Having said all that, and set the bar really incredibly low as a result, old Joe still managed to limbo under it with the Nazino Affair. Yes, even by Stalinist standards this was a particularly bad one.
Our story begins in 1933. By this point, nine years after he had succeeded Lenin, Joe Stalin had built up quite a collection of political prisoners alongside the usual genuine criminals. In fact, most of the “political” prisoners weren’t political at all- they had just fled famine in the west and been locked up at gunpoint for it. Probably tortured a bit too, just to really rub in the injustice of the situation. There they were, all these hundreds of thousands of people locked up and being a serious bloody inconvenience- what was he supposed to do with them?
Well, Stalin had a bit of a boner for Siberia. He was convinced that with a huge influx of manual labour Siberia could be turned into productive agricultural land that would feed and fuel Soviet growth. This really wasn’t a well-thought out plan, seeing as it ignored basic considerations like climate and fertility, but when you’re a murderous totalitarian dictator it’s amazing how slow people can be to point out that your plans are completely mental. So nobody tried stopping it.
As a result, many thousands of political prisoners were transported east to supply the necessary forced labour to carry out this deranged gardening experiment. In April 1933, some 25,000 arrived at the transit camp in the Siberian town of Tomsk, and immediately hit problems. The camp was incomplete and could contain only a fraction of the number that had turned up. Even when those running the camps considered things like food for the captives to be frivolous luxuries, it quickly became clear that the sheer quantity of arrivals was making absolutely every aspect of the plan unworkable. Fearing riots from the hungry prisoners, the local Party leaders started looking for secure areas that could be used as holding grounds
And on the edge of Siberia there was a promising little holding ground, in the form of Nazino Island- a swampy islet about 3 km long and 600 meters wide where the Nasina river meets the Ob. Being remote, and surrounded by nothing more than the harsh environment of the taiga, it was considered escape-proof- prisoners might get off the island, but their chances of surviving more than a few days were incredibly slim. In late spring of 1933, some 6000 already-starving prisoners were transported there, each provided with no more than a small bag of flour. No tools or fuel of any kind, just a bag of flour. As they had no means of cooking the flour, their only option was to drink it with river water, and within the first few days hundreds had died from dysentery. At first the guards maintained order through sheer, murderous brutality, but after a couple of weeks the situation got so far out of control that the prisoners were organising into gangs and fighting back, and the guards were forced into defensive positions by the starving survivors.
By this point, with food stores exhausted and no means of producing food on the island, cannibalism became the norm. This is where the story becomes really grim, because the prisoners didn't have access to blades or tools, beyond the local sticks or reeds. The most effective tool they possessed was their teeth, and eye-witness accounts from survivors tell of victims being literally eaten alive. As in “held down and being literally bitten and torn to death by human teeth.” In the early stages the guards were recorded as punishing over 50 prisoners for cannibalism, but toward the end it became a punishment itself. The guards would punish captured escapees by tying them to trees and allowing other prisoners to eat them alive.
The camp at Nazino was disbanded in June. Of the 6000 arrivals, 1500-2000 were confirmed as dead while a further 2000 were missing and presumed dead. Having spectacularly failed to supply labour for the great transformation of Siberia, the Nazino Affair finally killed off the large-scale relocation of urban populations within the Soviet Union. As Stalin was never terribly keen to admit that he’d made a cock-up, the events at Nazino were covered up until 1988, though by that time the locals had spent the last 50 years referring to the place by an understandable nickname- "Cannibal Island."
TheGothicLibrarian
