In the summer of 1933, a group of Soviet prisoners were sent to Nazinsky Island in
Siberia as part of a wide scale Kremlin-backed experiment. They proceeded to live through one
of the most brutal and horrific experiences imaginable, with many of them succumbing to
the most inhumane fate that can befall a person. Our researchers reluctantly looked through reports
and archives to discover the truth…behind the Russian Cannibal Island Experiment.
It all started when the Soviet Union decided to reinstate the dreaded “passport system”
of Tsarist Russia in 1932. In the past, passports were used to move within Russia,
and since they weren’t issued to most people, especially peasants,
they were generally used to keep people confined to their area of the country.
When the passport system was initially abolished in 1917,
loads of peasants went flocking to the cities for work and opportunities,
overburdening the Soviet urban areas and resulting in housing shortages and crowded conditions.
Thus, Stalin re-introduced the passport system, and ordered “mopping-up” operations in USSR
cities to expel all the peasants who - overnight - now found themselves living there illegally.
This soon led to an overflow of prisoners held in the Soviet Union’s infamous gulag system.
Genrich Yogada, the leader of the collectivization campaign at the time, thought he could ease
the overcrowding of the gulags and help Russia by conducting a little experiment.
Prisoners would be sent to the remote reaches of Siberia to farm the land there. This assignment
would serve the dual purpose of punishing the prisoners while providing food for the nation.
To fulfill his vision and conduct his Siberian experiment,
Yogada ordered police to rapidly increase the number of arrests.
To be clear, since this is the Soviet era we’re talking about, there was no real due process to
determine who was “guilty”, even under such flimsy definitions of guilt. People were apprehended
while stepping out for cigarettes and visiting nearby relatives, simply because they didn’t
have their passport on them, and authorities didn’t care to go back to their homes and check.
Even the head of the Moscow police department was accidentally arrested in the raids,
but since being well-connected always has its perks, he was released and
reassigned to his old position by high ranking relatives almost immediately.
Soon, pretty much any urban resident who so much as went
out to get some milk without a passport was locked away.
When these non-passport holders were rounded up, they were mixed with dangerous criminals,
political prisoners, and anyone the state deemed an anti-Soviet element.
This resulted in a total of over 2 million prisoners, all of whom were shuttled off
to Siberia together. All to fulfill Yogada’s totally, completely, viable dream of coaxing
food for an entire nation out of one of the most inhospitable places on earth.
On the journey to Siberia, this mix of prisoners created a terrifying atmosphere.
Ordinary citizens were held with some of the most violent criminals in the country;
intimidated, assaulted, and even killed by them.
Eventually, a large group arrived in the main city of Tomsk in the Siberian heartland. In May
of 1933, 6,000 of them were put in timber barges, kept below deck, and given meager
portions of bread to complete the 497 mile (800 kilometers) downriver journey to Nazinsky Island
on the River Ob. Surprisingly, only 23 of them died on the worst river cruise in the world.
This tiny uninhabited island, located near the town of Nazino,
was supposed to be their temporary home until authorities could find labor camps
able to accept the prisoners, but it quickly became a permanent hell instead.
Nazinsky was a swampy, mostly flat strip of land that measured about
1.9 miles (3 kilometers) long and about ⅓ of a mile (600 meters) wide. Though the theoretical
point of all this was for the prisoners to farm the land, they were given no tools,
no food, no shelter, and no clothing. If you are already seeing the problem here,
congratulations, because the Soviet authorities did not.
The men and women on the island spent their first night in Siberia wearing whatever they
had been detained in, while walking around in cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg,
then known as Leningrad. For most,
this clothing was not nearly sufficient enough for outdoor living and sleeping in Siberia.
Now, some people might be thinking: “it was May! How bad could conditions be, even in Siberia?”.
Well…pretty damn horrible, as it turns out. That first night,
295 prisoners froze to death in their sleep.
The second night, the wind started howling, and the temperature dropped below 32 degrees
Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius). The people on the island searched for bark and moss to chew on to
alleviate their ever-growing hunger, while making fires in a feeble attempt to keep from freezing.
On the fourth day, their guards were generous enough to provide the prisoners with a few
hundred grams of rye flour per person. The rations should have been in the form of bread,
but at some point the guards realized making flour into bread was hard work,
and they’d rather not do more than was required from them.
So the island’s new residents rushed to the river to mix up their newly received
rye flour with water in their hats, to make a hopefully edible kind of porridge.
The situation only deteriorated from there,
as though sleeping outdoors in Siberia and eating flour mush out of hats wasn’t already bad enough.
For those wondering why the prisoners wouldn’t try to escape this island and these horrid
conditions…they definitely tried. But they faced near insurmountable odds on their way out.
First of all, crossing the River Ob in freezing temperatures, while starving and exhausted,
was a near impossible task. Second, the island’s guards made a sport out
of torturing and killing the prisoners. They would beat them with rifle butts,
rape them, and engage in all sorts of brutality. The island itself was also
surrounded by machine-gun carrying soldiers who would shoot anyone caught trying to flee.
After some time, these conditions led to the unthinkable: desperate, starving,
and exhausted, the prisoners started eating each other.
