A Popular History of Unpopular Things
A podcast that makes history more fun and accessible - we love all things gory, gross, mysterious, and weird!
A Popular History of Unpopular Things
The Cannibal Island
Join Kelli as she discusses a Stalin Soviet-era plan to deport unwanted citizens and petty criminals to an island in the middle of Siberia - without proper shelter, supplies, or food. It only took a few days before the island's new inhabitants broke down and started to consume the flesh of their fellow prisoners.
In this podcast, we review the historical context of 1930s Stalin-era plans to starve the people in the name of progress and communism. Spoiler - it doesn't end well. In addition to discussing the Cannibal Island, more commonly known as Nazino Island, Kelli goes over the basics of the Ukrainian Famine/Holodomor and Stalin's collectivization policies.
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Intro and Outro music credit: Nedric
Find him on all streaming services and YouTube, and check out his debut EP, Yello Kake!
Sources Referenced:
Nicolas Werth - Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag
Music Credit:
Kevin MacLeod - Scheming Weasel
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
The Cannibal Island
Intro
Welcome to A Popular History of Unpopular Things, a mostly scripted podcast that makes history more fun and accessible. My kind of history is the unpopular stuff - disease, death, and destruction. I like learning about all things bloody, gross, mysterious, and weird.
Before we begin, a reminder to support me on Patreon - putting out episodes takes a lot of time, and your support will help ensure that the podcast keeps going strong! I appreciate any help you can give and thank you so much for being a fan. Now, on with the show.
Happy Thanksgiving Weekend to my American APHOUT fans! I’ve got quite the meal in store for you today. Once again, you’ve opened up an episode with the word “cannibal” in the title. In case you’re not already clued into the topic of today’s episode, it’s going to be… gross. Straight up cannibalism in this one. Not just a vague reference, not a hint, it’s gonna be full-on human-eating-human action. You’ve been warned.
In 1933, Joseph Stalin was in the midst of a purge. The most famous purge he had going on in 1933 was the Ukrainian Famine, or Holodomor. I’ll get into that today as well. But that wasn’t the only thing Stalin was doing that year. He was also sending millions of people to labor camps in Siberia, or gulags. But thousands of those who were rounded up were sent to a place known as Nazino, an island in the Ob River in the middle of Siberia. And I do mean the middle - geographically, Nazino is about in the center of Russia, thousands of kilometers east of Moscow. They were left to fend for themselves with no shelter and virtually no food - except, of course, each other.
If you’re an APHOUT fan, then you already know an uncomfortable amount of information about cannibalism. These people were left in the cold, with no options to escape or find food, with corrupt and violent guards watching over them. So, with few other options, some turned on each other.
So today, we’re going to serve up the historical context to get a good idea of why Stalin was targeting his own people and sending them to their gruesome deaths in the Siberian wastelands. I also want to explore other things Stalin was doing to his people, like the aforementioned Ukrainian famine, to get a broader picture of life in early Soviet Russia. Once we know why this happened, we’ll sort through the details of life on Nazino Island, including some primary sources of people who were there at the time of the incident, and explain how and why they gobbled each other up.
So let’s get started!
Historical Context
As always on the APHOUT podcast, we’ll start with the historical context. Basically, what was happening in the 1930s that led to thousands of Russians being dumped on an island in a Siberian River without proper food or shelter. To properly understand an event in history, we need this context - the background information, the reasons why. And for today’s episode, the context is all about Joseph Stalin’s rule over Soviet Russia.
In 1917, Russia pulled out of World War I as a looming revolution threatened to upend the absolute monarch, Czar Nicholas II. Russia up to this point was capitalist, but not democratic - the Russian Czar held all the power. But Russia’s problem, unlike its Western European counterparts, was that its industrial sector was delayed and inadequate. Russia was a massive agrarian power. In order to catch up to the West, it engaged in state-sponsored industrialization, but it wasn’t super successful. Russia lagged in a lot of areas - not just in industry and the economy, but also in war - they lost a conflict against Japan in 1904-1905, the Russo-Japanese War. Japan, for what it’s worth, was also undergoing state-sponsored industrialization, but they were significantly better at it - it helped that they were supported by an American economy.
