Novocherkassk shooting, 1961

In 1961 the state began a massive purchase of grain from Canada, and a year later the deficit of lard and meat soared in price by about a third. A little later, as a result of an acute shortage of food, dairy products also went up in the USSR.

Excitements began in many cities of the state, but the most active was Novocherkassk, in which the party's food program coincidentally coincided with a decline in wages at the largest local plant that produces electric locomotives. As a result, workers took to the streets. They demanded negotiations with the city administration.

The Novocherkassk shooting would not have happened, if it were not for the ridiculous imprudence. The detonator was an ill-considered phrase expressed by the plant's director who, when asked about how the workers live on, offered them liver pies instead of meat. This random replica was enough for gunpowder to kindle.

The plant went on strike

During the night, all the important city facilities - telegraph, post office, city chambers and the city executive committee - were taken by the authorities under the strictest guard, all money with valuables was hastily taken out of the bank of Novocherkassk. The garrison was put on alert.

Meanwhile, the square was gradually filled with workers and members of their families who in front of the administration's building loudly demanded that the local leadership come to them. However, this did not happen.

The administration, panicking, asked the capital for help in suppressing the "anti-Soviet insurrection". Mikoyan, the right-hand man of Khrushchev's general secretary, flew to the city. In Novocherkassk troops were introduced, the crowd began to gradually displace from the factory territory. About three o'clock in the morning, the remaining in history, like "Novocherkassk", the shooting of demonstrators, which had not been mentioned in the press for a long time, began.

The crowd, numbering more than four thousand strikers, was superseded, gradually it began to thin out. The factory was completely under the control of the military, a curfew was established in the city .

According to those who were at the time at the square, the crowd was making noise and did not want to disperse, not listening to the calls of the military. And then the soldiers gave several short bursts of machine guns and machine guns. They shot into the air, but the bullets hit several boys who, climbing the trees, watched the events with childlike curiosity. After the bodies they could not find the bodies.

Novocherkassk shooting resulted in significant sacrifices. Sixteen people were killed, more than forty - wounded. The factory square was literally drenched in blood, which was quickly washed away during the night, and the bodies of those killed were hastily buried on the outskirts of the city in a common grave. Relatives were not allowed to attend the funeral.

More than a hundred people were arrested. Two months later the trial took place. Seven people who, by court decision, provoked the shooting in Novocherkassk, were sentenced to death, the other seven - to life imprisonment. And although they tried to prove at the court session that they did not intend to take any action, but only tried to agree, the judges did not believe them.

The Novocherkassk shooting and all the truth about him were carefully concealed for more than two decades, and only after twenty years in the press began to appear relatively objective articles about these bloody events. And already in the mid-nineties of the last century the prosecutor's office started an investigation, but the perpetrators of the death of civilians were never found.