Last night, on a recommendation of a friend who understands the disastrous results of believing that socialism works that have plagued the world ever since that concept’s conception, I tuned to Amazon Prime to watch Cannibal Island, a 2009 or 2011, depending on where the referencing appears, documentary by Nicolas Werth, who has originally became interested in this little known story of 6,000 of Stalin’s “discards of society” because his great uncle was one of them.
They were, for the most part, the unsuspecting people in Moscow, Leningrad and other major cities, whom the NKVD rounded up in 1933, as part of societal cleansing, transported to and abandoned on the uninhibited island in Siberia…
I could end here, and those who understand the horrific implication of the year of 1933 in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, would already be terrified. But if I also add that 2,000 of these people were criminals and 4,000 were ordinary people, among them girls as young as 12 and 1 woman who actually gave birth on this God-forsaken island.
1933 was also the year of Golodomor in Ukraine, following socialist collectivization.
The year of razkulachivanie, or de-privatization of the peasant, when all their material possessions, including livestock and even planting seed were continually confiscated and they were forcibly resettled eastward.
The year of new order passports, The USSR decree of April 22, 1933 About the Issue of Passports to the USSR Citizens in the territory of the USSR declared that all citizens at least sixteen years old residing in cities, towns, and urban workers’ settlements, as well as those residing within 62 miles of Moscow and Leningrad, within fifty 31 miles of Kharkov, Kiev, Minsk, Vladivostok, Rostov-on-Don or within the hundred-kilometers of western border of the USSR were required to have a passport with propiska, a permanent residency stamp. (Read more about propiska in My Life through My Dresses, I explained it in detail.). Within these areas passports were the only valid personal identification documents. And if one did not have a passport on them, the NKVD were ordered to arrest and deport the people, regardless of who they were. And NKVD eagerly did, organizing special check-points and detaining people who, for instance, simply ran downstairs in their slippers to get tobacco from the corner store or milk for the infant they left upstairs. Many were transients, who were just passing through a major city and made a fast run from the stopped train to the station buffet to buy bread or pirozhkis, a commonplace affair in those days for long-distance train-travellers. Without passports on them, they were rounded up and shipped away.
I have always known that during that era people disappeared without a trace, I know countless references in post-perstroika books and film, but also from the oral family lore. I was mainly always concerned with those who were forced to die from Golodomor right in the heart of the wheat-wealthy Ukraine, or young girls who disappeared off the streets of major cities if they chanced to walk alone at night. The Black Crow (NKVD vehicles) snatched them for the high-echelon Communist Party players’ rapes and they were never seen again or their bodies found.
I also knew of Siberian cannibalism.
In the vastness of the land and harshness of its terrain, extra food to carry on long on-foot trips was necessary, but the extra weight could mean death to the carrier. So, for the last several centuries, criminals who served out in Siberia but dared to escape, brought their human livestock with them. Two or three men, escaping in a group, would bring another, an unsuspecting and completely unarmed one, with them, for emergency food. It is very gruesome, but very well-known to Russians now. Most likely, was not so in the 1930s.
Following their detention on or around May 1, i.e. the holiday of May Day, International Workers Day… these 6,000 humans were sent to a labor camp very much, like the soon to come to existence Nazi concentration or labor camps everyone is familiar with through history or their depiction in films like Schindler’s List and A Beautiful Life, but much much worse! Everything is worse in Siberia given its temperature, wildlife predators and immenseness. In that Soviet camp, the top admin was not prepared to absorb a four-barge load of humans into his domain, so in his evil wisdom, he decided that to dump them on a desert island without food. The situation quickly escalated to cannibalism, like within 24 hrs, becasue they were already starved in transit. The criminals began to hunt the ordinary folk for food. In the end, the numbers of those who disappeared were astronomic. Perhaps 1 in 5 lived to tell the story, but they were not permitted to. They were fact-checked by the communist party and it was determined that the story was already verified by other “independent fact-checkers” and is false. That is why they were never released, never allowed to return to the European part of the USSR, so that they would not spread the truth…they were sent on to other camps, jails, wherever their presence could be kept secret.
Since hearing the story last night, images of unfathomable cannibalistic atrocities are haunting me. Never had I ever heard details that horrific. Never could I ever have imagined them on my own, even though I am filled with stories of the Holocaust and WWII survivals and some of them are of unimaginable cruelty.
In 2022 – the vaccination passports seemed unfathomable just 2 years ago. No one in their right mind should desire them for any human after watching this exceptional documentary, that was made before our 2020s era of fear of government and blind compliance to its demands, as conveyed to the unsuspecting and trusting masses by highest, high, medium and low level execs and admins, who are busy creating their own forms of cannibalistic experimentation through acts not dissimilar from those of 1930’s USSR.
In a man eat man world – who would you be?