The Russian people noticed that things weren’t going well for them. Lagging behind the West was bad enough, but losing a war against the small island nation of Japan? Which chose to isolate itself from the world until the late 19th century? That was an insult. And from this uncertainty rose the communist party under Vladimir Lenin.
Lenin’s goal was to remove what many considered to be a failing absolute monarchy and replace it with a communist dictatorship - one led by his Bolshevik party, but would serve to benefit the common people. Lenin believed that Russia was too backwards to have a quote unquote “traditional” communist revolution, which Karl Marx described as one led by the proletariat, the working class. So, to make the revolution happen, Lenin and his Bolsheviks did the revolution for the proletariat - after all, it was for their own good, or so he argued.
This is more akin to socialism - the government taking over for the benefit of the common people. Lenin believed that once the socialist state was successful, they could start to remove social classes, the state itself would slowly die off, and Russia would be a true communist utopia.
Of course, that’s not what happened.
The 1917 revolution was successful. In 1918, the entire Russian royal family - Czar Nicholas II, his wife, their five children, and their servants, were all murdered. Shot to death. Then impaled by bayonets, you know, the pointy bit that can be affixed to the end of a rifle. With Lenin in power, the Bolsheviks got to work fixing Russia’s economy, defeating rival political factions, and spreading communist ideals throughout the country. When Lenin died in 1924, one of his chief operatives took over - Joseph Stalin.
Now one of Stalin’s primary goals was to make sure that this new government under the Communist Party had full control over the state. It had strayed far from the idea of a communist utopia at this point - Stalin didn’t want the government to fizzle out so that everyone could be equal and live in peace. He wanted to be in control of a communist dictatorship, to have absolute power. And the way he ensured this was to get rid of anyone who wasn’t on board the Communist train.
So in 1933, Stalin began a campaign known as the Great Purge. The idea, as the name implies, was to purge Russia and the Communist Party of any opposition - known or suspected. The Soviet Communist State was built on this idea of a single, centralized state. So therefore, opposition threatened communist leadership; questioning the authorities was not and by the way still is not tolerated in quote unquote “Communist” countries.
During this time, over a million Russians were imprisoned. A lot of these prisoners were sent to the Gulags, or forced labor camps, many of which were in the frozen Siberian tundras in the north. Between 1934 and 1937, over 700,000 were executed by various means. And though it was brutal, the end result did give Stalin absolute control over the Communist Party, and therefore the government.
Now before we get into Nazino, which was one of these places where opponents and prisoners were rounded up and sent, I want to talk about one of the more infamous of Stalin’s purges - the Holodomor of 1932-1933, also known as the Ukrainian Famine. Not only is it a fascinating microcosm of Stalin’s purges, but it will also give us some good context for what life was like being intentionally starved by your state.
So one of Stalin’s policies to increase his control over Russia, and lands he believed belonged to Russia, was collectivization. The idea behind collectivization was to round up, or collect, all of the land, farms, industries, whatever is there, take away ownership, and give it to the State. Let me explain it with an example.
So we have a Ukrainian family, let’s call them the Doroshenko’s, who work on a big farm in the middle of Europe’s bread basket, the rich, grain-producing area of Eastern Europe. They used to own this land themselves, but Stalin came in and collectivized the land - the farm no belongs to them, but the state. There are two options here, right? Give up your land and bow down to the power of the State, or resist.
Now if the Doroshenkos willingly gave up their land, they would be moved to one of the government’s collective farms - they would use their skills as farmers to support the state from this centralized area. The idea here is that everyone needs to pitch in, so everyone can equally share in the profits, the food, the labor, etc. Some people are fine with this - they’re doing it to work towards the communist utopia, right? We all work for everyone’s benefit. Fine.
The other option, of course, is to resist. After all, the Doroshenkos have owned this land for generations, and now the Russians are going to come in and take it? Yeah, okay. No.
Now, we’ve established that the Communist State is not cool with dissension, or people opposing the Party ideals, so they’d need to be dealt with. Farmers who refused to give up their lands were branded kulaks, or “rich” peasants, who opposed the communist ideology of raising up the lower classes for everyone’s benefit. By painting them as enemies of the poor, they were branded enemies of the state. And what do we do with these rich ‘capitalist’ enemies who won’t do what the socialist state wants? We eliminate them. Round them up, throw them in gulags, or just dispose of them. There’s no room for dissidents in Communist Russia.
