In the year 2000, a small-budget Japanese film by the name of Battle Royale was released to
great controversy, with several countries going so far as to ban the movie outright.
That probably had something to do with the film's unusual premise,
in which a bunch of kids are gassed during a school trip,
then taken to a remote island where they're forced to fight to the death. Not exactly Disney, is it.
Even if you've never heard of Battle Royale - which these days is considered a cult classic
by the way - the plot may well still be familiar to you. That's because it bears a
striking resemblance to one of the biggest book-slash-film
franchises of the last couple of decades - the Hunger Games.
Both stories are incredibly bloody and brutal, and according to millions of fans around the world,
pretty darn entertaining, too. But what neither the Hunger Games nor Battle Royale has ever been
accused of is being overly realistic - a load of random people dumped on an island in the
middle of nowhere and forced to fight to the death? It just couldn't happen in real life.
Except - it turns out it already has. And the real life version of the Hunger Games was much, *much*
worse than anything that's ever been dreamed up by the fertile mind of a creative writer.
When Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had six and a
half thousand prisoners dumped on a remote Siberian island in the 1930s
without food or water, what happened next was so flat-out disturbing that
efforts were made to erase any record of the events from the history books altogether.
This is the story of Stalin's Cannibal Island, one of history's most horrific examples
of what happens when you push human beings far beyond their breaking point.
As far as eggs go, Joseph Stalin was particularly a bad one.
In fact, if history's most evil dictators were made into Top Trumps, Stalin would
be fighting it out with the likes of Hitler and Pol Pot for the title of best card in the deck.
He rose to become General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1922,
and, among other things, he used those early years to consolidate absolute power over both his party
and the country it ruled. You've probably already heard about the infamous purges in which Stalin
systematically eliminated political rivals and basically anyone else who happened to piss him
off. In the most famous of those - known as the Great Terror - as many as 750,000 people
were executed and more than a million others were sent to the forced labour camps known as Gulags.
But Stalin had other ways of dealing with people he didn't like beyond simply murdering them to
death. The Soviet Union covered about 14% of the earth's total land area, and the sheer size of
the place gave Stalin the option of banishing people he wanted to get rid of to the far flung
reaches of the country and forgetting all about them. Kind of like the evil dictator version
of sticking all the relatives you don't like as far away as possible on your wedding seating plan.
In all, about 2 million so-called 'undesirables' were forcibly deported during the 1930s,
usually to the endless wildernesses of Siberia.
Some of these prisoners came from the Soviet Union's overflowing jails,
others were from social classes or ethnic minorities Stalin was slowly eradicating, and
still others were unfortunate enough to own things the Dictator coveted - usually valuable farmland.
It was one of those 'two birds with one stone' kind of affairs. Through forced deportation,
not only did Stalin eliminate these undesirables as a threat, he also used their labour to turn
millions of hectares of barren wilderness into productive land. Or at least, that was the plan.
To begin with, many of the deportees were sent to processing camps in Tomsk, Omsk, and Achinks
(excuse me). From there, they were forwarded on to newly-established settlements across
Siberia. Hundreds of these settlements appeared on the Soviet map during the 30s,
and almost all of them have their own sorry tales to tell. But for the purposes of this video,
we're only interested in one - a tiny island in the Ob River by the name of Nazino.
On the 14th May 1933, 5000 deportees from the Tomsk camp were rounded up
and packed into 4 enormous lumber barges that had been modified to accommodate a human cargo.
I say 'modified,' they basically just took all the lumber off and shoved the people on.
With no accommodation suitable for actual human beings, the deportees were simply
shoved below decks and largely forgotten about for the 800 kilometre, 4-day journey along the
River Ob from Tomsk to Nazino Island. They were given a pitiful food ration of just 5 slices of
bread per day to survive on, and conditions were so bad that 27 people were dead before
the barges even reached their destination, with hundreds more in extremely poor health.
