Nazinsky: Stalin’s Cannibal Island

In the middle of the Ob River, in Siberia, lies a forgotten

island

. It was never officially named, but is named after the nearest town: the village of Nazino. But the people who live in this desolate region know that the

island

has another secret name; a name you will never find on Google Maps. More than seventy years ago, dark things happened on this strip of land surrounded by icy waters, things so horrible that they remained hidden for decades. Things that resulted in this nameless place becoming known as Cannibal Island. Cannibal Island, an unnamed piece of marsh less than 600 meters wide, spent most of human history in total darkness.

Then, in 1933, it was abruptly chosen to be the site of a new type of Gulag, an agricultural prison where inmates would work the land for the glory of the Soviet Union. But instead of a pastoral utopia, the 6,000 political prisoners sent there found themselves trapped in a nightmare of famine, with only one gruesome way to survive. In today's video, we travel to the heart of human darkness and discover the horrors of Joseph Stalin's worst Gulag. A prelude to terror It was a spring night in 1933 when Feófila Bylina's parents received her visitor. She walked with fragile and painful movements, with her legs wrapped in dirty rags.

Although she said she was forty years old, she looked almost twice that age. For young Feófila, it was probably the first time she had seen a political prisoner. Feófila's family were natives of Siberia, then known as Ostyaks. They lived in Nazino, a small village on the north bank of the mighty Ob River, exactly the kind of place that is easily overlooked in the midst of Russia's vast wilderness. However, recently they had begun to notice the intrusion of the outside world. There were the boats that kept coming to the nameless island along the river. The screams in the night.

The shots. And now this. This strange young woman being carried away by guards, in need of a place to rest. They took the woman to a back room. There, by candlelight, they removed the rags from her legs. What she saw next would haunt Feófila for the rest of her life. “I saw that they had cut off his calves,” she recalled decades later. "I asked her and she said, 'They did that to me on Death Island: they cut them up and cooked them.' They cut off all the meat from her calves.” The woman came from the new Gulag on the Ob River known as Cannibal Island, the last atrocity that Stalin's Soviet Union had perpetrated against her own people.

But the story of Nazino Island (sometimes translated as Nazinsky) does not begin with Feófila, nor with that cold night in May 1933. It began almost four years earlier, 3,000 kilometers away, in a city that Feófila had only seen in their dreams. In the winter of 1929, Joseph Stalin had taken up residence in the Kremlin, reflecting on his latest decrees. Five years had already passed since the death of Vladimir Lenin, almost a year since Leon Trotsky was sent into exile; and twelve whole years since the Bolshevik Revolution overthrew the Tsar. With a wave of his pen, Stalin was about to open an entirely new and bloody chapter in Soviet history.

He called it “Collectivization.” Collectivization was the order for all peasants in areas like Ukraine to abandon their small holdings and go to work on Soviet collective farms. This was Stalin's anemic carrot. The gigantic stick was dekulakization, a euphemism for liquidating the kulaks. Technically, the kulaks were richer peasants. However, in practice, the kulaks were peasants who did not agree with collectivization. And boy, a lot of people don't agree with collectivization. In Ukraine, peasants destroyed their tools, slaughtered their animals, and burned their crops rather than let them fall into Soviet hands. So Stalin did what he did best.

He had everyone who defied him shot and sent everyone else to the Gulags. By 1932, collectivization had led to famine throughout the USSR and a Gulag system so overcrowded that even Stalin realized he could no longer push more people there. What the Soviet dictator needed was someone who could think outside the box. Someone who could come up with a new method of dekulakization. Luckily for Stalin (and very unfortunately for everyone else), the Soviets already had exactly that kind of man. Guilty until proven innocent On March 11, 1933, Genrikh Yagoda had an idea that was almost brilliant in its cynicism.

Yagoda, future head of the NKVD, is famous today for being just one in a long line of people Stalin promoted to the highest position, of whom he got bored and then shot. In 1933, however, he was part of the team overseeing the utter chaos that was collectivization, tasked with somehow making Stalin's decrees work without starving everyone. Then Yagoda found an ingenious solution. The USSR needed to establish collective farms and at the same time punish the kulaks, didn't it? So why not condemn those kulaks to work on collective farms? Yagoda's plan was to “resettle” 2 million dissidents in Siberia, give them tools, and force them to build their own self-sustaining farms.