Now our family here, the Doroshenkos, know better, so they give up their farm. It beats being murdered, right? So they are moved to one of these collective farms. They and the rest of the collective are given a quota to meet - a certain amount of grain they need to produce every year to satisfy the wants of the Communist State.
But the problem now is that the Soviet State keeps upping the quota, making it almost impossible for farmers like the Doroshenkos to meet the demand. If they didn’t send enough food, then special teams would be brought in to take whatever extra food was around - which included the food they needed to eat to survive. Essentially, the Ukrainian farmers were left to starve. Stealing or hiding food that was meant for the Soviet state? A crime punishable by death. Millions starved. And this food? The food that was supposed to be shared equally amongst the Soviet communist population? A lot of it was sold internationally so the Soviets could make money to increase their power and control. Modern death toll estimates for the Ukrainian famine are currently around 3.9 million people, though I’ve seen ranges that almost double that figure. It’s difficult for historians to get accurate numbers with mass genocides like this because there weren’t accurate records for peasant deaths in rural Ukraine.
My point here is to say that Stalin had no problem killing off his own people to pursue power and Communist control. And at the same time that Stalin was starving his Ukrainian subjects, he also sent a bunch of people to a tiny island in the middle of the Ob River in Siberia - now known as either Death Island, or my preferred nickname, Cannibal Island.
Nazino Island
Before we get to the gross cannibal stuff, we still need to answer the question why this island? Why did the communist government decide to send people here instead of an established labor camp?
Well, it was part of a plan to settle in western Siberia. It was knocking out two birds with one stone - you could get rid of people you don’t want around anymore and also build settlements in the resource-rich but relatively unpopulated regions of the west. And who was chosen? Well, typically, those “kulaks” - those rich peasants who supposedly stood in the way of Soviet progress, like the Ukrainian farmers who didn’t want to give up their land to collectivization. It was what we call deportation-colonization; you can get rid of people you don’t want around anymore, and have them do the work of colonizing new regions. They can fish, or fell trees, or mine, or farm, and give most of that back to the State while keeping what they need to survive.
This was supposed to be a big thing - an idea that would encompass over a million hectares of arable land and create 1000 new labor villages. But it would require so many resources. And labor. But the labor wouldn’t be a problem, because it was where they’d send troublesome kulaks and political dissidents to do hard time.
And so, in 1933, a whole bunch of people were rounded up from major cities like Moscow and Leningrad and shipped out East. The state’s goal was to establish a self-sufficient settlement - within two years, it shouldn’t need any more supplies from the State, but instead should be providing excess and sending materials back to Moscow. Nazino Island became one of these locations.
Those who were sent to Nazino came via Tomsk, the nearest city about 300 miles or 480 kilometers downriver. They had nothing with them - no documentation, no personal items, no provisions - nothing. Not only would this make it hard to survive out there, but there was also no paperwork explaining who they were, why they were arrested, or whether or not they had a criminal past - and some did, though it was often just petty crimes. And considering this was supposed to be a settlement, an alternative to a labor camp, there were a surprising number of people who wouldn’t have been able to do any work - the elderly, the disabled, and even the blind. So this lends to the idea that it wasn’t really only about producing labor for the benefit of the State - it was able getting rid of people they considered undesirable. As stated in the inquiries that took place after the event, the State was, quote, “relieving themselves of burdens by sending them as far away as possible.” End quote.
So now, it’s not just kulaks, criminals, or supposed enemies of the state, but also those the State deemed to be burdens.
Now those responsible for organizing the settlement were also afraid of the kinds of people being sent over - some were petty criminals from urban city centers that were being sent off to these remote settlements so they wouldn’t cause problems. But that’s a problem too, because the Soviets, in addition to getting rid of people, are also trying to settle areas in the east, right? So why would they send people they consider to be criminals? Wouldn’t that just mess up their plans?
That is why the island was chosen. It was across the river from a small settlement of indigenous folk, but perhaps by being on the island, the deportees couldn’t escape and cause mischief for the surrounding populations. I guess they didn’t care about the other people living there with these supposed criminal elements, but whatever.
