Then, perhaps in a desperate attempt to reassert control, the camp administration shipped a group of criminals into the camps, and openly instructed them to provoke fights with the politicals in lagpunkt No. 3—the most rebellious of the Steplag lagpunkts. The plan backfired. “And here,” writes Solzhenitsyn, “we see how unpredictable is the course of human emotions and of social movements! Injecting in Kengir no. 3 a mammoth dose of tested ptomaine, the bosses obtained not a pacified camp but the biggest mutiny in the history of the Gulag Archipelago.” 35 Instead of fighting, the two groups
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