Minibus driver Andrei Vilisov spends five days a week driving back and forth the 12 kilometers from Novocherkassk city center. His journey takes him past scrub land and open skies, across the wide bridge over the Tuzlov River to what, in many respects, is the true heart of this industrial city, the Soviet Union’s largest electric locomotive factory. For decades, the plant has been the economic life-force of the town, the place that forged its soul — and the place where its secrets are buried.

During the twenty-minute commute, workers going to the plant never discuss how, in 1962, the Kremlin ordered T-55 tanks to block the bridge to cut the plant off from the city. Nor the orders given to the commander of the mechanized infantry unit, a decorated World War II veteran, to open fire on the plant. Or the names of the nearly 30 people killed by gunshot wounds. At the ornate gates to the expansive factory grounds there is no sign describing events from 55 years ago.

Vilisov found out about this tragedy purely by accident when he was in high school. His grandfather Peter Grub, who used to work at the plant, mentioned that he had once almost been killed by machine-gun fire. Then, he told him the story of how Soviet security forces, who were supposed to protect the workers of the world from callous and predatory capitalists, instead opened fire on the Novocherkassk proletariat after they went on a general strike. The workers were protesting their poverty-level wages and managers’ demands for higher production.

“I had a happy Soviet childhood, like everyone else. For many years I did not know anything about the strike,” Vilisov said, as he pulled his bus up to the plant’s front gates. “Then I realized that we were not told everything in our Soviet schools. Not the terrible, shameful secrets, which this was.”