Now on the boat heading to their final destination, as it were, there were some food rations - but this amounted to a few bags of semolina flour (which is what you use to make good pasta, by the way), sugar, salt, and twenty tons of flour. It amounted to about ten days worth of food, but only if they turned the flour into bread. There was no yeast, so it would have been essentially hardtack, but it could have worked. For ten days. But, that assumes they had utensils for cooking - other than the ingredients, the deportees were given nothing - no bowls, no spoons, no dishes, no tools, nothing. They also didn’t have anything to help make shelter or even rudimentary ovens to bake bread. They were literally given a pile of flour with some sugar and salt.
You might be wondering - if they’re sending these men and women, some of whom they considered dangerous, into the wilds with very little food, did they at least send guards? I mean, Soviet guards might be scary enough to keep them under control, right? Well, yes and no.
Normally, with a population the size of what they sent to Nazino, around 5-6,000 people, there would be around 50 guards sent to monitor them. After all, remember, this is supposed to be a labor camp in addition to a new settlement. But they apparently had a hard time scrounging up 50 guards, because they instead took unemployed men wandering the streets of Tomsk. And some of these men didn’t even know what they were brought along to do. Here’s a source from one of the men who helped organize the whole disaster. Quote:
“These people, who had neither shoes nor uniforms, were in no way distinguished from [those] they were supposed to monitor. They had neither authority or discipline. If they gave an order, no one listened to them… We had hardly arrived in Nazino before most of them told me that they wanted to go back to Tomsk, because they had been tricked. When they were recruited, they had been promised that the [local officials] would take care of them, give them a uniform, shoes, and lodging in Alexandrovskoie, a nearby town. However, all they got was an old rifle, and then they were sent into the taiga to have the people ‘graze,’ as they called it.” End quote.
The taiga, by the way, is the name for the coniferous forests up there in northern Russia.
So the guards brought in to watch over the men and women sent to Nazino? They weren’t really guards. So I’m sure it’s no surprise for you to hear that they stole and were generally pretty corrupt, as they were more or less drifters that were now given power.
On May 18, 1933, the boats from Tomsk landed at an abandoned island in the middle of the Ob River and unloaded its passengers. According to many corroborated sources, around a third of the people were already weakened and feeble, half-starved, from the journey itself. It was a disaster waiting to happen.
Around 20 tons of flour was dumped onto the ground - not in sacks, literally just piled into a flour mountain. A fight broke out over it, and guards opened fire, injuring a few people. The decision was made to put the bulk of the flour across the river in Nazino so it wouldn‘t be stolen.
The next morning, people lined up to receive their rations of flour - one pound per person. Remember that there were no other provisions, and there were over 5,000 people. These men and women collected the flour rations with their hands mostly, or in their hat if they were lucky enough to have one. You could imagine it didn’t take long for this process to break down, and it was a mad scramble for food. People were trampled, guards opened fire again, and it was just general chaos. Here’s a source that describes what it looked like just two days after arriving. Quote:
“At two pm on May 20, I went to the island of Nazino with Commander Tsepkov. There was a terrible scramble, people crowding and fighting around the bags of flour, dead bodies everywhere, a hundred or more, and lots of people crawling about and crying “Give us bread. Boss, it’s been two days since we’ve been given anything to eat - they’re trying to make us die of hunger and the cold.”
And here, my dear APHOUT fans, is where we get our first source detailing cannibalism. Continuing with the source, quote:
“They told us that people had begun eating the dead bodies, that they were cooking human flesh. The scene on the island was dreadful, appalling. When we got back to the village of Nazino, we gathered together all the assistant commanders and health personnel - barely a dozen persons in all. It was decided (1) to set up a few tents to shelter the most sick; and (2) to mobilize the local population to construct ovens.” End quote.
Y’all. Two days. It only took two days for cannibalism to start. Although to be fair, the six or so days spent stuck in the bottom of the boats en route to Nazino were also pretty awful, so the people were starving and crazed by the time they arrived.
So let’s get into the meaty part of this episode - the cannibalism.
