Klimovich, Grigory Sergeevich

The First Years and First Conclusion

Born October 3, 1924 in the village. Shlyakhetskaya Okolitsa (today the village of Tereshkovichi of the Gomel region) is in a family of gentry origin, who lived in the vicinity of Gomel in the middle of the 17th century. In the mid-1930s, Father Grigory Klimovich was "dispossessed." Grigory Klimovich met the Belarusian idea as a child when he read Belarusian books of the 1920s that did not go through Soviet censorship.

Shortly before the start of World War II , Gomel Industrial-Pedagogical College entered. I did not have time to evacuate with the technical school. At the end of 1942 he crossed the front line, six months getting to Saratov , where his school was evacuated ^[2] . In early 1943 he went to Moscow, where he was arrested by the NKVD. At the beginning of 1943, he went to Moscow with a friend, but the NKVD arrested him there on charges of “espionage”: they also tried to charge him with the murder of the leader of one of the partisan detachments, which was based near Gomel in 1942.

From 1943 to 1947 he was in the Sverdlovsk colony ^[2] , where he wrote several dozen poems aimed at exposing the Stalinist regime. But the authorship of the verses was revealed, and for these verses Grigory Klimovich was sent to Gorlag near Norilsk, which at that time was unofficially considered a death camp, and officially was a camp of a particularly strict regime of detention. In 1950, re-sentenced to 10 years for anti-Soviet activities. From 1950 to 1953 he was in the Norilsk prison. In 1953 he was again transferred to Gorlag. There, the Norilsk prisoners' uprising soon began, which was provoked by the killing of prisoners and extremely difficult conditions of imprisonment, Grigory Klimovich became a representative of Belarusians in the strike committee of the 4th camp division of Gorlag.

Participation in the Norilsk Uprising

In May 1953, the confrontation between the prisoners of Gorlag and the administration received unprecedented scale and tension for the history of the Gulag. While after the death of Stalin on March 2, 1953, massive amnesties began throughout the USSR, in Gorlag not only the detention regime intensified, but the guards began to shoot prisoners without trial and investigation at their own discretion. In the first spring months of 1953, 13 people were killed in this way. On the evening of May 25, before the uprising, 4 more people were shot in the 5th camp area, after which a black flag was hoisted above the camp, later replaced by a black flag with a red stripe - according to the prisoners, “black is our life, red is blood spilled by our comrades. " The rebels demanded the arrival from Moscow of a commission of the Central Committee of the CPSU, as well as rehabilitation for victims of the war, dissenters and prisoners who until 1939 were not citizens of the USSR. In early June, a commission arrived from Moscow, but it consisted of the top leadership of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of State Security, led by Colonel M.V. Kuznetsov . On June 6, a commission led by M.V. Kuznetsov held talks with striking prisoners of the four camp divisions. On the part of the prisoners, Ukrainian Yevgeny Gritsyak , Russian Vladimir Nedorostkov , Belarusian Grigory Klimovich and four other representatives of different nationalities from the 4th camp division participated in the negotiations: Galchinsky, Genk, Dzeris, Melen ^[3] . The main task of the commission was to prepare the suppression of the uprising. After lengthy negotiations with the leaders of the rebel committees, on July 1, 1953, Colonel Kuznetsov ordered the troops to enter Gorlag territory and open fire for the destruction of all types of weapons. On July 3, the uprising was crushed. On the suppression of the uprising, Grigory Klimovich recalls this: “We did not feel fear, but a burning hatred of the executioners. "We did not rush to run away from danger, but resolutely stood in the place of those killed." According to prisoners, more than a thousand prisoners were killed. The Moscow administration of the Gulag decided to disband the Gorlag. The prisoners took this information as their own victory, since Gorlag served as a kind of death camp, from where few returned alive.

