Last night, I was wandering around YouTube looking for some specific videos about some World War II stuff for research. One thing led to another, and I ended up wandering down this weird rabbit hole, which ended at a video called "Stalin's Cannibal Island." I clicked on it, because who wouldn't click on that, and here we are.
So, here's a brief overview of Nazino Island, what happened there and why, and the longer ramifications of this event.
Trigger/content warning, dear reader, this is graphic, and it involves cannibalism. If you're squeamish, you might want to skip over this deep dive. As always, a list for further reading will be at the end of this post.
Alright, here we go.
In 1933, some of Stalin's cronies got the big idea to start "special settlements" up in Siberia. His plan was to send two million people up there to start these new settlements. The big idea was to send people up the river on these barges until they ultimately ended up on this island, due to foul weather, frozen water preventing them from traveling further.
Now, you should know this was part of the GULAG system, or the forced-labor prison camps that Stalin really enjoyed using during his years in power. These people had been rounded up and sent north for numerous reasons. In a group this large, some of them were, of course, criminals. However, this YouTube video (where I learned about this last night) talks a bit about some of the reasons people were arrested. Quotas were hugely important. If someone needed to hit a quota and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, things could go very bad for you. If you didn't carry the proper internal passport, things could go bad. I read a book about Stalin's Great Purge (which happened in 1936, not 1933) and one of the case files was about a guy who was executed due to being a stamp collector. He had stamps from other countries (because he's a stamp collector) and this, according to the government, made him a foreign agent and spy. The obscure things a person could be arrested for is just mind boggling.
The idea of these special settlements in Siberia was really the bugaboo of Genrikh Yagoda, one of Stalin's hangmen (who later ended up six feet under, himself), and Matvei Berman. Their goal was to repopulate areas of Siberia with around 2 million people from other parts of the USSR. This was, in every respect, a brutal social engineering experiment. Their thought was that these 2 million people would bring knowledge and resources along with them, and they'd be able to transform millions of hectares of land into cultivation, and develop self-sufficient communities within two years.
To generate settlers, the government reinstated internal passports, and quotas, as I mentioned above, which allowed the police to arrest anyone who was not in the area they were allowed to be in on their passports. One man in a report I read said he was a student in Moscow, and was arrested when he went to visit his aunt for her birthday. His passport didn't cover her part of the city.
In any group of this size, you'll have a good mix of people who are criminals, and people who just got swept up because they had the really terrible luck of being nearby when someone was trying to fill a quota. Typically in the GULAG system, criminals were mixed in with average people to keep an atmosphere of terror permeating the group.
Soon, 25,000 people were rounded up and sent north to the small Siberian town of Tomsk. However, the police had worked too fast when they'd arrested people, and by the time the barges and prisoners arrived, there was no camp, no buildings, and nothing set up to welcome them. Furthermore, the Ob and Tom rivers were iced over, and they couldn't travel any further north, and Tomsk was not prepared to deal with this influx of people.
Nazinsky Island itself is a bit of swampland squatting in the middle of the Ob river. It's about 3km long and less than 600 meters wide. The island itself had no name, and was only typically visited by locals, known as the Ostyak people, who would go there to collect tree bark and the like. It was from their local village called Nazino/Nazinsky the island would eventually get its name.
So, here's the setup. There's this big idea to start huge self-sufficient settlements in Siberia. 25,000 people are arrested and sent north, but there's nowhere to put them, and the rivers are iced over so they are all kind of stuck in this one-horse town called Tomsk.
Fearing unrest, the guards and officials in Tomsk realized they needed something to do with these people, so they loaded 5,000 of them on four barges and basically said to each other, "that swampy, frozen island looks great." And onto this island they dump their charges. Only, it's May, which is winter in the frozen north, and these people who are supposed to be starting this fantastic settlement weren't given any tools with which to do that (the officials in Tomsk were so glad to be rid of them, they apparently "forgot" to give them any.). They were given 200 grams of bread a day to sustain them (which, I learned, was less than prisoners as Auschwitz got during World War II.)
The first night, almost 300 people died due to sleeping in the elements and the freezing temperatures in that area.
The Hunger Games
The soldiers guarding the area decided that giving out bread was too much work, so they started giving out 200 grams of raw flour instead and then hoarded the remaining twenty tons in their camp across the river. Many of the prisoners, starving and desperate, started mixing their flour with river water, which brought an outbreak of dysentery to the camp, ultimately killing more people. Added to that, some were dying every night due to the elements. At this point, the guards stopped giving rations of flour.
