Nazinsky: Stalin’s Cannibal Island

In the middle of the Ob river in Siberia there is a forgotten

island

. Neverly appointed, it is known after the closest town: the Nazino village. But people living in this desolate region know that the

island

has another secret name; A name that you will never find in Google Maps. More than seventy years ago, dark things happened in this strip of land surrounded by frost waters, such horrible things that were kept hidden for decades. The things that resulted in this nameless place was known as a Cannibal Island. An anonymous piece of swamps of less than 600 meters wide, Caníbal Island spent the best part 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 earth for the glory of the Soviet Union. But instead of a pastoral utopia, the 6,000 political prisoners sent there were trapped in a star nightmare, with only a horrible way to survive. In today's video, we travel to the heart of human darkness and discover the horrors of the worst Gulag of Joseph Stalin. A prelude to terror was a spring night in 1933 when the parents of Ageophila Bylina received their visitor. He walked with fragile and painful movements, his legs wrapped in dirty rags.

Although he said he was forty years old, he seemed almost twice that age. For the young ugly, it was probably the first time that he had seen a political prisoner. The Floophile family were Siberian natives, then known as Ostyaks. They lived in Nazino, a small village on the north shore of the Ob river running, exactly the type of place is easily overlooked in the middle of the vast desert of Russia. Recently, however, they began to notice the interior world. There were the ships that continued up on the island without name along the river. The screams at night.

The shots. And now this. This strange young woman that the guards are transported, who need a place to rest. They took the woman to a back room. There, in the light of the candles, the rags of their legs were removed. What he saw below would torment Foofila for the rest of his life. "I saw that his calves had been cut," he recalled decades later. "I asked him and she said: 'They did that to me on the island of death, cut them and cook them.' All the flesh in their calves was cut." The woman had come from the new Gulag in the OB River known as Cannibal Island, the last Soviet union of Atrocity of Stalin had perpetrated against her own people.

But the history of the Nazine island, sometimes Nazinsky rendered, does not start with ugly, or with that cold of May night in 1933. It began almost four years before, 3,000 km, in a city, Foophile had only seen in their dreams. In the winter of 1929, Joseph Stalin had appeared at the Kremlin, reflecting on his last decrees. Five years have passed since Vladimir Lenin had died, almost a year since Leon Trotsky was sent into exile; and twelve full years since the Bolshevik revolution overthrew the tsar. With a movement of his pen, Stalin was about to open a completely new and bloody chapter in Soviet history.

He called it "collectivization." The collectivization was the order that all peasants in areas such as Ukraine renounce their small properties and work on Soviet collective farms. This was Stalin's anemic carrot. The gigantic stick was dekulakization, a euphemism to liquidate the kulaks. Technically, the kulaks were richer peasants. However, in practice, the Kulaks were peasants who did not agree with the collectivization. And, boy, many people did not agree with collectivization. In Ukraine, the peasants destroyed their tools, killed their animals and burned their crops instead of dropping them into Soviet hands. Then Stalin did what Stalin did better. He had everyone who challenged him shot, and everyone else sent the Gulags.

By 1932, the collectivization had led the famine through the USSR, and a gulag system so crowded that even Stalin realized that he could not continue pushing more people there. What the Soviet dictator needed was someone who could think outside the box. Someone who could devise a new deskulakization method. Fortunately for Stalin, and very unfortunately for everyone else, the Soviets already had exactly that kind of man. Guilty until it is demonstrated innocent on March 11, 1933, Genrikh Yagoda hit an idea that was almost brilliant in his cynicism. A future Chief of the NKVD, Yagoda is mostly famous today for being only one in a long line of people that Stalin promoted the superior work, got bored and then shot up.

However, in 1933, it was part of the team that supervises the absolute disaster that was the collectivization, responsible for making Stalin's decrees work in some way without killing everyone. Then Yagoda hit an ingenious solution. The USSR needed to establish collective farms while also punished Kulaks, right? So why not condemn those kulaks to work on collective farms? Yagoda's plan was "resettle" 2 million dissidents in Siberia, give them tools and make them build their own self -sufficient farms. All these new farms would solve the collectivization famine, while the miserable Siberian climate would provide the punishment part. Yagoda was so satisfied with his idea that he began to implement it even before Stalin agreed, sending Kulaks quotas so that the police forces arrest him.

