Lukashenko Is Playing With Fire

• 27.05.2025, 13:18

It could go up in flames.

Recently in Belarus, in Rechitsa district of Gomel region, they conducted an experiment especially for Lukashenko - they hired 4 Uzbeks. They pay them "neither much nor little", but three thousand rubles a month. While the average salary of local agricultural workers, according to official statistics, barely reaches 2,000. Using historical examples, UDF explains how such a practice can turn out.

A mansion with a fireplace, billiards and a thousand denunciations

In 1928, the Fifth Congress of Soviets of the USSR adopted a five-year plan that included, among other things, the construction of a tractor factory in Chelyabinsk. But soon it became obvious that the experience was insufficient and foreign specialists were needed. And then the USSR government began to intensively invite construction workers and engineers from the USA and other countries, mainly from Germany.

At that time there was an economic crisis in America and Europe, so many people responded to this proposal. They moved to the USSR with their families, and some even received Soviet citizenship. Not only the tractor factory in Chelyabinsk, but also the Magnitogorsk metallurgical plant was built by the hands of foreign specialists.

Only the conditions that the Soviet authorities created for foreign specialists seemed unfair to many local workers and engineers. While they lived in barracks and communal houses, one of the heads of the design group "Albert Kahn Incorporated" American engineer Calder and his staff lived in the center of Chelyabinsk in a two-storey mansion specially built for them in 1928 with baths, fireplace, billiards and other amenities. The luxurious mansion made of red brick stood out very much against the background of the general poor housing situation.

Soviet workers were angry about it, foreign specialists were envious. And those, by the way, were still dissatisfied with living and working conditions. And they boldly expressed their claims at general meetings.

"We have such a situation at the tractor plant: they talk to us and raise our enthusiasm only for this or that holiday instead of establishing permanent good work in production. It is impossible to do nothing between holidays. Complete absence of light in the apartments of foreigners. We have to make lamps out of tin cans, which we call "our CHGRES"..." - from the speech at the meeting of ChTZ model shop foreman Rosen.

Many foreigners, by the way, after the end of the contract returned home.

But in 1933 Hitler came to power in Germany, the air smelled of war. Soviet party members and the NKVD began to look askew at foreigners as a fifth column, despite the fact that they did a lot for the industrialization of the country. The year 1937 came, a fruitful year for the NKVD, a time of witch hunts. Here Soviet workers and engineers were able to get even for all their offenses. The NKVD received denunciations about foreigners, many of whom were already Soviet citizens. Mass arrests began, and in this case they did not distinguish whether you were a high-class specialist or just a guest worker. They took indiscriminately.

"Arrests of Koreans, Chinese, Poles, Italians, border defectors and others were carried out without any compromising materials. All those arrested were mechanically categorized as spies and ... were shot..." - wrote former NKVD officer Pavel Kulikov.

Perhaps there would have been far fewer denunciations of foreigners in the fateful 30s if the Soviet authorities had made working conditions equal for all?

The uprising in Temirtau

It happened in the first days of August 1959 in the Kazakh city of Temirtau. At that time, there was going on the "construction of the century" -- the Karaganda Metallurgical Combine was being built. Volunteers from all over the Soviet Union came to the construction site, mostly "on Komsomol vouchers". Only they could not think in what hellish conditions they would have to live and work.

The shift at the construction of Soviet workers lasted 12 hours, sometimes -- more. They slept in tents and dusty barracks, water was given by the hour, but the situation with food was especially acute. We had to forget about meat, and sometimes there was no bread. But very close by, in comfortable houses, lived foreign specialists - builders from Bulgaria. And the conditions were quite different for them. Every day they took hot showers, ate separately, where they were served meat and vegetables. The Bulgarians worked no more than 8 hours a day, and in the evening they went to a movie hall or a hobby club. Foreign specialists also had a personal medical center.... All this could not but irritate the Soviet workers.

August 1, 1959 they came for breakfast, but they were asked to wait until the Bulgarians finished eating. This caused an outcry. The construction workers refused to go to work. A crowd gathered outside the CPSU city committee building demanding food and human living conditions. The police were pushed out. And then the pogroms began...

