Bishkek Riots – 1966
Under the Soviet regime, content of the “News” was strictly controlled – and almost anything that could be considered to be negative was duly censored. As a result there was little known about episodes of social unrest and disorder within the Union, yet alone in the wider world beyond the country’s borders.
In the mid 1960s, Frunze, (as Bishkek was then known), witnessed an incident described by one source as “unbridled violence”. It was one of a series of anti-police riots that took place at about the same time in a number of Soviet cities, such as: Shymkent, Jambul, Stepanakert, Chisinau, Tula and Slutsk.
Although I wrote a brief postcard about the events back in 2010 but recently a newspaper published an account, (it’s in Russian), with more details, by one of the witnesses who lived through the events, I thought it was worth revisiting.
The author, Karpek Kurmanov, is now a lawyer but at the time of the events he was a student finishing graduate school.
One of the interesting facts that emerged from this was the date … previous accounts I have seen referred to it happening in 1967, but this account clearly puts in a year earlier in 1966.
The fact that the media was kept under strict control at that time, it’s difficult to get corroborative evidence to support either date – but I presume. Being an eye witness, that Kurmanov is probably correct – 1966.
According to Kurmanov, it was on May 17th, at about 10 or 11 in morning, that two soldiers appeared in the area of the town market (which was on the site of what is now Victory Park – or Park Pobeda).
The surrounding area now has several high rise buildings, apartment blocks and offices, but at that time, the area around the market featured a large number of walled cottages and was called “Shanghai”.
According to Kurmanov, the soldiers went from house to house, (according to some reports, they were drunk), knocking on doors and windows calling for someone called Nadia. Some of the neighbours told them that Nadia was not at home and told them to stop their noise, but they carried on shouting and the neighbours called on the police patrol based in a trailer in the market to restore the peace. The senior officer on duty sent a couple of policemen to deal with the situation. They arrived and detained the soldiers and escorted them back to the trailer, through the bazaar.
This was all in front of the townspeople in the bazaar and as they were walking to the trailer, someone in the crowd called out: “Brothers, look at the rubbish which have beaten the defenders of the Motherland”. A large crowd gathered around the trailer calling for the release of the detained soldiers, and as time passed, it grew bigger and bigger … and more threatening.
At one point a police motorcycle and sidecar which parked nearby was overturned and set on fire.
Apparently, there were those amongst the crowd that were shouting, calling for for violence against the police if they didn’t release the soldiers. They began to hit the windows and hammer the door of the trailer. Those inside managed to telephone their superiors in the local station and were told to “get out of there”. Reinforcements arrived in a car to help evacuate them and backed up to the door of the trailer and the both the police and the detainees decamped and they drove off.
When they had left, the crowd broke into the trailer and ransacked it; smashing the phone, scattering the papers, breaking tables and chairs and … it was in the days of the Soviet Union … smashing the portraits of Marx and Lenin, eventually setting it alight.
At this point the crowd is said is said to have numbered a thousand people.
Now the cry went up move off to the city’s police headquarters, and the crowd moved off, growing in number as more people joined them en route.
Once they reached the three storey building, they found that the police inside had changed out of their uniforms and fled in civilian clothes.
A black “Volga” drove up; a prestigious Soviet vehicle popular amongst officials and a status symbol among the nomenclature. Inside was the First Secretary of the Party Committee, who spoke to the crown in an attempt to persuade them to disperse. The response he got was not what he expected. Stones were thrown and he had to rapidly retreat.
In the absence of any resistance, the rioters pouched open the gates and rushed into the building, repeating the scene of mayhem and destruction that had earlier taken place in the trailer, setting alight anything that would burn. Fortunately, however, they weren’t able to access the armoury.
The crowd then moved their attention to other police stations around the city – destroying two of them.
Troops were brought into the city almost immediately, and placed around the Government house and the burned out shell of the police headquarters. Some of the rioters tried talking to them, attempting to persuade the soldiers to join with them. These efforts weren’t successful and there were reports that in the clashes that followed several servicemen were injured.
It seems that the city became a “no-go zone”, with uniformed police absent from the city streets for about a week. Where police were found they were often attacked and the trees were decorated with items of police uniform; a cap here, an insignia there and so on.
Within a month of the unrest, order and calm had been restored. The authorities had identified many of those who had been involved and some 500 were prosecuted.
Moving amongst the crowd during the riot were operatives of the KGB who secretly photographed events and these photographs were later used to identify individual rioters and as evidence in the prosecutions.
Most were charged with “hooliganism” or “destruction of state property” but some of them were also charged with “incitement to disaffection” for trying to persuade soldiers to leave their post and join the protest.
Many of the cases were actually dropped, although the ones that did proceed resulted in heavy prison sentences.
According to some reports, the cause of the riot was that the soldiers were beaten when they were arrested and some of the surrounding shoppers had mistakenly thought that at least one of them was dead and so the they set upon the surprised policemen. (It seems that the riots in Shymkent and Stepankurt were also sparked off as a result of deaths of people in police custody).
It has also been said that, apparently, the crowd included a number of Uighur and Dungan stallholders and the situation was further complicated by a general dissatisfaction about paying bribes … and, apparently, it has been suggested that the riot was later represented as a “Chinese plot”.
Kurmanov, however, paints a different picture. He says that the original protestors that surrounded the police trailer included out of work itinerants, (he actually uses the Soviet term tuneyadtzy -parasites), and other pravonarushitely, (“offenders”): thieves, pickpockets, thugs, alcoholics and others “who were fed every day at the market”.
It seems to me that although either of the accounts of the origin of the riot could be correct, Kurmanov lived through the events and although he admits that he wasn’t involved in the trials, he may well have had access to some of the legal material like court records, so we should give his account some credence.
What his account doesn’t tell us, however, is why if this disparate group of ne’er-do-wells were responsible for starting the riot in the first place, why it took so long for calm to return to the streets – and seemed to involve a wide variety of others. The main “ringleader”, for example, (as he tells us), was a Russian who taught drawing and singing at a school in a neighbouring district across the border in what is now Kazakhstan.
Bishkek