It is at this point that everything descended to a terrifying farce. In the Stalin Police, not fulfilling its quota meant becoming part of the share of another person. Then you were extremely encouraged to find dissidents even when there were no dissidents. That meant that if you lived in an urban area with few kulaks, you were after those who failed in the internal passport regime. A hated feature of the Tsarist Russia, the Bolsheviks had abandoned internal passports after they gained power. But Stalin had revived the system in December. Distributed only to those who carry out a useful work, internal passports made it effectively a legal citizen.

You don't carry one, and you were automatically a criminal. And, in the cities, there were always enough people without passports to comply with police quotas. Kuzma Salnikov, for example, was a married miner of Novokuznetsk and a passionate communist. Then, one day, it went to a market without its internal passport, just when the police sealed the building. He was deported from his hometown without even the opportunity to inform his wife. He never saw her again or her two children. As horrible that is the story of Salnikov, it is only one of the many. The 12 -year -old girl was on a station platform for ten minutes while her mother went to buy bread.

When the mother returned, her son was gone, kidnapped by police officers trying to hit her share. There was the 103 -year -old man who went out for a little air. Or the student who was taken by his aunt's door in Moscow. There was even a pregnant woman deported for not carrying her passport ... although she clung to her hand all the time. Throughout the USSR, hundreds of thousands disappeared in this way. While their families struggled to discover what was happening, Yagoda's thugs loaded those captured in trains to the nature of Siberia. The vagrants, the common criminals, the political prisoners, the Kulaks and the common people kidnapped on the street became part of an involuntary exodus inside Russia.

The conditions were so bad that the scores died along the way. They were the lucky ones. The survivors did not know, but they were being channeled towards hell itself. The island of death given the immense cruelties he inflicted, it can be tempting to think of the Soviet system as an infernal machine adjusted for repression. But that was not the case. In Siberia, officials were not even informed of the thousands of prisoners who headed towards their way until the first trains appeared. When 25,000 people were downloaded in Tomsk in April 1933, the local party leaders were basically as "good, what the hell do we do now?!" The problem was that Yagoda's boys in Moscow had implemented repression orders Raying Rightning quickly, but then let all logistics get into the bureaucracy.

In raw terms, this is a bit like the Fyre Festival Guy putting all the advertising instead for a massive party in the Bahamas, but forgets to supply food, personnel or tents. Only, in this analogy, the Bahamas are a snowy Siberian desert, the missing tents are unplayed prison compounds, and all are superrified because canceling the festival will result in Stalin to celebrate a unique rival festival called "Mass executing all my Siberian officials." By May 1933, Tomsk housed almost 90,000 prisoners, but had not yet received a Copek for caring for them. Then, the officials finally decided that someone else was going to have to deal with the problem.

When loading the first 5,000 exiles and 50 guards in the wooden barges, they were placed along the OB River, bound for the settlement of the new island near the Nazino village. It wasn't a pleasant trip. Nazino was approximately 800 km away. 800 km along a river still drowned with ice, in a part of Siberia devastated snow storms. By the time the barges came to what would become Cannibal island on May 18, 27 settlers had already died from exhibition. Meanwhile, the survivors entered a nightmare. The island was a low swamp about 3 km long and just 600 meters wide. There was no refuge, only trees that the settlers were destined to cut and use to build cabins.

But Tomsk officials had forgotten to give them some tool. And now here they were, standing in a snow blanket when the night was established, without the way that the wood builds refuge. Without another option, the prisoners slept outdoors in the conductive snow. When it dawned on May 19, 1933, another 295 were dead. And thus a struggle for survival began that would make hunger games resemble very charming games. Almost all unfortunate souls sent to Cannibal island were inhabitants of the city that had been trapped without their passports. They had none of the agricultural skills that the real Kulaks would have had, none of the survival skills.