After the deadly journey along the Ob, it's safe to say the remaining deportees
were prepared for their new accommodation on Nazino Island to be worthy
of a one-star tripadvisor review. What they probably *weren't* prepared for
was for the accommodation to not actually exist in the first place.
As the 5000 deportees stepped, crawled, or were dragged from the lumber barges onto the island,
they found themselves on what was essentially an entirely empty speck of
swampy land in the middle of a freezing river in Siberia. There were no buildings or tents,
no toilets or cooking facilities. Not even any tools or building materials. Just... nothing.
To make matters worse, the meagre bread ration that had kept the deportees alive
on the barge journey - well, most of them - had pretty much run out. Which
meant the only remaining food to feed the 5000 already-nearly-starving people
on the island came in the form of twenty tons of raw flour.
The men tasked with handing out this precious resource - Nazino Island's newly appointed
guards - were woefully underprepared for the task at hand. Almost all were rookies who hadn't even
been issued with uniforms yet, and when they first attempted to hand out the allotted 4kg
of flour to each prisoner, it's fair to say things didn't exactly go according to plan.
Not that that should have come as a big surprise. The deportees were already
suffering from an extreme lack of food in what was fast becoming a life or death situation
on a frightening scale. Rocking up with twenty tons of flour and trying to give
5000 people a neat 4 kilograms each was akin to bringing a shit load of heroin to a drug den
and expecting everyone to form an orderly queue. As you've probably guessed, the poor
souls on Nazino Island did not form an orderly queue... they went absolutely fucking mental.
A full-scale riot broke out, and, forced to admit defeat,
the guards retreated to the relative safety of the lumber barges to devise a new, less dangerous plan
for the distribution of the flour. All of which meant that Nazino's 5000 new inhabitants spent
the first night in their new home without food or shelter. By morning, 300 more were dead.
The following day, the guards made their second attempt to dish out the flour. The deportees were
asked to organise themselves into 'brigades' of 150 people. Each brigade had a self-appointed
leader, and each leader was tasked with collecting enough flour for everyone in their group.
On paper that might sound like a fairly sensible idea, but once again the guards had overlooked the
somewhat crucial detail that the people on Nazino Island were already beginning to starve to death.
To take the drug den analogy one step further, this new 'ordered' approach
was a bit like giving a select group of addicts a year's supply of heroin,
then asking them to share it with a bunch of random strangers. Spoiler alert - they didn't.
Most kept the flour to eat themselves and used whatever was left as a kind of
pseudo currency to gain favour with other powerful deportees.
Even the apparently 'lucky' ones who managed to get their hands on some
genuine Nazino white powder had no way of turning it into bread, so they were forced to mix it with
river water and slurp it down as a kind of paste. The precious calories certainly helped,
but the dysentery that resulted from drinking untreated river water... not so much.
Within a matter of days, the unimaginably brutal conditions led to a total breakdown in order.
Gangs formed around powerful brigade leaders and skirmishes were fought over the island's meagre
resources as people died in their hundreds from a combination of exposure, starvation, and disease.
The guards were completely out of their depth and mostly kept to the barges. Still, they were the
ones with the food and the guns, and that gave them god-like power over the islanders. A power
that - predictably enough - they abused at every opportunity. The guards traded food for favours
among the island's women, accepted bribes in the form of gold teeth plucked from the mouths of the
dead - and occasionally the living, and executed hundreds of deportees for minor infractions.
Despite their brutality, the guards were still outnumbered 100 to 1, and they simply didn't
have the manpower to maintain genuine control. As a result, hundreds of people came to the perfectly
reasonable conclusion that the best way to survive the unfolding horrors of Nazino Island was to
get the hell out of there as fast as possible… not that escape was without risks of its own.
For starters, it was punishable by death,
and the guards shot anyone they suspected of trying to leave the island on sight.
Then there was the small issue of the wide, fast-flowing, ice-cold Siberian river that
stood between the islanders and freedom. Some fashioned makeshift rafts from bits and pieces
scavenged on the island and others simply swam for it. Almost none made it to the other side.
