[The following takes place during what would later be known as the Nazino Affair. Context of the incident, courtesy of Wikipedia: “The Nazino affair was the mass deportation of 6,000 people to Nazino Island in the Soviet Union in May 1933. The deportees, mostly political prisoners and petty criminals, were forcibly sent to the small, isolated island in Western Siberia, located 540 kilometers (340 mi) northwest of Tomsk, to construct a "special settlement". They were abandoned with only flour for food, few tools, clothing or shelter, and those who attempted to leave were killed by armed guards. The conditions of the island led to widespread disease, abuse of power, violence and cannibalism. Within thirteen weeks, over 4,000 of the deportees related to Nazino Island had died or disappeared, and a majority of the survivors were in ill health.”]
On the island, the dead were piling up. In the mission report Kolubaiev, the head of the convoy, submitted on his return to Tomsk he wrote:
At two p.m. 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.” 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.
Source:
Werth, Nicolas. “Nazino.” Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag. Princeton University Press, 2007. 132. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Nazinskaia Tragedia, doc. 15, p. 44.
Further Reading:
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