Three days of anarchy reigned in Temirtau. The rebellious young people smashed a canteen, then a nearby department store and stores, and then began looting. The city leadership sent enlisted soldiers to the scene of the riots, but they refused to shoot unarmed people. And then the cadets of local military schools were involved, who by order of their commanders opened fire on the rebels.

In the night from August 3 to 4, the riot was completely suppressed. The police carried out mass arrests. But not everyone was detained - many of the rioters escaped from the construction site.

According to official data, 11 people were killed and 32 wounded in Temirtau (five later died). About 190 people were arrested (75 of them were Komsomol members). Criminal cases were initiated against 42 detainees, 5 of them were sentenced to death by the court. Subsequently, two of them were commuted to 15 years in prison...

But here's something surprising: on August 5, Leonid Brezhnev, then secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, arrived in Temirtau. As recently as four years ago, he was head of the Communist Party of the Kazakh SSR and had experience in that republic. Eyewitnesses assure that at a closed session Brezhnev gave the local party and economic activists a trashing, expelled from the party and dismissed many policemen and officials.

And what about the rebels?...

After a week they went to work. They rebuilt the streets and buildings they had destroyed. The builders were provided with normal conditions, even brought to the city on tour fashionable at that time Moscow theater "Sovremennik". And the Bulgarian workers left for their homeland ...

It would seem that the Soviet leadership should have learned a lesson and drawn conclusions. However, they kept stepping on the same rake.

"Cuba, my love" or the mysterious death of a student from Ghana

On December 8, 1963, the Associated Press reported the disturbing news:

"Several hundred students from Ghana and other African countries today stormed Red Square, right under the windows of Premier Khrushchev, fought with police and tried to break into the Kremlin."

The reason for this, according to the agency, was the mysterious death of Edmund Assare-Addo, a student from Ghana who was studying at the Kalinin Medical Institute (modern-day Tver). In early December 1963, his body was found near a railroad station outside Moscow. African students insisted that he was killed by a Soviet citizen because Assare-Addo was courting a Russian girl. And they demanded an independent investigation. They brought with them placards "Stop killing Africans!", "Moscow is a center of discrimination!", "Moscow is the second Alabama!"

In the end, the students were persuaded to go to the courtyard of the architectural institute and hold negotiations. They took place in the assembly hall and lasted two hours. From the USSR, the most senior official was the Minister of Education Vyacheslav Elyutin. But even he failed to convince the students that racism in the USSR was an anomaly, not a regularity... Except that everything ended peacefully: the Africans separated.

How the student from Ghana died is still unknown. According to the official version, he froze in the snow as a result of alcohol intoxication...

Unbelievable, but none of the participants of this march to Red Square were expelled from the university or expelled from the USSR. And about a year before the Moscow anti-racist demonstration, the authorities used weapons in Novocherkassk against their own citizens who dared to protest over price increases.... So foreign students were in a special position in the USSR?

In fact, yes. It all started after the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. After that, exchange students and workers from the island began to arrive in the USSR en masse. They were provided with dormitories, free meals, and students were given scholarships. In 1961 it amounted to 50 rubles per month. But in the Kiev flight school (in 1978-83) foreigners received 90 rubles. Soviet students - only 40, from which was deducted monthly 3 rubles for uniforms.

Provided foreigners and benefits in the dormitory. While local students lived 6 people in a room, the same Cubans received apartments for two. Also a monthly ration of fruit, cigars, meat, and even imported goods.... Not surprisingly, many Komsomol women preferred to date Cubans. Conflicts arose on this ground. Even mass fights were recorded, which had to be broken up by police officers.

And in 1960 in Moscow opened the Russian University of Peoples' Friendship named after Patrice Lumumba, which accepted students from Africa, the Arab East and Latin America. Those countries that "won freedom from colonial dependence" at the turn of the 1950s-1960s. Soviet youth also studied at the same university. Understandably, under different conditions..... By the way, it was students from Patrice Lumumba University who organized the march to Red Square. But it is still unclear how the future physician Edmund Assare-Addo died. Even if he was murdered, it's unlikely that the cause was skin color. Rather, it was the total injustice that the Soviet authorities artificially created by giving privileges to foreign students.