Of all the tyrannical dictators of the 20th century Joseph Stalin does not seem to get
as much attention as he should. His 30-year reign of terror caused 30 million lives just among his
own population. The greatest legacy was when he created and expanded the gulag system but
what was the gulag system and why was it created? Why were the communists so active in persecuting
their own people even when innocent of crimes? What happened on Nazinsky Island?
How did these isolated prisoners survive?
Hello i'm Colin Heaton, former soldier, Marine Corps scout sniper, history professor, historian and
book author and we'll answer these questions and other issues on this segment of Forgotten History.
When Stalin succeeded Lenin and exiled Leon Trotsky he became the supreme leader
and created the massive gulag system. The gulags had several components; the one thing they all had
in common was forced to labor for the common good. Stalin and his Cheka his secret police used terror
to instill obedience through fear, compliance through retribution. They needed a labor force and
rather than pay wages they utilized slave labor. The head of Cheka and its successor the NKVD or the
secret police, Genrikh Yagoda and Matvei Berman the head of the gulag system created the resettling
program. Genrikh Yagoda is best known as the head of the NKVD who oversaw the trials of old school
Bolsheviks Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev during the Great Purge. He eventually became a victim of
Stalin himself that was executed in 1937 and replaced with Lavrenti Beria.The conservative
estimate is that from 1930 to 1933 at least two million people were forcibly taken to the gulags
in Siberia, Uzbekistan Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. Many of these gulags were placed near coal,
gold, lead, and silver mines. Others were used as part of the massive deforestation program to
harvest trees. Many of these prisoners were used as slave farmers to plow and build a large expanded
agricultural program. A large part of this program was to cover up the ongoing famine in Ukraine
where Stalin punished the Ukrainians by stealing their harvests, slaughtering their animals and
killing or deporting the farmers, called Kulaks who resisted the enforced collectivization policy.
The NKVD had a quota and to meet that arrest quota anyone was fair game from children to the elderly.
No one was exempt from arrest and deportation for labor, no questions asked. Stalin needed hard
currency so agriculture, coal and precious metals were sold on the open market. Slaves did the work
and millions died as a result. One such place was a labor camp on Nazinsky Island also called Nazino
due to the nearest village and was located in the middle of the Ob River in Siberia which
was only three quarters of a mile long and about 600 yards wide in size. In early 1933 people deemed
criminals or anti-revolutionaries were sent to these camps which were expanding in what
Alexander Solzhenitsyn later called the "Gulag Archipelago" and 6700 so-called criminals were
sent to Nazinsky Island. People were arrested and sent to the island under the weakest of charges
such as not having the proper passport for being in a certain area without permission or
being accused of anti-communist propaganda. Many communist criminals such as thieves, rapists and
even murderers were sent there to be part of the forest labor project. The secret police had their
quotas and they were highly effective. When the first 25,000 people arrived in the main collection
point at Tomsk in April 1933 their camp had not been built. However in true incompetent fashion
the NKVD were stuck with these people because continued transportation was not possible as the
Ob and Tom Rivers were frozen solid. Again in true communist fashion Stalin and his minions had not
thought through the long-term logistics of such an action. Their prisoners were placed on the island
without adequate shelter and no tools or materials to build any and the population kept growing.
They were also not provided enough food although the guards on the island were fed. Prisoners who
tried to swim off the island were shot if seen and disease, starvation and exposure began taking their
toll. Soon many incidents of cannibalism were being reported as the guards talked about it
and some events were officially reported. The locals living near the island were well aware
of these events hence their calling it "Cannibal Island" or the "Island of Death". By the end of August
1933 at least 4,000 people were reported dead or missing. A Soviet document from August 20th 1933
reflected that there were only 2,200 survivors out of the original 6,700 prisoners in the last
count. These unfortunate 2,200 survivors were simply transferred to other gulags to perish. More of this
story surfaced during an investigation by Radio Free Europe which posted the following story in
1989" Vera Panovaya a resident in the village of Ust-Tyma who told her story recalled a meeting a
man named Kuzma Selenkov who had been on Cannibal Island quote: "He was a miner from Novokuznetsk
married two children. Once he went to Novosibirsk and stopped at the central market. At that moment
they surrounded the market set up a dragnet and arrested anyone who wasn't carrying documents.
Anyone including women and children was loaded onto a barge and sent to Nazinsky Island. There was
no food, people were tortured by hunger, the guards threw bits of bread as they passed the island. If
you got a piece you ate the rest had nothing... Salnikov was there but he managed to escape.
He swam the river and made it through the swamps to a village. After that he worked
on a collective farm." Occasionally small drops of food were made as reported in an interview
with a prisoner who stated: "Immediately after the snow and frost came the rains and freezing winds
and the people were still left without food. Every fifth or fourth day some dry flower was brought
to the island and distributed to the settlers. A few hundred grams each after getting the ration.
The people ran to the water and mixed it with the flower in their hats and ate it. Many people just
ate the flower as it was and since it was a powder many suffocated from breathing it in." Among the
Soviet era documents preserved in the Gulag Museum in Tomsk are some records of the interrogations of
some of the criminals who were at Nazinsky Island. One man was asked if he ate human meat; his reply
was quote, "No that is not true I only ate livers and hearts...it was very simple just like shashlik.
We made skewers from willow branches cut it into pieces stuck it on the skewers and roasted it over
the campfire," end quote. This man explained how he and others selected their victims, "I picked
those who are not quite living but not 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," end quote. Reports also included women who were tied to trees
as their breasts calves thighs and buttocks were removed. There was also a profiteering aspect to
the murders; some prisoners were murdered not just for food but so the gold in their dental work
could be removed as currency. One prisoner's interrogation explained that they could exchange
the gold fillings for some of their food and smoking tobacco. So horrific were the events one
of the local communists named Vasily Velichko set out on his own initiative to investigate. In July
1933 he interviewed dozens of people and wrote an 11-page report that "People began dying,
they burned to death alive while sleeping close to the fires they died from exhaustion and cold."
His report was sent to Moscow, the Secret Police local headquarters at Novosibirsk
and the district collection center at Narym. His report was received and stamped "top secret." The top
communists did not want this story getting out and it was not discovered until 1994 after the USSR
collapsed. When Velichko returned to the island in august 1934 after all the prisoners were gone his
report stated "The grass on the island was head high but locals who went there to gather berries
returned after discovering corpses in the grass and stick shelters full of skeletons."
end quote. As one may imagineVelichko's report created an uproar when it landed in Moscow. The
Communist Party did not advertise any news that was detrimental and were less than appreciative
of those who brought such news to their attention. However a special commission in Nazino was sent
to investigate and the facts of the report were confirmed. Several officials who ran the camp were
reprimanded and sentenced to prison terms ranging from one to three years. Velichko was rewarded for
his detailed and verified report by being fired from his position. He later became a journalist and
became famous reporting on the war as he traveled with the Red Army all the way to Berlin. After the
war Velichko wrote several books describing the great improvements in the transformation
of Siberia under the Soviets. However he never again wrote about Stalin's Cannibal Island. We
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