Stalin’s Cannibal Island and Distracted Driving

“All the best doctors are in the Gulag or dead.” – The Death of Stalin

Stalin has a special place in his heart for you, right at People’s Worker Camp Number 1323.

I’ve been more time driving recently, and with that time, I’ve learned to speak Dutch, memorized the Dewey Decimal System, and figured out how to make a bagpipe using trash bags, duct tape and copper pipe stolen from abandoned buildings.

I kid.  PVC pipe works better.

I’ve actually spent most of the time driving listening to commentary on the news, history, or other podcasts that drift on up into the “play me next” list.  I guess that means to a certain extent my viewing history is determined by an algorithm written by a pimply-faced 19 year old in the basement of the Google® complex.  Thankfully, he writes pretty good code, and I thank all of the girls that wouldn’t date him for that.

Yes, I know that it’s YouTube®, but I really don’t let watching it distract me from driving – I swear I never actually watch YouTube™ while I’m texting and drinking coffee at the same time while steering with my knee in a school zone.  In reality, most of what I “watch” doesn’t require any visuals at all, since often it’s just a person talking.

The Mrs. tells me that the steering wheel is just in my way.

However, in the case of one particular video, the story was one of the most horrible I’d ever heard and I was thankful that pictures didn’t survive to illustrate it.

Let me tell you about it.

In 1933, a guy named Genrikh Yagoda (head of the OGPU secret police, which eventually become known as the KGB) got together with his best buddy Matvei Berman, who ran something called

Главное  управление  лагерей

– which has the sort-of boring translated name of “Main Administration of Camps.”  I first heard about Berman’s organization though its more common name, Gulag.  Yagoda and Berman had a fantastic idea.  Stalin had decided to punish the Kulaks by taking all of the food out of the Ukraine and closing the border – I write more about that little adventure here (In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!).  That meant that there wasn’t as much food in the Soviet Union since they were purposefully killing all the people who made the food in the area where the food came from.

A rational leader would respond by, oh I don’t know, stopping the slaughter of all the farmers that grow the food?  But not Stalin-era Soviets.  No, they needed a solution that allowed them to keep killing their own farmers, yet still grow food.  Since Yagoda had police and Berman had prisons, they’d use the police to arrest citizens to fill the prisons and make the prisons farms that grow food.

Secret, secret police:  the CatGB.  Only known weakness?  Laser pointers.

But what crime to arrest the citizens for?  Yagoda and Berman came across the idea of requiring internal passports.  If you were caught without your papers?  Boom.  Deport to the Gulag where you could be magically made into a productive farmer to patriotically feed the Motherland.

The local secret police that worked for Yagoda loved the idea.  They loved it so much, that even if you had the internal passports, you could still get arrested.  Why?  Quotas.  The plan was for the secret police to arrest 2,000,000 Soviet citizens for export to the farms.  With a demand of 2,000,000, there was no reason for actual guilt to be required.

In the infinite wisdom of Yagoda and Berman, they decided the best people to abduct for their new farming plan were . . . city people.  I mean, how hard could farming be?  This was the Yagoda-Berman plan – they would send these arrested city dwellers off to Eastern Russia so they could make farms in Siberia and gloriously feed the Soviet Union.

Red Acres is the place to be . . . farm living is the life for me . . . Siberia stretching out so far and wide . . . Comrade, keep Moscow just give me that Gulag life

If you’re like me, you’re immediately wondering how this bulletproof plan could fail.  As their plan was being enthusiastically carried out, tens of thousands of people were being arrested.  Time to ship them east.  How?  Open barges used to haul timber.  In May.  In Siberia.  Amazingly, of the first 5,000 shipped out, only 27 died on the 2,500 mile trip.

Immediately died, that is.  The day they got there several hundred more died of exposure.

Not having any real orders, and not having any tools or shelter or, well, anything, the guards dropped all of the first 5,000 prisoners on an island in the middle of a river.  Another 1,200 or so were shipped to the same island by the end of May.  Nazino Island was the chosen site.  Why?  Who knows – probably made sense from the viewpoint of a map in Moscow.  And those guards?  They had no shoes.  No uniforms.  No training – they were new recruits as well.

Nazino Island is 2000’ across at its widest point, and about 2 miles long as it squats in the middle of the Ob River.  As a landing point for 6,000 city-bred farmers, it probably couldn’t have been worse – part marsh, part forest.  The forest part would have been fine, if they had axes.

But they didn’t have any equipment or shelter of any kind.  Thankfully things couldn’t get worse, could they?

If only it were just rain . . .

Wait, they could – there were regular, violent criminals tossed in with the poor randomly arrested citizens.  And violent criminals tossed in with scared people was a way to make the disaster even worse as the criminals took charge.  What little food was given to the prisoners (about 900 calories of rye flour per person – 300 grams per day) was often given to the criminals to distribute, with worse than predictable results.

How could it have been worse than predictable?  The city folk mixed what flour they actually got with water so that they weren’t eating handfuls of dry powder.

What water did they use?  River water.  Raw river water.  Unboiled raw river water.

Many became violently ill.

It gets worse.  Much worse.  By June, only 2,000 of the Nazino deportees are left alive, and only 200 of them were in any condition to work when they were moved to the next labor camp – one that actually had buildings and tools and food this time.  Go to YouTube© and search for “Stalin’s Cannibal Island,” if you want more details.  But I’ll warn you – it’s disturbing content which should be clear because you’re using “Stalin” and “cannibal” in the same search term.  I don’t recommend you watch or listen to a video on it, so I’m not linking to it – you can’t unhear it.  Make your own call if you really want to watch it – it’s not hard to find, especially if you’re driving.

No one knows if Nazino was the worst of Soviet excesses.  We only know about it because a local communist leader was so appalled by what he saw that he sent a report to Moscow.  The report was immediately classified, and popped in a folder in a featureless warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant.  Only after the fall of the Soviet Union did this information come out because someone found a dusty copy in that Siberian warehouse.

And that, perhaps, is the greatest tragedy.  The following phrase has been (rightly or not) attributed to Stalin, “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.”  Not long after the report reached Moscow, Stalin stopped the program that Yagoda and Berman had started.  Millions were still sent to the Gulags and millions died in them, but there was at least some planning, food and logistics to go with the casual cruelty.

In 1938, five years after Nazino, Yagoda was shot after a show trial because he irritated Stalin.  One year later, Berman was shot as well after his own show trial.  It’s unlikely that either was executed with Nazino in mind – Stalin just didn’t like Yagoda and Berman after a while and when Stalin didn’t like you, it was pretty common that you were guilty of huge numbers of crimes.  It’s likely that Stalin simply didn’t care about the dead citizens and had probably forgotten about them by the time he got around to thinning the herd.

This is communism.  It’s not an aberration.  It’s not an unusual condition.  It’s a story that’s repeated wherever communism is tried.

Che, showing his skill at mining for glorious mineral resources for the worker’s paradise!

Despite the soft face put on socialist regimes by their proponents, this is the inevitable end state.  Communism results inevitably in a war against the people, with places like Nazino being the rule rather than the exception.  When you see the faces promising class warfare and offering free things, remember that this is what they mean – eventually every citizen either cowers in fear of the state, or is consumed by it.

There is an alternative, thankfully.  You too can learn to make your own bagpipe . . . but I’d avoid doing the tricky bits in a school zone.