The Nazino File
WOOD, GRAEME
The Nazino File A vision of Hell from the Soviet archives. by Graeme Wood As a general rule, a name like "Cannibal Island" spells doom for property values. But Nazino, in western...
...Like so many expeditions into Russian archives, Werth's digging through the history of declasse deportations uncovers moments of obscene vileness—Molo-tov, Stalin's chief commissar, suggested tetchily that the deportees be made to pay for their own deporta-tion—but also countless instances of gross incompetence that represent, if not a straightforward crime against humanity, at least a clear-cut case of criminal negligence against it...
...On May 18, about 5,000 declasse labor colonists, nearly all men, disembarked at Nazino, an island about half the size of Central Park...
...Diarrhea struck immediately...
...The State's enemies had merely transmogrified, he said, from easily spotted kulaks into insidious saboteurs, rumormongers, and marginals known collectively as "declasse elements...
...These unlucky folk—who constituted the bulk of Nazino's inmates —were plucked from city streets and sent to Siberia...
...Visitors found bodies mutilated and stripped of their tenderest meat and organs, and caught settlers with human livers in their hands...
...But the initial reaction was denial...
...The plan's mastermind, Genrikh Iagoda, saw an attractive side benefit to "purifying" cities: Thousands of beggars and criminals could be dragooned into settling and subduing the Siberian wild as "labor colonists...
...The enterprising among them removed their hats and shirts and loaded them with a meager clump of flour—not that it mattered, since they were so crazed with hunger that they ate the flour raw and washed it down with the giardia-infested waters of the Ob and Nazina rivers...
...By 1933, before Nazi-no's gulag opened, Soviet authorities had already spent four years shipping the vestiges of the prosperous peasant class to Siberia and, generally, to their deaths...
...Perhaps surprisingly, the disgorging of thousands of secret, yellowed documents since 1991 has not dramatically revised our understanding of what happened in the gulags...
...The summers, though a brief deliverance from the subzero winters, brought dense clouds of mosquitoes and biting flies...
...In one wave of deportations, one out of five deportees was totally incapable of working—indeed, many appeared to have been selected because they were guaranteed not to survive the journey...
...Authorities found out that Nazino had gotten out of hand, and eventually they sent in guards to protect the nearby villagers from being overrun and devoured...
...Within two days, dozens had died, and the living feasted on their corpses...
...They terrorized the locals, stealing boats to escape their wretched conditions, plundering local gardens and farms, and in general acting like extras from a zombie flick...
...Werth writes that the planners harbored the same spirit of Siberian manifest destiny that Russian leaders had embraced since the time of the czar...
...In any case, cannibalism in Siberia was widespread enough to demand a special argot for prisoners who intended to devour their colleagues...
...As for the rare meadows, they are under water until mid-July...
...But shocking miniatures—Werth humbly calls his a "microhistorical effort"— are emerging more vivid than those we could reliably cite before...
...Already the region had reduced its unwilling residents to eating roots and carrion...
...But Nazino, in western Siberia, is so naturally awful that even the grimmest name can't make it sound much worse than it really is...
...One intended settler of the brutal Siberian outback, a 103-year-old man, could not stand, walk, or speak...
...Residents appealed for government protection...
...The guards did, however, have rifles, and they eagerly extorted food and favors from their ragged charges...
...An account from the early 1930s described the region as "an immense marshy plain . . . covered with an impenetrable tangle of brush...
...In one case, a guard fell in love with a pretty deportee and tried to protect her...
...Officials in Siberia received only two days' notice that they would have to come up with food, medicine, dwellings, and jobs for a million new settlers...
...The phrase "bleeding the cow" referred to the practice of inviting another prisoner to join an escape attempt, only so his fellow escapees could murder and eat him somewhere along the long trek to freedom...
...The state also rounded up vagrants, beggars, and others viewed as parasites on Soviet society...
...Malaria was endemic, and among forced settlers in 1932, infants died at a rate of 10 percent per month, compared with 10 percent per year in Somalia today...
...In 1931, a district near Nazino was gifted with 800 "socially dangerous" individuals, who arrived and were told simply to "live and prosper," with neither food nor jobs provided...
...Nicolas Werth's excellent history of the Nazino gulag is a portrait of a place that went from terrible to Graeme Wood is an editor at the Atlantic Monthly...
...Authorities snatched many of them and hustled them onto trains solely because they had forgotten their internal passports (an innovation introduced that year...
...Eventually, even the Soviet state couldn't ignore the disaster, and a commission convened to establish what had gone wrong...
...The archives reveal deportees who were "invalids," "mentally retarded," and "decomposing semicadavers...
...In a strong field, Cannibal Island is one of the grisliest and most unpleasant accounts of gulag life...
...Its author, best known as a contributor to the Black Book of Communism (1997), a book-length butcher's bill of communism's millions of victims worldwide, is among a cohort of historians who have provided a picture of Stalinism that matches in gruesomeness and exceeds in scholarly rigor the anthologies of rumor compiled by Robert Conquest before the opening of the archives in 1991...
...Their rations consisted of one large rotting pile of flour communally administered by a few guards, and no containers...
...The commission's reports, excavated by Werth and the Russian scholar Sergei Krasil-nikov from State, FSB, and presidential archives, form the basis of Cannibal Island...
...unimaginable...
...But where the spirit was willing, the state apparatus was weak, and probably nothing could have saved the plan from disaster...
...They contended that those who resorted to eating the dead suffered from mental illness and were "cannibals by habit," rather than because the Soviet system had failed them...
...The plan had predictable consequences...
...Werth's history of Nazino summarizes this background in careful detail before describing the Nazino gulag, founded in 1933...
...This one ranks as one of the more memorable exhibits in the Soviet gallery of horrors...
...But Stalin pronounced the revolution incomplete...
...Officials insisted that rumors of a cannibalistic nightmare lacked foundation and were, by the way, seditious...
...The plan's own authors knew that their strategy was "grandiose," and they noted that the "settlement of two million almost completely deprived individuals in virgin territories" would require massive planning and funding, something the Soviet state could not possibly provide...
...When no help came, they took it upon themselves to hunt down and kill the deportees...
...The few guards lacked shoes, uniforms, and discipline, and were, said an official, "in no way distinguished from the declasse elements they were supposed to monitor...
...When he returned from a short trip away, the other deportees had tied her to a poplar tree and, while she still lived, cut off her breasts and muscles for meat...
Vol. 12 • July 2007 • No. 42
