“Eat liver pie instead”,
replied the commie Marie Antoinette director of the Novocherkassk locomotive plant when the workers asked him how they will afford meat.
The Soviet government had just hiked meat and dairy prices while simultaneously slashing factory wages in 1962.
The wage dispute escalated into an uprising. Marches headed toward the Communist Party HQ, protesters singing revolutionary songs, and holding portraits of Lenin in defense of “real” communism against the Soviet authorities.
So they shot them.
7 organizers were executed, 26 dead were thrown in unmarked graves so there wouldn’t be any public memorials, and people living under the commie regime never found out any of this happened until the Soviet Union fell nearly 30 years later.
“But the Nazis weren’t socialists because they crushed labor unions!”
It wasn’t until 1980 that the first independent union was legalized in the Soviet bloc. “Solidarity” in Poland reached 10 million members in a year which was absolutely terrible for the commies.
So in 1981, the Communist Party declared martial law. They sent their tanks into the streets, shot protesting miners, and jailed tens of thousands just to keep their grip on Poland.
Jaruzelski cut the phones, sealed the borders, banned the union, and imprisoned the their leader Lech Wałęsa for 11 months. 3 days after that, riot police stormed the Wujek mine and killed 9 strikers who refused to accept the crackdown.
Internments, censorship, and surveillance continued for years afterward.