Cannibal Island – Nazino tragedy

Posted on July 3, 2023July 1, 2023 by obligingworldviewer

In my previous posting, I mentioned the tyrant Stalin who succeeded to keep people around him in line with his ideas and made it possible to have labourers to work for the construction and succession of his plans.

Stalin‘s land collectivisation, to reduce the economic power of the kulaks (prosperous peasants), resulted in a large-scale famine, which made the Russian people suffer from 1931 to 1934 and the Ukrainian people from 1932 to 1933. At least 5 million people perished of hunger all across the U.S.S.R.. Among them, according to a study conducted by a team of Ukrainian demographers, were at least 3.9 million Ukrainians. Hunger also affected the urban population, though many were able to survive thanks to ration cards. Still, in Ukraine’s largest cities, corpses could be seen on the street.

The Ukrainian famine, also called Holodomor, however, was made deadlier by a series of political decrees and decisions that were aimed mostly or only at Ukraine.

Lots of peasants went looking for some way of living in towns or cities. That population movement brought with it a lot of problems to the industrial suburbs, where crime and violence levels skyrocketed. The people moving away from the country meant that even fewer people could provide food there, while in the industrial cities an influx of workmen unbalanced the stock.

A hungry population in search of better places

As this massive influx of immigrants destabilised urban economies, Stalin ordered special militia to ‘clean up’ the streets of Leningrad and Moscow. During the spring of 1933, 70,000 ‘socially harmful’ people were either ordered back to their sterile croplands or forcibly sent to ‘special settlements’ in Siberia or Kazakhstan. Either way, they would meet certain death.

Berman together with GULAG camp chiefs in May 1934

In February 1933, Genrikh Yagoda, the head of the OGPU secret police under Stalin from 1934 to 1936 and a central figure in the purge trials, and Matvei Berman, the Soviet security officer and head of the Gulag Soviet prison camp system from 1932 to 1937 proposed a self-described “grandiose plan” to Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Soviet Union, to resettle up to two million people to Siberia and the Kazakh ASSR in “special settlements“. The deportees, or “settlers”, were to bring over a million hectares (10,000 km²; 2,500,000 acres; 3,900 sq mi) of virgin land in the sparsely populated regions into production and become self-sufficient within two years.^{[ Kiernan 2007, Ch. 13]}

According to the plan proposed by Yagoda and Berman, the deportees would pass through transit camps at the flat and monotonous taiga, or coniferous forest area of Tomsk, the previous headquarters of the Siberian Cossacks and seat of the anti-Bolshevik government of Adm. A.V. Kolchak, Omsk as well as and Achinsk in Krasnoyarsk Krai, located on the right bank of the Chulym River near its intersection with the Trans-Siberian Railway, 184 kilometers (114 mi) west of Krasnoyarsk.

The largest camp was at Tomsk, which had to be rebuilt from scratch, starting in April to hold 15,000 deportees. 25,000 deportees arrived that month even though the camp was not scheduled to be completed until 1 May. River transport to the final labour camps was closed until the start of May until ice on the Ob and Tom Rivers cleared. Most of the first arrivals were people without any papers on hand, alleged kulaks, other agricultural workers and people from southern Russian cities. The arrival of so many deportees panicked Tomsk authorities, who viewed them as “starving and contagious“.^{[Werth 2007, pp. 86–92.1]}

Located on the Ob River a major river in Russia, in West Siberian Krai, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union (now Tomsk Oblast, Russia), the deportees were abandoned at Nazino Island with only scant supplies of flour for food, little to no tools, and virtually none of the clothing or shelter necessary to survive the harsh Siberian climate.

The sparsity of resources led to the formation of gangs that began to terrorise and dominate weaker settlers. It was all about the right of the strongest. People did not even look to kill people to capture their possessions. The bodies of those in possession of anything of value such as gold tooth fillings and crowns were often looted. Because of the shortage of food, they even proceeded to cut up the bodies and consume them.

The guards established their own reign of terror, extorting settlers and executing people for minor offences, despite being apathetic towards the gangs. Even the doctors sent to monitor the island’s population, who were supposed to have protection, began to fear for their lives. On 21 May 1933, the three health officers counted seventy new deaths, with signs of cannibalism observed in five cases. Over the next month, guards arrested about fifty people for cannibalism, hence the current nickname of Nazino, ‘Ostrov lioudoedov’ – Cannibal Island.

Early June, the situation on Nazino Island was finally ended when Soviet authorities dissolved the settlement and the surviving 2,856 deportees got transferred to smaller settlements upstream on the Nazina River, leaving 157 deportees who could not be moved from the island for health reasons. Despite the settlement being dissolved, several hundred more of the deportees died during the transfer. People who survived the transfer found themselves with few tools, little food and facing an outbreak of typhus. Most deportees refused to work in the new settlements due to their previous treatment.

In a period of thirteen weeks, of the roughly 6,000 deportee settlers intended for Nazino Island, between 1,500 and 2,000 had died due to starvation, exposure, disease, murder or accidental death. Another 2,000 settlers had disappeared and their whereabouts were untraceable, so they were presumed dead. The death tolls include people who either died or disappeared during their transportation to or from the island. {Nazino tragedy}

This episode is only a short-lived nightmare compared to the monstrous chronicle of Soviet Purges; a mere six thousand neglected lives is nothing compared to the millions who died elsewhere – in Kazakhstan gulags, on the battlefield, or in the famine-plagued countryside. Without Vassily Velichko’s letter, which brought up further investigation, would we have known about Cannibal Island? How many similar crimes have been silenced? These are the questions that the ghosts of Nazino are still asking us — and they still haunt us to this day. {Ghosts of Nazino: Inside The Soviet Gulag Nicknamed ‘Cannibal Island’}

Preceding

Thousands of victims of the Stalin regime

Stalin’s Enslavement of Rural Russia

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