Cannibalism
In 1989, so 56 years later, an organization went around recording and preserving oral histories of Soviet political oppression - part of a project associated with Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms. A group went to Nazino and listened to an older indigenous woman who lived nearby the island in 1933, and would travel with her family to the small Nazino village every year to find supplies. Here’s what she recounted. Warning - it’s gross.
Quote.
“We were living in Ergankina. Every spring, we left for the island of Nazino to harvest the poplar bark that we sent downstream. It was our only source of income…
That year, what did we see? People everywhere… So many people! We didn’t understand what was going on.
They were trying to escape. They asked us, ‘Where’s the railway?’ We’d never seen a railway. They asked, ‘Where’s Moscow? Leningrad?’ They were asking the wrong people, we’d never heard of those places.
On the island, there was a guard named Kostia Venikov, a young fellow. He was courting a pretty girl who had been sent there. He protected her. One day he had to be taken away for a while, and he told one of his comrades, ‘Take care of her.’ But with all these people there the comrade couldn’t do much… People caught the girl, tied her to a poplar tree, cut off her breasts, her muscles, everything they could eat… They were hungry, they had to eat.
When Kostia came back, she was still alive. He tried to save her, but she had lost too much blood - she died. That was the kind of thing that happened.
When you went along the island, you saw flesh wrapped in rags. Human flesh that had been cut and hung in the trees. I heard that when people on the island saw [a doctor] pass by, they said, ‘There’s one that would be good to eat, fat as he is.’ [The doctor] ran away.
And yet, how much flour there was on the riverbank! They’d brought in a mountain of flour to feed people. But what they did with it, no one knows. One thing is certain - it rotted. Or maybe somebody stole it. I don’t know whether it was stolen or not. What I do know is that people were starving to death.
[Some] people fled the island on rafts, on tree trunks. One day, starving to death, hardly able to stand up, they tried to attack our cow. We went to stop them… People thought they ought to give them a little bread. There were women among them, and that made us feel more confident. We took them home, gave them bread, curds, and milk… and then we took them back to the guardhouse. God knows what they did with them afterward. Maybe they shot them, or they escaped, or they were taken back to the island.
My Lord, what cruelty! Of course, God knows what these people did. We didn’t know them; they scared us… We gave them milk to drink, and fed them, and afterwards, they were shot [by the guards].” End quote.
This is just one account of many about the atrocities that happened at Nazino. And it wasn’t just the deportees attacking each other - the guards, those random young men from the streets of Tomsk, were also complicit. With the little bit of power they had over the others, they used blackmail and coercion to get what they wanted, and in several instances, just straight killed the prisoners to take their coats or supplies.
During the inquiry that happened after this event, several men were called out for their actions. One threw deportees into the river knowing they couldn’t swim, so they drowned. Another used a stick to beat the deportees, taking clothing from them. Another sent men into the frozen waters to retrieve birds he shot. And yet another would stuff himself with the food rations in front of the deportees, just to tease them. But beyond all this, there was also just straight-up murder. The guards gave two explanations for why they shot and killed men - they were either trying to escape or join the criminal bands forming on the island, or, they were cannibals.
On May 21st, so three days after they arrived there, health officers were sent to check on the island’s inhabitants, as the dead were piling up. Here’s what they wrote in a report. Quote:
“The liver, the heart, the lungs, and fleshy parts of the bodies (like breasts and calves) had been cut off. On one of the bodies, the head had been cut off, along with the male genital organs and part of the skin. These mutilations constitute strong evidence of cannibalistic acts; in addition, they suggest the existence of serious psychopathologies. On the same day, May 21, the deportees themselves brought us three individuals who had been caught with blood on their hands and holding human livers. Our examination of these three individuals did not reveal any extreme emaciation, but rather external signs of degeneracy.” End quote.
So the doctors here are saying that these men, caught literally red-handed, weren’t emaciated and eating their fellow man out of necessity, but because they were psychopaths.
Now before you get too excited about these sources, also consider the bias here - the state would want to paint this situation as an aberration of the deportees, not taking responsibility for leaving these people alone on an island with basically no food. I’m not saying it was justified, I’m just reminding you to consider all sides to a story, and to remember that every source has bias.