All of these new farms would solve the famine of collectivization, while the miserable Siberian climate would provide the punishing part. Yagoda was so pleased with his idea that he began implementing it even before Stalin agreed, sending quotas of kulaks for police forces to arrest. It is at this point that everything became a terrifying farce. In Stalin's police, failing to meet the quota meant becoming part of someone else's quota. Therefore, he was extremely incentivized to find dissidents even where no dissidents existed. That meant that if you lived in an urban area with few kulaks, you instead went after those who did not comply with the internal passport regime.

Internal passports, a hated feature of Tsarist Russia, were abandoned by the Bolsheviks after they came to power. But Stalin had revived the system the previous December. Distributed only to those doing useful work, internal passports effectively made you a legal citizen. If you didn't wear one, you were automatically a criminal. And in the cities there were always enough people without passports to meet police quotas. Kuzma Salnikov, for example, was a married miner from Novokuznetsk and a passionate communist. Then, one day, he went to a market without his internal passport, just as the police were closing the building.

He was deported from his hometown without even having a chance to inform his wife. He never saw her or her two children again. As terrible as Salnikov's story is, it is just one of many. There the 12-year-old girl remained on a station platform for ten minutes while her mother went to buy bread. When her mother returned, her son was gone, kidnapped by police who were trying to reach his quota. There was the 103-year-old man who went out to his street to get some air. Or the student who was kidnapped on his aunt's doorstep in Moscow. There was even a pregnant woman deported for not carrying her passport... despite having it in her hand all the time.

Throughout the USSR, hundreds of thousands disappeared in this way. As their families struggled to discover what was happening, Yagoda's thugs loaded the captured onto trains bound for the wilds of Siberia. Vagrants, common criminals, political prisoners, kulaks, and ordinary people kidnapped from the streets became part of an involuntary exodus into Russia's frozen interior. Conditions were so bad that dozens of people died along the way. They were the lucky ones. The survivors didn't know it, but they were being channeled into hell itself. The Island of Death Given the immense cruelties it inflicted, it may be tempting to think of the Soviet system as a hellish machine tuned for repression.

But that was not the case. In Siberia, officials were not even informed of the thousands of prisoners heading toward them until the first trains appeared. When 25,000 people were landed in Tomsk in April 1933, the local party bosses basically said: "well, what the hell do we do now?" The problem was that Yagoda's guys in Moscow had implemented the repression orders at lightning speed, but then let all the logistics get bogged down in bureaucracy. In layman's terms, this is a bit like the Fyre Festival guy putting up all the publicity for a massive party in the Bahamas, but he forgot to supply food, staff or tents.

Only, in this analogy, the Bahamas is a snow-covered Siberian desert, the missing tents are unbuilt prison compounds, and everyone is super terrified that canceling the festival will result in Stalin holding a rival one-man festival called “Execution.” en masse of all my Siberians.” officials.” In May 1933, Tomsk was holding almost 90,000 prisoners, but had not yet received a copek for caring for them. So officials finally decided that someone else would have to deal with the problem. They loaded the first 5,000 exiles and 50 guards onto logging barges and set them off along the Ob River, bound for the new island settlement near the village of Nazino.

It was not a pleasant trip. Nazino was about 800 kilometers away. 800 kilometers along a river still covered in ice, in a part of Siberia ravaged by snowstorms. When the barges arrived at what would become Cannibal Island on May 18, 27 settlers had already died from exposure. Meanwhile, the survivors were plunged into a nightmare. The island was a swampy area about 3 kilometers long and barely 600 meters wide. There was no shelter, only trees that the settlers had to cut down and use to build cabins. But Tomsk officials had forgotten to give them tools. And now here they were, standing in a blanket of snow as night fell, with no way to get wood to build a shelter.

With no other option, the prisoners slept outdoors, under the snow. When dawn broke on May 19, 1933, another 295 had died. And so began a fight for survival that would make the Hunger Games look like the Very Lovely Games. Almost all of the unfortunate souls sent to Cannibal Island were townspeople who had been captured without passports. They had none of the farming skills that true kulaks would have had, none of the survival skills. And this would soon become a very serious problem. On the barges, prisoners were given a piece of bread each day to keep them alive. But now the guards could no longer be bothered to turn the flour they brought with them into bread.

