'The Things We Saw!'

...The things we saw...

...He and his assistants thought the area was in serious danger of being turned into a “garbage can,” and that the expected benef its of a labor force intended to exploit natural resources would be slight compared to the huge problems of policing “these enormous contingents of outlaws...

...They uncover “a crucial and particularly dramatic episode that has been ignored for almost six decades: the deportation in 1933 of thousands of ‘déclassé and socially harmful elements’ from Moscow and Leningrad...

...For example, over half a century ago I reviewed Gustav Herling’s A World Apart (Heinemann, 1951), one of the first memoirs to expose the cruelty and inhumanity of our wartime ally...

...His narrative begins with a 1989 interview conducted by a founding member of the Tomsk Memorial Association, “created during [Mikhail S.] Gorbachev’s perestroika in order to preserve the memory of political repression in the USSR...

...Soon afterward, Eikhe and other purged comrades were posthumously rehabilitated...

...People “turned into jackals,” Velichko wrote in his letter to Stalin...

...Incidentally, strictly speaking “gulag” does not mean forced labor camp...

...Eikhe, who was the off icial chiefly responsible for forced collectivization and dekulakization in Siberia, later became a Politburo member and People’s Commissar for Agriculture...

...In time, of course, the world learned about the decades-long exploitation, repression and liquidation of millions of Soviet citizens from such eloquent eyewitnesses as Vladimir Bukovsky, Evgeniya Ginzburg, Varlam Shalamov, Natan Sharansky, and other camp survivors...

...Their book, Fo r ced Labor in Soviet Russia (Yale, 1947), communicated the reality of the Stalinist system not only through the testimony of inmates but also the reproduction of irrefutable documents...

...Her testimony is “complemented and conf irmed by a dozen others collected on Nazino and in neighboring villages,” W e r th notes...

...Leningrad?’ They were asking the wrong people...

...We r th points out that Eikhe’s name would have been forgotten “had the tortures to which he was subjected after his arrest as an ‘enemy of the people’ not been discussed at length by Nikita Khrushchev” in his secret speech to the 20th Communist Party Congress in 1956 (first published in the U.S...

...In this sense, this episode mirrored the Stalinist vision—and its reality—as a whole...

...They asked us, ‘Where’s the railway?’ We ’ d never seen a railway...

...We r th quotes frequently from several archival documents, in particular The Nazino Tragedy: A Documented Scholarly Edition (Tomsk: Memorial Association and Institute of History of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Science, 2002), which details the ensuing “dreadful, appalling” instances of cannibalism...

...Since it was impossible during the Cold War to obtain a comprehensive picture of Soviet forced labor camps, the West had to rely largely on the testimony of victims who survived...

...People were dying everywhere...

...The first 5,000 who arrived in May 1933 were so emaciated and weak that they were unable to stand...

...The government began its program of agricultural collectivization at the end of the 1920s, and by 1934 most kulaks who opposed it had been deported to Siberia—over 500 miles from the nearest city or railway line—with many ordinary peasants...

...But he fell victim to Stalin’s purges of 1937-38, when he was accused of “Bukharinism,” and was executed in 1940...

...Further evidence came to light in 2002, “with the publication of the documents produced by the commission of inquiry set up in September 1933 by the Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Western Siberia...

...The last quarter of the book is devoted to the gruesome account of what occurred on Nazino...

...W e r th’s “microhistorical effort” shows that “the uniqueness of what happened on the island of Nazino had to do with a very particular conjunction of circumstances...

...The author demonstrates how this event fit into the policy of massive deportations Stalin’s regime had been pursuing for more than three years in an attempt to “liquidate the kulaks” (prosperous peasants) as a class...

...He concludes that the regime’s goal of “a modernizing utopia of purifying and civilizing social engineering under complete control” transformed the deportees into animals and “paradoxically caused a whole nest of archaisms to rise to the surface...

...Hard as it is to believe today, many abroad were skeptical and often contemptuous toward the early postwar revelations of Herling and others, such as Menshevik scholars like David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky (names that will be familiar to longtime NL readers...