And this would soon become a very serious problem. In the barges, the prisoners had given a piece of bread every day to keep them alive. But now the guards could no longer bother to convert the flour they brought with them into bread. On the other hand, 200 grams of flour as a livelihood, less food than even the prisoners in Auschwitz or the Cambodian murder fields had to live had simply given each prisoner. Already desperate, many of the settlers mixed the flour with dirty water from the river, which led to an outbreak of dysentery. It was only the second day, and Cannibal island was already a horror show.

If all this is a bit too much for you, it goes out better now. From now on, things will only get worse. The theater of cruelty before May 22, four days after the barges arrived, the prisoners had already reached new depths of suffering. The frozen rains were killing people every night, while those who had achieved fires were too close to them and burned until death. In addition to that, the guards had not returned to give more flour since the few 200 grams that everyone received the first day. At this stage, the prisoners were still about to hold on to enough of their humanity to organize in protest.

They started a riot. They made enough noise for the guards to finally navigate one of the ships from the opposite shore to see what was happening. When the prisoners said they wanted food, the guards agreed to restart the rations of flour. But not in a person per person. On the other hand, all surviving prisoners would have to self -organize in 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 any solidarity on the island of Cannibal was lost forever. Among the settlers was a minority of violent criminals and direct sociopaths.

Seeing the key to their survival, they presented themselves to the guards as leaders of the Brigade. The guards simply shrugged and gave them the flour. And so the horrible process of starving for all but a handful of prisoners on the island began. Maybe he wonders why people didn't try to escape. Why they didn't challenge the river and they got a break. The answer is that they did. Do you remember Kuzma Salnikov, the communist miner who was arrested in the market? Well, in the first days, when I still had its strength, it managed to swim through the ice water to the opposite shore and escape towards the desert.

Milaculously, he finally found a collective farm where he could live his days. But Salnikov was an exception. The majority of the prisoners who challenged the hard waters of the OB drowned. Those who arrived at the bankThey were shot by the guards. Those who escaped, well -fed guards hunt through the desert for sport. Which perfectly leads us to the cruelty of the guards of the island of Cannibal. From the security of their barges, they got drunk, they went to the deck and shot the prisoners for fun. Other times, they would navigate, they took a piece of bread and threw it into a crowd, enjoying the way the prisoners fought with each other for a piece of food.

Some of them would change these pieces of bread for sex with young prisoners. However, others would order that the criminal elements tear their gold teeth from the elderly in exchange for cigarettes. The island of Cannibal would have been a legendary nightmare if the guards had just dropped the prisoners and left. When staying, they transformed a disaster into a deliberate massacre. On May 25, a week after the barges landed, the camp doctor made a horrible discovery. When examining the bodies of five prisoners, he noticed the first signals of

cannibal

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

cannibal

s for habit." Not two days later, another barge arrived, carrying 1,000 additional prisoners to the island.

Did these guys come with an extra meal? Ha. What do you think? Death in Siberia at the end of May, the survivors of the island had left their humanity far. The strongest prisoners had divided into gangs that roamed the narrow island, terrorizing the weakest than they themselves. The murder for food had become a common place. And it was not enough. As a cold June dawned in Remotest Siberia, the hungry survivors did the only one they could. With all these bodies out there, they simply started eating them. From this moment, things become so frightening that it really does not seem any point that we inform ourselves with our usual mixture of stylistic and ingenious flourishes.

It is much better to let those who were there speak for themselves. Later, a convict was interrogated by the authorities about eating human flesh. His answer survives in the records: "It was very simple." Said. "Like Shashlik. We made Willow branches skewers, we cut it (the body) in pieces, we put it in the skewers and we roast it on the fire." "I chose those who did not live at all, but they were not yet very dead. It was obvious that they were about to go, that in one or two days, they would give up. Therefore, it was easier for them that way.

Now. Quickly. Without suffering for another two or three days." But the horrors of Cannibal Island not only with eating the dead, or even the almost dead. Donner's party, this was not. This was crazy on a upset scale, as a painting from Bruegel's hell the youngest. A 13 -year -old girl from the local population of Ostyak went to the island to collect the cortex during the June chaos. Later he remembered to have seen a prisoner who was returned by one of the guards he had been sleeping to eat, a man named Kostia. In her words: "People caught the girl.

