A KGB with a Human Face? The End of Illusions. The 1962 Novocherkassk Protests and the End of De-Stalinisation Under Khrushchev

This essay analyses the role of the KGB, the Soviet state security and political police, in suppressing large workers’ protests in Novocherkassk in early June 1962. The aim is not only to study the actions of the KGB during the crisis itself, but to show how events in Novocherkassk and the subsequent brutal punishment of their main actors contributed to the subsequent change in the overall character of the KGB and, more generally, the entire regime. The main argument presented here is that the suppression of the Novocherkassk protests, lasting from June to August 1962, marked the de facto end of the KGB’s de-Stalinisation reforms and the process of internal political democratisation of the Soviet system. Although the ‘thaw’ period definitively ended only after Nikita Khrushchev was ousted from the leadership of the Soviet state and the Communist Party in October 1964, in reality the turning point came two years earlier, with the suppression of workers’ unrest in Novocherkassk and, not long after, the failure of Soviet foreign policy in the Cuban Missile Crisis.