Unsurprisingly, the group’s hardened criminals were the first to cross the line into cannibalism,
with incidents reported as early as the tenth day of isolation on the island.
Before we describe these incidents in detail, perhaps it would be best to make sure your
stomach is settled and you put down any food you’re in the middle of eating. In fact,
maybe put it away altogether for the rest of the day.
Shocking accounts first started pouring out of residents from the nearby town of
Nazino. One 13-year-old girl, who we hope received plenty of therapy later in life,
recalled how a guard named Kostia Venikov fell in love with a beautiful young girl on the island.
Fair warning, this story doesn’t have a Hallmark ending.
Kostia protected her as much as he could, but one day when he had to leave the island,
a group of people grabbed her, tied her to a tree, and stabbed her repeatedly. The gang
then started eating all the parts of the girl they could stomach. By the time Kostia returned,
it was too late. She was still alive, but had lost too much blood for him to save her.
The little girl who observed this added, “all over the island, one could see human
flesh being ripped, cut and hung on trees. The clearings were littered with corpses.”
Some villagers encountered victims of cannibalism who made it out alive. One of them,
a woman named Theofila Bylina, gave an account of a female prisoner coming out of Nazinsky.
Or as she tells it, “once a woman from the Island of Death was brought to our
house”. Along with the nickname Cannibal Island, the charming moniker “Island of
Death” was frequently used by locals to describe this super successful,
everything’s-going-great-here Soviet island experiment.
“The woman was taken into the back room to spend the night and I saw that her calves
had been cut off. I asked and she said, ‘they did that to me on the Island of
Death - cut them off and cooked them.’ All the meat on her calves was cut away. Her legs were
freezing because of this and she wrapped them up with rags. She was able to move on her own.”
These stories started to leak to government officials and the local Russian population,
to the point where they could no longer be completely ignored. In July of 1933,
a local communist instructor named Vasily Velichko was sent to the camp, ostensibly
to report on the successful resettlement of the “declassed elements” of Soviet society,
but realistically to check out how many of the rumors coming out of Nazinsky were true.
What he found was akin to hell on earth.
He confirmed the overall horrific conditions of the camp. He noted, “immediately after the snow
and frost came the rains and freezing winds” - proving that even during summer in Siberia,
you really can’t catch a break - “and the people were still left without food”.
The rye flour brought to the prisoners often ended up suffocating them in their weakened
state, just from breathing it in. As though dying from trying to eat wasn’t bad enough,
many died from trying to stay warm as well.
As Velichko reported, “they burned to death alive while sleeping close
to the fires. They died from exhaustion and cold.”
After dozens of no doubt traumatizing interviews,
he wrote up an 11-page report and sent it off to Moscow. The officials who viewed the report
found it so shocking that they sent a special commission to confirm Velichko’s findings. The
commission found 31 mass graves on the island of Nazinsky, each containing 50-70 corpses.
The facts of the case now confirmed, the Kremlin took action by immediately stamping
Velichko’s report “top secret” and burying it far, far away from the general population.
To be fair, they did also prosecute more than 80 prisoners and guards
for cannibalism as well as looting and assault. But the Kremlin went
to great lengths to hide the truth of Cannibal Island from the public.
Like all awful secrets, the report eventually came to light…in 1994.
That’s right, the report stayed buried so long that by the time it came out,
“Friends” had just premiered. However, the truth of the events on Nazinsky Island had
already been shared with the public in the late 1980s, during the downfall of the USSR.
Back in 1933, Moscow thanked Velichko for his investigative work by firing him and kicking
him out of the Communist Party. He eventually ended up working as a journalist through World
War II and beyond, yet never revisited the tragedy of Cannibal Island in his writings.
By August of 1933, Nazinsky Island had been emptied out. Of the original 6,700 prisoners,
only 2,200 survived. Of those 2,200, only 300 were considered healthy and fit enough to work.
Prisoners who survived the horrifying island conditions eventually gave accounts of their
own engagement in cannibalism. One man named Uglov claimed that he never ate human meat,
just “livers and hearts”, which…one might argue is the definition of splitting hairs.
He continued, “I picked those who were not quite living, but not yet quite dead. It was
obvious that they were about to go - that in a day or two, they’d give up. So it was easier
for them that way. Now. Quickly. Without suffering for another two or three days.”
Though the horror of the Cannibal Island Experiment occurred generations ago, the
locals have never forgotten the atrocities that took place there. In 1993, they erected a wooden
cross on the island, and every year, a small group of people from the nearby city of Tomsk,
342 miles (550 kilometers) away - “nearby” is relative in Siberia,
we guess - travel to Nazinsky Island and place a wreath on it.
The wreath serves as a gesture of remembrance for
all the victims whose lives were claimed by this cruel experiment,
and as a bit of resistance to current Russian minimization of Stalin’s atrocities.
The tragic events on Nazinsky Island took place over a period of 13 weeks. Without food, shelter,
or warmth, subjected to constant violence and threats, the prisoners’ devolution into
cannibalism happened swiftly and shockingly. Though the USSR tried to cover up these crimes,
the locals of Nazino never forgot, and want to make sure this horrific
experiment is not forgotten. Have you heard of the Russian Cannibal Island Experiment before?
Now that you’ve finished watching this video, and would like to clear your mind of all the
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