He tied her to a poplar, he cut off his breasts, muscles, everything they could eat, everything, everything ... they were hungry ... they had to eat. When Kostia returned, she was still alive. She tried to save her, but she had lost a lot of blood." It was not long after this that the parents of Autophila Bylina opened the door of her cabin to a 40 -year -old woman who seemed to be 80 years old, and had her legs wrapped in rags. Not long after that, they removed those rags and saw that their calves had been cut to eat. It seems that the combined effects of extreme hunger, the active sadism of the guards and the lack of supervision created something very dark on the island of Cannibal.

A place where people not only ate other humans to survive, but perversely pleased to torture them in advance. Fortunately, suffering was now so bad that not even the Soviet could ignore it. In mid -June, a month after the first barges landed, Tomsk authorities abruptly dissolved the settlement. The surviving prisoners were evacuated to other collective farms, the guards were returned to Tomsk and Caníbal Island was abandoned. In total, more than 6,700 reastlers had spent time on the island during that horrible month. Less than 2,200 of them survived. The remaining four and a half had perished, killed by the elements or murdered by food.

In August, summer herbs had become so high that the bodies that still could there were hidden. Only the locals like Bylina's ugly had some knowledge of the nightmare that had been developed on the island. But the story of Cannibal Island is not over yet. We still have to deal with the consequences. Stories that cannot be told that we know anything about all this is due to a man. Vasily Verlichko was a communist instructor who lived locally in the collective farms that extended throughout the OB on Tomsk. In July 1933, the first rumors of the catastrophe began to listen to the Nazino farm.

The whispers of cannibalism, of incomparable suffering. Not to mention his superiors, he decided to investigate. It was a hard walk, and Verlichko did not arrive on the island of Cannibal until August. At first, nothing seemed out of place. There were high summer pastures, scarce trees and a handful of ostyak people who were engaged in their business. It was only when Velichko entered the island that the secret of the pastures found: the half bodies that went out of sight. During the next few weeks, Verlichko interviewed the Ostyaks, local villagers, anyone who speaks to him. Little by little, he began to build an image of what had happened.

Of the catastrophe, Soviet negligence and bad planning had caused. That fall, Velichko presented an 11 -page report to Moscow, describing his findings. Do you care to guess what happened next? That's how it is! Velichko was fired from his work and threw to the party, and his report fell into the black hole of the state archives. But not before a handful of officials with a splinter of humanity had read, and they put certain things in motion aimed at making sure that another Cannibal island never happened again. A moratorium was placed in the resettlement program, with work fields brought in place for dissidents.

In Tomsk, the 50 guards who supervised this schedule of terror reign made the membership of their party and were imprisoned. While we would love to tell you that they ended up in a gulag as bad as the island of Cannibal, the sad truth is that almost all served only twelve months in regular prisons before being released. As for the Velichko report, he 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 had been alive at that time they had begun to stir a monument to be erected on the island.

But, like the history of Caníbal Island, it is worth remembering that it was just an example in a decade of Soviet terror. At the same time that hungry prisoners resorted to cannibalism in Nazinsky, a vast famine was sweeping Ukraine and Kazakhstan. In Ukraine, the most fertile republic throughout the USSR, Stalin established food impossible fees so high that even when the food was grown, it was confiscated and taken to collective farms. In the resulting disaster, somewhere between 3 million and 7 million peasants died of hunger. As in the OB River, there were stories of cannibalism. Of families forced to kill their weakest son for food to survive.

Of children who ate their own parents after they were starving. And this was just the beginning. After the horrors of the famine, the collectivization and the dekulakization backed up, the great purge began. Three quarters of one million denounced and killed. Then came the deportations of the Tartars, the internal exiles of the dissidents, the expansion of the Gulag system, the purge of the doctors in Moscow ... the list of crimes is almost endless. Caníbal Island can be horrible, but it is worth remembering that it is only a lower chapter in two decades of suffering unleashed by Stalin.

A suffering was not yet properly occupied even today. We can find stories like this horrible, even macabre. We can choose to look the other way, as many did. But the fact is that disasters like this happened in recent history, more frequently than we would like to admit. It can be just an anonymous trap of swamp in the middle of a remote river. But Caníbal Island should be a place that the world tries not to forget it, a monument to a very human inhumanity.