Russia Marks Soviet Massacre of Strikers

Russia on Saturday quietly marked half a century since Soviet forces brutally suppressed a rare protest led by striking factory workers in one of the worst massacres of the USSR's postwar era.

Twenty-six people were killed on June 2, 1962 when Soviet troops fired on the mass protest against working conditions and rising prices in the southern city of Novocherkassk.

With modern Russia still reluctant to face head-on the traumas of its Soviet past, commemorations of the 50th anniversary are small scale and not promoted by the Kremlin.

Memorial services were taking place in Novocherkassk while in Moscow leaders of the liberal Yabloko party were to lay a wreath at the Solovetsky Stone that remembers the victims of repression opposite the ex-KGB Lubyanka headquarters.

State television also broadcast a low-profile scattering of factually-worded news reports about what is now known in Russia as the "Novocherkassk Tragedy".

"I heard a crackling noise. A sharp crackle. And I looked down and there was blood, a puddle of blood," pensioner Nadezhda Dmitriyeva, who was caught up in the events as she walked in the city centre, told state television.

The strike broke out on June 1, 1962 at the electric train factory in Novocherkassk whose workers protested against a new order to increase output by 30 percent at the time when their salaries were falling and prices rising.

The next day, joined by other segments of the population as well as women and children, they marched to the local Communist Party headquarters and occupied the central square in Novocherkassk.

According to documents that were only made public after the fall of the Soviet Union, top leader Nikita Khrushchev gave precise instructions: "No pity for the enemy."

Troops fired on the crowds, killing 26 people including children. In the brutal ensuing crackdown, over 100 people were arrested, seven being condemned to death and shot and others receiving 10-15 year terms in prison camps.

All information concerning the Novocherkassk massacre was carefully concealed by the Soviet Union during almost the entire Communist period and the Soviet press first mentioned the tragedy only in 1989. Those condemned were finally rehabilitated in 1996.