After four days, a riot broke out in the camp, which was loud enough to cause the guards on the banks of the river to pay attention. The guards decided to start up flour rations again, but this time they organized the prisoners into groups of 150. A person at the lead of each group of 150 was assigned to distribute the flour rations to those under his care. The criminal elements, however, saw their chance, and the guards didn't care, so most of the people who lead these groups and were supposed to distribute flour were criminals, who instead of distributing flour, decided to hoard it.
The guards, likely knowing what was happening, didn't care nor did they stop this from happening.
One week later, on May 25, a camp doctor reported the first signs of cannibalism, after seeing bodies missing limbs. When he reported his findings to authorities in Tomsk, he was told to keep quiet.
The guards who patrolled this camp were truly instigators. They'd fire at will on prisoners from their barge in the river, turning it into a sort of game. They'd throw crusts of bread in there and watch people fight over it. They'd trade bread for sex, and one interview with a man said he was given cigarettes if he extracted gold teeth from other prisoners. Anyone who swam the Ob River and made it to the other side were hunted through the woods for sport.
On May 27, 1933, 1,000 more prisoners were deposited at the camp. By the end of the month, gangs were roaming around the island murdering at will for food. By this point, cannibalism was rampant.
Eyewitness Accounts
There were witnesses, people who saw things, and eventually after this happened, an individual interviewed former prisoners, and kept a log of what they said, which was discovered after the USSR fell. More on this later. For now, some of the eyewitness accounts are as follows.
A thirteen-year-old Ostyak girl went to the island to collect bark along with her family. She saw a woman who had been sleeping with one of the guards return to camp, and was caught by a hungry mob. In her words: “People caught the girl, tied her to a poplar tree, cut off her breasts, her muscles, everything they could eat, everything, everything…. They were hungry…. they had to eat. When Kostia [the guard] came back, she was still alive. He tried to save her, but she had lost too much blood.”
One surviving prisoner said, when interviewed was asked whether he ate human meat and said, “No, that is not true. I only ate livers and hearts. It was very simple. Just like shashlik. We made skewers from willow branches, cut it into pieces, stuck it on the skewers, and roasted it over the campfire. I picked those who were not quite living, but not yet quite dead. It was obvious that they were about to go — that in a day or two, they’d give up. So, it was easier for them that way. Now. Quickly. Without suffering for another two or three days.”
Another tale, told by an Ostyak woman, recounts a time when she was a child and a woman was brought to their home. Her legs were wrapped in filthy rags. When they unwrapped her legs, they saw her calves had been cut off. When her parents asked the woman what happened, the woman said her calves had been cut off, cooked, and eaten.
The Velichko Report
By mid-June, the Soviet Union became aware of their failed experiment and decided to cut their losses and close the camp. Only 2,200 people were left alive, after about 4-5,000 deaths (I've seen both numbers frequently enough, I think the true number of deceased is somewhere in the middle). The survivors were sent to other GULAGs while the government tried to figure out what had happened, and attempting to bury the information, as only the Soviets really could. This would mean that this incident would never be heard of again. It would be as though none of it ever happened. Erased forever.
Vasily Velichko decided he didn't like that idea. An instructor on a local collective farm, he'd been hearing rumors about this camp for a while, and decided to go investigate. He arrived up there in August. it was summer and the grass was tall. From the banks of the river, he saw nothing amiss. However, he decided, "Hey, I've come this far, why not go further?" Dude gets in a boat, paddles his way across the river, and gets to the island.
Once he got there, and grass wasn't obscuring what was present, he saw evidence of what had happened. Bones, piles of them, evidence of cannibalism, and the like were everywhere. This enterprising chap collected evidence, made notes, started forming a report.
When he got back to land, he started interviewing people. Those who may have witnessed what had happened, and those who he could find, who had survived it. With his collected evidence and his carefully written report, he submitted his findings to Moscow.
As you would expect, he was promptly fired from his job, and kicked out of the party. His report was dropped into this black hole where all uncomfortable information goes and wasn't seen again until 1994, when various information vaults were opened up.
However, before all that happened, some officials read his report, and immediately stopped the social engineering program, declared resettlement in Siberia a failed operation, and ended it, which basically paved the way for the GULAG system we all know of.
As for the guards who were part and party to this? They got 12 months in regular prisons.
Memorial
In 1993, some Ostyak people who were alive when this happened started rattling their sabers and making a big fuss over this event (I mean, who wouldn't?). They wanted a memorial built, commemorating the lives lost and the tragedy itself. Due to the volume of their outcry, the report was found, dug out of the vault, and made public, ensuring the tragedy that befell this place would never be forgotten.
A cross was put on the island, along with a plaque that reads, “To the victims of political repression. 1933–1993”. Every June, local villagers travel to the island to put flowers on the memorial.
Further Reading
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