Hundreds of shouting prisoners tore through the breaks in the wire under a hail of wild machine-gun fire. Dogs tried to head them off but cascades of toxic foam from fire extinguishers, snatched up at the towers, held them back. A machine-gun from one of the towers was seized by the crowd. The scene was a terrifying one: 700 raging men armed with hammers and spades, with fire-extinguishers and, now, a machine-gun. And they still had one tractor in reserve. They turned it towards the guards' barracks. The guards ran shouting and screaming out of the doors or jumped out of the windows, straight into machine-gun fire. A second attack was under way. The grey-black crowd roared towards the central gates. One of them had picked up an automatic lying on the ground and still yet another machine-gun fell into the prisoners' hands. Fire broke out in the more distant guard towers. But the guards there had long since deserted their posts and fled into the forest.
The throng of prisoners pulled down the gates and were free.
“Wait!” shouted Nikolay Kryukov, a machine-gun in his hands. “Listen to me. In this situation prisoners usually go off into the forest in small groups, on the basis that you can't catch a lot of hares in one go. But we're no hares, and times have changed now anyway. The communists haven't the forces to hunt us through the forest. I'm forming a National Liberation Detachment. Anyone who wants to join — come with me. If not — then go off separately or in small groups.”
Kryukov got 193 men for his detachment.
Immediately after the uprising the Lithuanian prisoners formed their own group of twenty-seven. They thanked Kryukov, took their leave of the other political prisoners and set off back towards Lithuania. It was a long way off but what else could they do? A group of Armenians followed suit with even further to go, as well as a score or so of Baptists making for Kursk. There were a couple of hundred common criminals in with the political prisoners; some asked to join Kryukov, but he declined to take them. Some of the politicals had to be left behind too — if they were seriously wounded or suffering from leg injuries which made walking difficult. A small camp was organized for them on an island in the swamp, where they were left with an automatic rifle and sixty rounds of ammunition, together with such stores and medicaments as had been seized. Kryukov's detachment then set off into the forest.
Kryukov himself realized that they should not go far. He would be hunted in the woods and marshes, so it would be better to hang out near a camp, where no one would think of looking for him. The detachment made a great loop through the forest, coming back to where their tricky journey had started. The following night they attacked a neighbouring camp for political prisoners. The guards' attention was directed inside the camp, not towards the perimeter — an ancient and natural instinct of prison guards. Hence the attack could go in quickly and quietly, without much shooting and with few losses to the attackers. Six hundred political prisoners and 400 criminals were then set free from the camp. There were also rich pickings — 100 automatics, several cases of ammunition, many grenades. Kryukov now had 297 politicals in his detachment. The prisoners hanged the entire prison guard from the gateposts and guard towers and the detachment then took cover in the forest. This time Kryukov held a council of war and decided to head straight for the industrial area in the Urals — to Chelyabinsk and Magnitogorsk… “[28]
The question is still being asked, how was it possible for Duglenko's conspiracy to succeed; how could a system established for so long, buttressed by the largest security apparatus in the world and governed by an all-powerful Communist Party, be overthrown in a few minutes' gun battle in the inner sanctum of the Politburo in the Command Post?
The general answer is that the system, in spite of all appearances, was already permeated by decay, like a wooden structure devoured by termites, when only the outer shell remains and can be knocked over by a minor accident. Considered in outline, the situation brought into being by the war held powerful elements of change. The check to the Soviet advance in Europe, the defection of units of the armed forces to the enemy, the fear of total nuclear devastation following one horrifying disaster, and the initial signs of break-up in the east — all these might have been weathered if the system had been generally sound. As it was, they brought into the open the disillusion and hatred that so many in the USSR had long been harbouring in their hearts. Reactions to failure, to fear and to hunger were for the first time stronger than the customary caution of the citizen towards the secret policemen and the informer. The 'masses' on whom the regime was supposed to be based now at last realized the strength that numbers could give.
Three primary weaknesses were exposed. First of all, the system was grossly inefficient in producing material goods because of the distortions inherent in central planning in a state of the size of the Soviet Union, and because ideology still dominated economic theory. Secondly, agriculture was a disgrace and cause of shame. How could a vast area like the Soviet Union, with some of the most fertile soil in the world, not produce enough to feed its own people? Agricultural failures had been concealed because there was enough gold and gas produced in Siberia to find hard currency for American wheat and maize, but now, with the always inefficient distribution system upset by the demands of war, the lack of food in urban centres became a pressing matter of public order.
Last but by no means least was the contrast between the way in which 'we' and 'they' lived. The Bolshevik revolution had triumphed in the name of a classless proletarian society determined to root out aristocratic privilege. It succeeded in this task, but only to substitute another privileged group for the old aristocracy. It was tragic that the Soviet Union, which was founded in the name of egalitarianism and love and brotherliness, should become the land of privilege and hate and police-state cruelty.
Societies turn unstable when distribution of incomes is too uneven. Revolutions like those of 1789 and 1917 and 1985 have usually broken out when the top decile of privilegentsia is more than, say, fifteen times richer than the mass of population. In stable countries like the United States, Japan, China and all West Europe, the after-tax incomes of the richest decile in the inter-war (1945-85) years were rarely more than seven to eight times the incomes of those even on welfare relief. In the Soviet Union, because of the system of buying goods through special shops, the top 2 to 3 per cent of the privilegentsia had after-tax living standards more than fifteen times those of the ordinary toiler. They have paid a terrible price for it.
Such was the situation, in general outline, in which the Soviet imperial system disintegrated. So much effort has been applied over the years, however, to the falsification of the historical and philosophical background to this gigantic and cruel swindle, that a little further reflection on what lay behind it, and how it developed, may not be out of place. The simple fact was that the Soviet Empire was destroyed by its own inner contradictions, under an inexorable historical dialectic whose existence Marxists had long suspected but apparently never fully understood. The basic contradiction lay in the fundamental incompatibility of freedom and socialism. Marxism, offering such rich early promise to a humanity suffering under its own human limitations, had long shown itself to be romantic, unscientific and obsolete.