Tag #148642 - Interview #95166 (Semyon Vilenskiy)

After Stalin died in 1953 and Beriya [30] was executed, the camp administration faced ‘rainy’ days. Professional KGB officers were thinking what was to happen to them. Perhaps, some officials from Magadan were trying to prove to the government that there were mortal enemies of the state kept in these camps and hard measures were quite justifiable there. A country needs jailers. So the officers were trying to provoke prisoners to violation to strengthen their power. Someone had to take the lead over Tiazhev and stand against him. The fate willed that this someone was to be me. And I managed to handle this. 5-6 crew leaders left 2-3 members of their crews in the camp one day having authority to do so at their discretion. They were strong Russian, Ukrainian and Tatar guys. On that day Tiazhev didn’t go to work. We armed ourselves with sticks and went into his barrack. There were about 10 of us. I was the first to come in there. For the first time in my life I was to tell a person that he was a provoker and rascal looking into his eyes. And I said this. Someone threw a log into Tiazhev. He ran out of the barrack and ran to the guard shack. We were following him yelling: ‘Warden, take your man back!’ Tiazhev ran into the shack and nobody saw him in the camp again. Shortly afterward all of us, who chased Tiazhev away, were taken to jail. We didn’t know what our jailers were up to, but we had a bad premonition. We were kept in a gloomy stinking cell. We were not allowed walks outside. There was a cement floor and a wooden plank on the window. All of a sudden it occurred to me what we had to do.  We argued for few days. At first only few inmates agreed with me, but then all of them believed this was the only opportunity for us to get out of here. On Saturday evening, when all crews were on their way back to the camp after their daytime shift, when villagers were going to the cinema, we broke the wooden plank on the little barred window and shouted as loudly as we could: ‘Beriya stooges have tortured us!’ Te stone mounds spread our voices far away and everybody could hear our screams. The crews of prisoners refused to go into the camp. Inmates in the camp came out of their barracks and ran to the isolation building. There was a crowd gathering in front of it. The chief of the gold mine called the chief of the camp: ‘What are you doing to the people? If they don’t stop shouting, I will call Magadan’. This couldn’t happen, if Beriya had not been executed. If it happened at a different time, nobody would call the chief of the camp or approached the camp, and we would have lost our lives. We were released. This day, when we were released from the isolation ward, was the brightest day in my life.