Instead, they simply gave each prisoner 200 grams of flour as sustenance: less food than even prisoners in Auschwitz or the death camps of Cambodia had to live on. Already desperate, many of the settlers mixed the flour with dirty river water, which caused an outbreak of dysentery. It was only the second day and Cannibal Island was already a horror show. If all this is too much for you, better disconnect now. From here on out, things are only going to get worse. The Theater of Cruelty By May 22 - four days after the barges arrived - the prisoners had already reached new levels of suffering.

Freezing rains killed people every night, while those who had managed to light fires lay too close to them and were burned to death. Furthermore, the guards had not returned to distribute more flour since the meager 200 grams that everyone received on the first day. At this stage, the prisoners were still holding on to enough of their humanity to organize in protest. They started a riot. They made so much noise that the guards finally brought one of the boats in from the opposite bank to see what was happening. When the prisoners said they wanted food, the guards agreed to restart the flour rations.

But not from person to person. Instead, all surviving prisoners would have to self-organize into brigades of 150. Each brigade would have a leader, and that man would be responsible for distributing the flour quota. It was at this point that all solidarity on Cannibal Island was lost forever. Among the settlers there was a minority of violent criminals and avowed sociopaths. Seeing the key to their survival, they presented themselves to the guards as brigade leaders. The guards simply shrugged and gave them the flour. And so began the terrible process of starvation for all but a handful of prisoners on the island.

You might wonder why people didn't try to escape. Why didn't they brave the river and escape. The answer is that it was. Do you remember Kuzma Salnikov, the communist miner who was arrested at the market? Well, in the early days, when he still had strength, he managed to swim through the freezing water to the opposite shore and escape into the desert. Miraculously, he finally found a collective farm where he could live out the rest of his days. But Salnikov was an exception. Most of the prisoners who challengedthe hard waters of the Ob drowned. The guards shot at those who managed to reach the bank.

The well-fed guards who escaped hunted them in the desert for sport. Which brings us neatly to the cruelty of the Cannibal Island guards. From the safety of their barges, they would get drunk, go on deck and shoot prisoners for fun. Other times, they would sail by, grab a piece of bread, and throw it into the crowd, enjoying the way the prisoners would fight each other for a piece of food. Some of them would exchange these pieces of bread for sex with young female prisoners. Others would even order criminal elements to pull out the gold teeth of older settlers in exchange for cigarettes.

Cannibal Island would have been a legendary nightmare if the guards had left the prisoners and walked away. By staying, they turned a disaster into a deliberate massacre. On May 25, a week after the barges landed, the camp doctor made a gruesome discovery. Examining the corpses of five prisoners, he noticed the first signs of

cannibal

ism among the settlers. When he conveyed the message to officials in Tomsk, they told him that the prisoners were degenerates and obviously "

cannibal

s by habit." Less than two days later, another barge arrived carrying 1,000 more prisoners to the island. Did these guys come with extra food?

Ha. What do you think? Death in Siberia At the end of May, the island's survivors had left their humanity far behind. The stronger prisoners had divided into gangs that roamed the narrow island, terrorizing the weaker ones. Murder for food had become commonplace. And it still wasn't enough. When a cold June dawned in remote Siberia, the hungry survivors did the only thing they could do. With all these bodies lying around, they just started eating them. From this point on, things get so dire that there really doesn't seem to be any point in reporting them with our usual mix of stylistic flourishes and witty commentary.

It is much better to let those who were there speak for themselves. Authorities later questioned a convict for eating human flesh. His response survives on record: "It was very simple." He said: "Just like shashlik. We made skewers out of willow branches, cut it (the carcass) into pieces, stuck it on the skewers and roasted it over the campfire." "I chose those who were not quite alive, but not quite dead yet. It was obvious that they were about to die, that in a day or two they would give up. So it was easier for them that way. Now "Quickly.

Without suffering for another two or three days." But the horrors of Cannibal Island were not limited to eating the dead, or even the nearly dead. The Donner Party was not. It was madness on a deranged scale, like a painting of Hell by Bruegel the Younger. A 13-year-old girl from the local town of Ostyak went to the island to collect bark during the June chaos. She later recalled seeing a prisoner brought back by one of the guards she had been sleeping with to ask for food, a man named Kostia. In his words: “People caught the girl. They tied her to a poplar tree, they cut off her breasts, her muscles, everything they could eat, everything, everything….

