[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.”]
”At first,” one official explained,
we didn’t think anyone could escape from the island of Nazino; the current was very strong, the water was freezing cold, and the river was several kilometers wide. Without tools, they couldn’t build a boat. But a certain number of criminal and déclassé elements showed great ingenuity: by tying large, dry branches together, they were able to make a sort of primitive raft that could carry three or four people. Then they let the current carry them along. A persistent rumor was going around to the effect that about sixty kilometers downstream there was a railway line that would enable them to get back to Novosibirsk… Naturally, the fugitives had very little chance of surviving. Most of them drowned or died of hunger. We found, for dozens of kilometers downstream, hundreds of bodies that had washed up on the banks of the Ob.
Source:
Werth, Nicolas. “Nazino.” Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag. Princeton University Press, 2007. 137. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Nazinskaia Tragedia, doc. 33, p. 161.
Further Reading:
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