Rafts disintegrated in the strong currents,
swimmers weakened by weeks of starvation were overcome by the freezing waters,
and dozens of people were shot by guards before their escape attempts even got underway.
Before long, hundreds of bodies lined the banks of the Ob downriver from Nazino island.
In truth, even those few lucky ones that managed to survive the crossing
probably didn't last long in the never-ending forest that awaited them on the opposite bank,
though at least a couple are thought to have found their way to safety
on isolated farms. Still, dying alone in the beautiful, desolate Siberian wilderness
was almost certainly preferable to the fate that awaited those who stayed behind.
Predictably, the pitiful supply of flour soon ran out, meaning there was quite literally
nothing whatsoever to eat. And that's when the hunting began.
On May 21st - just one week after the barges brought the first deportees to
Nazino Island - health inspectors among the guards were totting up the day's new corpses
when they noticed something disturbing. Five of the bodies showed telltale signs of cannibalism.
Over the course of the following month, more than fifty people were arrested - and in most cases
executed - for the consumption of human flesh. And they're just the ones that were actually caught.
There are plenty of stories of desperate people resorting to cannibalism after finding themselves
stranded without food for long periods - plane crashes in remote areas, that sort of thing.
Typically cannibalism under these circumstances comes about as a last
resort - the weakest member of the group dies of natural causes, and the others make the
impossible decision to do what they have to do to survive.
And that's exactly what happened on Nazino Island...
at first. But as time went on, the island's most desperate and depraved inhabitants
stopped waiting for the weak to die before making their move.
Those who survived Stalin's cannibal island have unsurprisingly been reluctant to
talk about their experiences there. But what little information has surfaced is
so horrific it doesn't even sound real - like eyewitness accounts
that speak of people being tied to trees and butchered for their meat while still living.
You've probably heard plenty of places described as 'hell on earth' over the
years. A shopping mall on Black Friday or a rough city centre at 1am on a Saturday morning. But
for 13 weeks in 1933, Nazino Island came about as close to the biblical torment
of the fiery pits of hell as anywhere on earth has ever been.
At the end of those 13 weeks of violence, starvation, cannibalism, and death,
it seems the Powers that Be finally started to realise that Nazino Island wasn't about to be
transformed into a thriving, productive community anytime soon. And so the settlement was dissolved,
and barges arrived to take the surviving deportees away.
Some 6700 people had been sent to the island in total - the initial 5000,
plus seventeen hundred or so more who arrived over the following weeks.
According to official records, by the time the barges arrived to begin evacuations, 2000 were
dead through a combination of starvation, exposure, disease, murder, and drowning,
and a further 2000 had simply disappeared. It's a safe bet that pretty much all of the ‘missing’
perished one way or another, though exactly how they met their ends, nobody will ever
know for sure. All told, just 2856 people made it out alive, and in most cases it was a close
run thing - the vast majority were at death’s door. According to the report made at the time,
only around 200 could be considered to be in good physical health - as for exactly what they
must have done for that to be the case... well, I’ll leave that up to your imagination.
I'd love to be able to tell you that the suffering was over for those who survived the
horror of Nazino Island, but sadly that wasn't the case. They were simply sent on to other,
slightly better organised settlements elsewhere in Siberia. Considering what they'd been through,
it's no surprise that hundreds died before making it to their new homes.
Many truly terrible things happened in the Soviet Union during Stalin's reign of terror,
but even on that bloody list, the horrific events that took place on Nazino
island in 1933 stand out. And it seems that fact wasn't lost on Stalin and his advisors, either,
because the truth about what happened to the Nazino deportees was never made public,
and a report into the incident was buried in the Soviet archives for more than 50 years
before being rediscovered by a human rights group. Without their efforts,
the world might never have known what really happened on Stalin's Cannibal Island.
And, as hard as it is to learn about something so terrible,
these are exactly the kinds of atrocities we must never forget.
Thanks for watching.