They were hungry… they had to eat. When Kostia returned, she was still alive. He tried to save her, but she had lost too much blood.” Shortly after, Feófila Bylina's parents opened the door of her cabin to a 40-year-old woman who looked 80 and had her legs wrapped in rags. Not long after they removed those rags and saw that they had cut off his calves to eat. It seems that the combined effects of extreme hunger, the guards' active sadism, and lack of supervision created something very dark on Cannibal Island. A place where people not only ate other humans to survive, but took perverse pleasure in torturing them beforehand.

Fortunately, the suffering was now so intense that not even the Soviets could ignore it. In mid-June, a month after the first barges landed, the Tomsk authorities abruptly dissolved the settlement. The surviving prisoners were evacuated to other collective farms, the guards were returned to Tomsk, and Cannibal Island was abandoned. In total, more than 6,700 resettlers spent time on the island during that horrendous month. Less than 2,200 of them survived. The remaining four thousand five hundred had perished, killed by the elements or killed for food. By August, the summer grass had grown so tall that it completely hid the bodies still rotting there.

Only locals like Feófila Bylina were aware of the nightmare that had unfolded on the island. But the story of Cannibal Island is not over yet. We still have to deal with the consequences. Stories that can't be told The fact that we know anything about all this is thanks to one man. Vasily Velichko was a communist instructor who lived on the collective farms that stretched along the Ob above Tomsk. In July 1933 they began to hear the first rumors about the catastrophe that had occurred at the Nazino farm. The whispers of cannibalism, of unparalleled suffering. Without telling his superiors, he decided to go investigate.

It was a tough trip and Velichko didn't arrive at Cannibal Island until August. At first nothing seemed out of place. There were tall summer grasses, sparse trees, and a handful of Ostyak residents going about their business. Only when Velichko set foot on the island did he discover the secret of the grass: the half-eaten bodies lying out of sight. Over the next few weeks, Velichko interviewed the Ostyaks, local villagers, and anyone who wanted to talk to him. Little by little, he began to get an idea of ​​what had happened. Of the catastrophe that Soviet negligence and poor planning had caused.

That fall, Velichko submitted an 11-page report to Moscow in which he outlined his conclusions. Care to guess what happened next? That's how it is! Velichko was fired from his job and expelled from the Party, and his report fell into the black hole of state archives. But not before a handful of officials who had some humanity left read it and put certain things in place with the intention of ensuring that another Cannibal Island would never happen again. A moratorium was imposed on the resettlement program and labor camps for dissidents were reclaimed instead. In Tomsk, the 50 guards who had overseen this sordid reign of terror had their Party membership revoked and were imprisoned.

While we'd love to tell you that they ended up in a Gulag as bad as Cannibal Island, the sad truth is that almost all of them served just twelve months in regular prisons before being released. As for Velichko's report, it remained “lost” in the archives until the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was not discovered until 1994, and only then, after some ostyaks who were alive at the time began campaigning for a monument to be erected on the island. But as grim as Cannibal Island's story is, it's worth remembering that it was just one example in a decade of Soviet terror.

At the same time that starving prisoners were resorting to cannibalism at Nazinsky, a great famine was ravaging Ukraine and Kazakhstan. In Ukraine - the most fertile republic in the entire USSR - Stalin set impossible food quotas so high that even where food was grown it was confiscated and taken to collective farms. In the disaster that followed, between 3 and 7 million peasants died of starvation. As on the Ob River, there were stories of cannibalism. Of families forced to kill their weakest child to get food and survive. Of children who ate their own parents after they died of hunger.

And this was just the beginning. After the horrors of famine, collectivization, and dekulakization receded, the Great Purge began. Three quarters of a million reported and murdered. Then came the deportations of Tatars, the internal exiles of dissidents, the expansion of the Gulag system, the purge of doctors in Moscow… the list of crimes is almost endless. Cannibal Island may be gruesome, but it's worth remembering that it is just a minor chapter in two decades of suffering unleashed by Stalin. A suffering that is still not adequately addressed today. We can find stories like this frightening, even macabre. We can choose to look the other way, as many did.

But the fact is that disasters like this have occurred in recent history, more frequently than we would like to admit. It may simply be an anonymous expanse of swamp in the middle of a remote river. But Cannibal Island should be a place the world strives not to forget: a monument to a very human inhumanity.