After the murder of some of their fellow prisoners by guards, Kengir inmates rebelled and seized the entire camp compound, holding it for weeks and creating a period of freedom for themselves unique in the history of the Gulag.

After 40 days of freedom within the camp walls, intermittent negotiation, and mutual preparation for violent conflict, the rebellion was suppressed by Soviet armed forces with tanks and guns on the morning of 26 June.

Beria, who was the chief of the entire Soviet security and police apparatus and architect of some of the most hated policies relating to the camps, was declared an "enemy of the people" and executed by those who succeeded Stalin.

[2]Prisoners all over the Gulag, for this reason and others, were becoming increasingly bold and impudent during the months preceding the rebellion, with hunger strikes, work stoppages, large-scale insubordination, and punitive violence becoming more and more common.

[3] The rebellion's causes can be traced back to a large arrival of "thieves" – the accepted slang term for the habitual criminals who were also imprisoned in Gulag along with the political prisoners.

This situation was facilitated by a variably complacent or actively encouraging camp administration, which recognized the value of discouraging the thieves and politicals from uniting with a common cause.

The inmates organized as national, religious, and ethnic groups (Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Chechens, Armenians, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Muslims, Christians, etc.)

[7] Protests and collective refusals to work were increasing in frequency and the prisoners were learning how to plan and maintain large-scale disturbances, mainly by creating systems of communication between camp divisions and establishing command hierarchies.

Into this changed situation the thieves were injected and, to the surprise of the camp authorities, they joined forces with the politicals, meeting secretly on the first night with the Ukrainian Centre and establishing a pact.

At nightfall, though, the thieves regrouped, shot out all of the lights in range with their slingshots, and broke through the barrier between the men's camp and service yard with an improvised battering ram.

During the night, though, thieves, now joined by the politicals, started breaking up their bunks and cells, trying to add to their cache of shivs and arm those without weapons, while the camp authorities posted machine gunners at the hole in the wall.

[citation needed] With the entire camp at their disposal, and with feelings of fellowship and good-will in abundance, prisoners began to enjoy some of the joys of normal life which had been denied to them.

Because of the large number of political prisoners in the Gulag, almost every camp had a selection of engineers, scientists, intellectuals, and artists, who gave lectures to other inmates.

Notably, one of the religious sects massed at the original hole broken into the dividing wall on the first night of the rebellion, claiming that their prophet had predicted its destruction and the freedom that followed.

[12] Soon after the camp was captured, the prisoners congregated in the mess hall and decided to elect a commander, and a former Red Army Lieutenant colonel, Kapiton Kuznetsov, was chosen.

The guards broadcast propaganda by loudspeaker into the camp, urging surrender and decrying the loss of days of valuable prison labor and the alleged detrimental effect it was having on the Soviet economy.

The prisoners, realizing the precariousness of their situation, endeavored to publicize their rebellion and demands to the village adjacent to the camp, hoping to incite its citizens to assist them.

[22] Barricades were established in important places, and responsibility for manning them was divided amongst the camp barracks (renamed "detachments" by the Defense department), with set shifts and procedures.

The Technical Department contributed to this effort as well, namely by creating improvised explosive devices and incendiary bombs, both of which, according to Solzhenitsyn, were used during the actual invasion in June, the latter bringing down a guard tower.

This too was terminated by the authorities after a few days, and thereafter the prisoners used a modified motor as a generator and even improvised a running tap "hydroelectric station" to supply power to the government headquarters and medical barracks.

[27] While these efforts largely failed, another objective of the authorities — to draw out orthodox Communists and Soviet loyalists — was successful and a number of them fled the camp in the days before the raid,[28] including a high-ranking member of the prisoner's government who would later urge surrender by the guards' loudspeakers.

"[30]Making matters worse for the prisoners, the day before the raid it was announced by the guards' loudspeakers that their demand to meet with a member of the Central Committee was to be granted.

While some 'detachments' vigorously fought back despite heavy losses and throwing improvised sulfur bombs at the tanks, other prisoners hid or committed suicide.

Some tanks carried in barbed wire-laden trestles, and these were immediately set down as a means of quickly dividing up the camp and hindering the prisoners' freedom of movement.

[32] In keeping with the prevailing theme of their story, the camp administration is said to have planted weapons on the corpses of those who didn't already have them for the sake of the photographers, who were brought in expressly for this purpose.

While Stalin's death, Lavrentiy Beria's arrest, and Nikita Khrushchev's rise bore much promise for the prisoners, who had long expected general amnesties and rehabilitation to follow these events, the role of the Kengir rebellion in hastening this process cannot be overlooked.

In a 1978 review of Solzhenitsyn's book, Hilton Kramer of The New York Times declared that the rebellion "restored a measure of humane civilization to the prisoners before the state was able to assert its implacable power again.

[12][35] Indeed, Solzhenitsyn later dedicated a screenplay he had written to the bravery of the Kengir rebels, entitled Tanks Know the Truth (Знают истину танки).

[a] Most remarkably, as George Mason University historian Steven A. Barnes noted in a 2005 edition of Slavic Review, the prisoners' campaign was performed with a certain pragmatism, and their propaganda with a degree of skill, that was all but unprecedented.

In the same Times review, Kramer issued an important caveat to his previous claim: …Solzhenitsyn harbors no illusions about what was possible in the way of resistance… he knows very well how little they could achieve without the support of public opinion – something the Soviet state waged constant war on.