...now a more extensive campaign aimed to cleanse the USSR’s two largest cities plus other urban centers of “parasitical and socially dangerous elements...

...Some will remember that he contributed to The Black Book of Communism (Harvard, 1999), edited by Stéphane Courtois, which elicited both widespread acclaim and indignant protests for daring to compare the Kremlin’s crimes with those of Nazism when it initially appeared in French...

...In February 1930, Robert Eikhe, the highest regional Party official in Western Siberia, had tried unsuccessfully to “negotiate a decrease” in the number of dekulakized peasants to be sent to his region...

...INCONTRAST to the panoramic approach of his predecessors, Werth focuses on an actual island called Nazino, in the Ob River, north of Tomsk and Novosibirsk in Western Siberia...

...We’re Ostyaks...

...She recalls that in the spring of 1933 thousands of people were brought to the island and tried to escape...

...it is the Russian acronym for the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps (Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei), established in 1930 under the jurisdiction of the Soviet political police (called the OGPU between 1922-34, then successively renamed NKVD, MVD and KGB...

...During the preceding three years more than 2 million kulaks had been deported...

...People were running away, starving...

...Thanks to the magisterial works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Robert Conquest and more recently Anne Applebaum, among others, it has come to represent the entire network of camps located like islands in the vast Siberian expanse...

...Underground songs composed by gulag prisoners, many of them anonymous, also offered poignant proof of the suffering...

...In addition, the opening of the regional archives in Novosibirsk and Tomsk in the early 1990s, “along with the publication of certain documents concerning the tragedy of Nazino, [have] allowed us to see more clearly what happened on ‘Dead Island’ (Ostrov-Smert), which the locals also called ‘Cannibal Island’ (Ostrov lioudoedov...

...Instead of putting them in labor camps, they were removed to a kind of second-level gulag, “special settlements” in isolated locations where presumably they would perform useful economic activity and pay for their upkeep...

...Its] goal was to ‘check the veracity of the information that Comrade Velichko, the Party’s journalist-propagandist in the Narym region, sent to Comrade Stalin regarding the situation that occurred on the island of Nazino, on the Ob.’” Werth comments that if Velichko had not undertaken his own investigation of the deportees’ deaths, “and then dared to write to Stalin himself,” they would never have been disclosed...

...Reviewed by Gene Sosin Author, “Sparks of Liberty: An Insider’s Memoir of Radio Liberty” IN HIS new book Nicolas Werth, a prominent French historian of the Soviet era, again makes good use of the gulag archives opened to researchers after the collapse of the USSR...

...The respondent is an elderly peasant woman belonging to the Ostyak ethnic group that inhabited this bleak region long before the Russians arrived...

...by the NL as a supplement to the issue of July 16, 1956, entitled “Crimes of the Stalin Era,” with annotations by Nicolaevsky...

...They asked, ‘Where’s Moscow...

...BEFORE THE AUTHOR concentrates on what befell nearly 10,000 people who were dumped on Nazino, he depicts the prevailing crisis in Soviet agriculture, the widespread famine, and the haphazard, improvised decisions that reflected the confusion and poor coordination between the central and local authorities...

...Not only killing but in some cases eating their prey, as this woman all too graphically describes in one g risly example...

...they were killing each other...

...In 2004, together with the Russian organization Memorial, Werth prepared a sevenvolume documentary study based on official materials kept secret by Stalin and his successors...

...A worldwide survey of the past five centuries, it seeks to “stimulate discussion and debate in the public sphere as well as among scholars and in the classroom,” in the hope that it will “help promote human rights standards and prevent future crimes against humanity...

...Cannibal Island is an important contribution to a valuable Princeton series edited by Eric D. Weitz, “Human Rights and Crimes Against Humanity...

...In February 1933, Eikhe wrote directly to Stalin, setting forth the reasons why the new OGPU plan seemed to him “totally unrealistic,” and “thought up by comrades who know nothing about the reality of the Great North...

...The head of the OGPU, Genrikh Yagoda, launched a “grandiose” plan in early 1933 to colonize the virgin areas of Siberia and Kazakhstan with millions of “anti-Soviet elements...

...They were starving and fought for bags of flour...