[The following is in relation to cannibalistic practices among deportees and Gulag prisoners in the USSR, particularly during the early 1930s.]
In referring to “cannibalism by habit” the officials of the Gulag were certainly thinking of a practice that was widespread in the particularly ruthless world of hardened criminals, that of “bleeding the cow.” In the argot of the underworld, Jacques Rossi explains in his Manuel du Goulag,
the “cow” is a novice whom the ex-convicts ask to join them in attempting to escape. In general, the novice is flattered to find himself associating with famous criminals. However, he does not know that if they run short of food, he will be killed, and his kidneys and his blood eaten (usually raw, the fugitives not daring to light a fire for fear of being spotted). In the camps and prisons, cow eaters are called cannibals. Cannibalism is not peculiar to the Soviet period. Under the Czars, a certain V. Vassiliev escaped from jail along with another prisoner. Before being caught, he had eaten his companion’s flesh. But it was not until the establishment of the Soviet system that the phenomenon, which had become fairly frequent, gave rise to a series of specific slang terms (the cow; synonyms: the baggage, the ram, the lamb).
Source:
Werth, Nicolas. “Nazino.” Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag. Princeton University Press, 2007. 141. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Jacques Rossi, Le Manuel de Goulag (Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 1997), p. 283.
Further Reading:
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