After the Norilsk uprising, the prisoners were taken to other camps with a milder regime of detention, which helped save many human lives. Immediately after the uprising, Grigory Klimovich was instructed to write the anthem of the uprising: “If, after the uprising was suppressed, we were taken up the Yenisei on a barge, we were convinced that they were taking us to destruction. Therefore, the leaders of the national communities of prisoners at the general meeting decided to create a rebel anthem so that the memory of the uprising remains. The verses were instructed to compose me, a Belarusian, on the motive of the Ukrainian song (I chose one of the songs of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army) in Russian, as understood by all prisoners. ” From the end of 1953 to 1956 he was held in prisons in Vladimir and Irkutsk, as well as in Ozerlag. During this period, he was once again tried for anti-Soviet activity, which manifested itself in a refusal to work, but under an amnesty by the decision of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR Grigory Klimovich was released from prison.

In the wild, he immediately took up the work of rallying the liberated counterparts in the gulag. At the beginning of 1957, the core of the organization was created, which planned the preparation of an uprising against the Soviet regime. The Soviet intelligence services managed to get on the trail of the organization, a number of arrests were carried out, including Grigory Klimovich. But three months after the arrest, due to lack of sufficient evidence, Grigory Klimovich was released, as one of the organization’s members, Ukrainian Veniamin Duzhinsky, assumed all responsibility.

After being released from the Gulag

From 1957 to the end of the 1980s, he was under the supervision of the KGB until he retired. During this period, he conducted active, as far as possible in a situation of supervision, activities to maintain contacts between Gulag veteran prisoners, as well as to disseminate truthful information about the repressions of the Soviet regime - Grigory Klimovich himself described this as “passive dissidentism”. In 1986, Grigory Klimovich prepared a manuscript of memoirs entitled "The End of the Gorlag." For the first time, information about the Norilsk Uprising was openly voiced in 1991 in Kiev at the World Conference of Ukrainian Political Prisoners. At the same time, for the first time, it was publicly stated that Grigory Klimovich was the author of the rebel anthem “The tyrannies of Bolshevism are not terrible for us.” Today the anthem has been translated into Polish, German, Lithuanian and Ukrainian.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, Grigory Klimovich has stepped up his public activities, he has become a regular participant in various forums dedicated to the victims of the Soviet regime, arranged public speeches (at rallies, in front of schoolchildren, etc.), and spoke in various media. He became honorary president of several foundations and organizations involved in the care of victims of political repressions, coordinated veterans of the Gulag in Belarus, worked for material and moral assistance to them. He was an honorary member of the Norilsk, Irkutsk, Perm and Chelyabinsk branches of the Memorial society, as well as a member of the Moscow historical and cultural society Return. In 1993, the Moscow studio "Lad" made a documentary about Klimovich ^[2] . Since the mid-90s, Grigory Klimovich, as a publicist, has been actively raising the problem of the lack of demand for information about the participation of Belarusians in anti-Stalin resistance. In his publication “Rise of the Spirit”, the Norilsk Uprising cited as an example, in which, according to his estimates, more than five thousand Belarusians took part: “It’s a shame that Belarus still doesn’t know about the uprising.” In recent years, he spoke of the political situation as follows: “The old days are returning today. I again feel the KGB's curiosity for my personality. But in vain do they hope for the success of their cause. I believe in the future when I see the activities of new Belarusian freedom fighters. ”

Grigory Klimovich died on July 1, 2000 in Gomel. Buried there.

• Klimovich R. to the Spirit // "LіM". 06/02/1995;
• Rygor Klimovich: “I am sending new zmagaros” // Nasha Niva. No. 13, July 6, 1998.

• Biography of Grigory Klimovich
• Bіyagrafіya Rygor Klimovych to the old people Leanіda Marakova
• Уладзімер Арлоў. Names of Freedom: Rygor Klimovich
• “Stalin daslaў an indispensable telegrama to our“ cripple ”- to thousands of corpse, yakіya gnіlі ў zamlі”

• Anti-Soviet movements in Belarus. 1944-1956. Directory, - Minsk, 1999. ISBN 985-6374-07-3
• Fursevich I. It is written with the blood of the heart // Narodnaya Volya. 2000, February 8
• Poznyak S., Starchenko V. In memory of Grigory Klimovich // Narodnaya Volya. 2000 July 8