Nazino was Stalin’s worst labour gulag. Its inmates knew it by another name: Cannibal Island

Yet the regime ensured that details of the horrors of those few short months in 1933, which resulted in more than 4,000 deaths, were hidden for decades. To understand why, look no further than the epithet most often given to the place: Cannibal Island.

Why did Nazino Island become a gulag?

The idea proposed by the heads of the Gulag system and secret police was to relocate criminals and undesirable elements to previously uncultivated land and so develop self-sufficient communities.

In reality, there were nowhere near enough resources to make these ‘special settlements’ viable.

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Far from hardened criminals or political dissidents, the majority of people sent to them had been arrested on the streets of Moscow and Leningrad for being caught without their internal passport.

One man was taken away after he stepped outside for a cigarette, while a young student was seized while waiting at the front door of his aunt’s apartment. Even those with the proper paperwork were not safe from the unforgiving arrest quotas of an authoritarian police state.

How Nazino Island became Cannibal Island

In May 1933, the first batch of prisoners arrived at Nazino Island, on the Ob River. They were already malnourished, sick and despairing after being crammed into barges for the journey – during which over two dozen had died – and it immediately became clear that there was zero chance of cultivating the swampy terrain. Besides, they had no tools or shelter.

For food, the prisoners of Nazino had only 20 tons of flour. Order broke down straight away, with fights breaking out over the distribution of the flour, gangs forming, and the guards taking perverse pleasure in hunting those who tried to escape as if it were a sport.

Those who managed to get some of the flour either suffocated on the dry powder or mixed it with water from the river and contracted dysentery. Starvation and disease set in quickly, followed by the first cases of cannibalism.

Soon, violent mobs murdered the weak to ensure a source of meat. Horrific accounts later gathered from eyewitnesses told of women being tied to trees and having body parts cut off and cooked. One of the local Ostyak people recalled another woman arriving at their house one night having made it away from the “Island of Death” despite having no calves.

The guards did nothing to prevent the atrocities; in fact, more prisoners kept arriving, as if they were animals on the way to an abattoir.

How did the Nazino tragedy end?

By July, when the camp was eventually closed, only 2,200 of the roughly 6,700 sent there remained alive. Many would not survive the transfer to other camps, let alone be healthy enough to be put to work. The guards, meanwhile, had been given short prison sentences; token punishments that amounted to a slap on the wrists.

Having heard rumours of the horrors of Nazino Island, a Soviet official named Vasily Velichko set out on his own volition to investigate. Having conducted interviews and seen half-eaten bodies hidden in the grass, he sent a damning report. The response: Velichko was kicked out of the Communist Party and his findings buried in the archives.

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It was only thanks to the efforts of human rights organisation, Memorial, in the late-1980s that the truth of Cannibal Island came to light.

On Nazino today stands a wooden cross and every year people make a pilgrimage to the island to commemorate those who lost their lives in that most desperate, most appalling of situations.