Now apparently, there wasn’t an immediate reaction to this - those with bloody hands caught in possession of human organs were just released back into Genpop, because, and again I’m quoting, “it had not been established that they had killed the person whose body parts they had eaten,” and “the Soviet penal code does not prescribe a penalty for necrophagy” which is eating dead flesh. It doesn’t just have to be human, by the way - vultures are necrophages - they eat carrion, or dead meat.
The first recorded act of murder that resulted in cannibalism in Nazino took place on May 29th, 11 days after arrival, when three young men were caught and captured, then sent to prison in the nearest bigger town. Three more cannibal murderers were arrested on May 31st after they admitted to killing a man and eating his livers and kidneys.
The State tried to paint this as “cannibalism by habit,” meaning that they engaged in cannibalism because they were criminals, and that’s what these criminals did. They didn’t take responsibility for the fact that they were shoved on an uninhabited island, with no resources, nothing to eat except raw flour mixed with river water (which, by the way, caused gastrointestinal problems and fevers) and a broken power dynamic between the “guards” and the prisoners.
One report from the head of the Special Settlements Department, which spearheaded and oversaw settlements at places like Nazino, claimed that, quote,
“Hunger cannot be the origin of these acts, given that most of the cases of cannibalism occurred at a time when the problem of provisions was being resolved. None of the cannibals caught showed signs of pronounced emaciation. Several of them admitted that in the past they had already eaten human flesh” end quote, and y’all that’s just straight up not true.
So why was the Soviet state trying to paint these deportees as criminal necrophages or murderous cannibals? Well, consider what the State is doing, and also consider the context I set up earlier. The Soviets deported these people because they were either in the way or were suspected non-Communists, right? So painting them as criminals, as cannibals, as horrible evil people, aligned with their message that deporting them was good for the communist state. Considering we know that other instances of violence against their own people were occurring simultaneously with what happened at Nazino, like the Ukrainian Famine, the State needed to cover up their involvement and make it seem like the people themselves were deranged.
Were some of them deranged before they arrived? Possibly. But I’ll wager a bet that since they were picked up on the streets of Moscow, then shoved in transportation for a while with no proper meals, then abandoned on an island with corrupt, power-mad guards and no access to food, had something to do with them turning to cannibalism to survive.
Saying that cannibalism was a response to the violence inherent in the system was a seditious concept - presuming that the Soviet Communist Government was ultimately responsible for cannibalism would not have been allowed. There is no freedom of expression in communist dictatorships - if you speak out against the Party line, then you are an enemy of the State. A counterrevolutionary. And perhaps you’d find yourself in a similar situation to these people on Nazino.
In his book titled Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag, historian Nicholas Werth summarizes things nicely. He writes, quote,
“Precisely how widespread was cannibalism in Nazino? Even if it left an indelible impression - to which the well-attested nickname “Cannibal Island” bears witness - the number of proven cases of cannibalism and necrophagy was not more than a few dozen. About fifty persons suspected of having eaten human flesh were arrested, but many of them were quickly released. Given the very fragmentary evidence we have regarding the identity of these individuals, it would be risky to draw any conclusions about the “typical profile” of the “Nazino Cannibal.” End quote.
The Nazino settlement was clearly a failure. Soviet authorities shifted the survivors, who only numbered around 2,800, to better-policed and settled camps upriver. It didn’t get much better for them, though, as many died anyway, or contracted Typhus and got extremely sick.
One thing the Nazino incident did do, though, was help to end these settlement projects. There was clearly not a good system put in place to handle deporting these men and women to new locations where they could be useful in settling out on the frontier. Labor camps were much more useful to the state; here, at least, they were producing something. The settlement projects were just abject failures, and cost the State more than they got in return. It also made them look bad - disorganized, chaotic, and incapable of moving towards that goal of a communist utopia, where people can function without rules or a system to keep them in check, where they would all work for the common cause and share things equally. That certainly didn’t happen at Nazino, where the system broke down immediately.
Outro
Thanks for joining me for this episode of A Popular History of Unpopular Things. My name is Kelli Beard, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the story of The Cannibal Island. Thank you for supporting my podcast, and if you haven’t already checked out my other episodes, go have a listen!
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