, just as his mother and aunt did not believe. For a quarter of a century, someone under his name was a member of their family. For a quarter of a century, faith and waiting were the lives of two women, and even after their departure, the elderly man cannot forget it.

What really happened to Gleb Sluchenkov? This question has been haunting him for several decades. The system of state security agencies, so seemingly strict, orderly, and mindful, does not provide a satisfactory answer. Neither museums nor eyewitness accounts provide an answer, and this uncertainty is more terrible than everything else that is known for certain.

The last photo of Sluchenkov is on death row. It seems he's still there.

Photo: Sakharov Center