To survive, people ate human hearts, lungs and livers. Man was an animal - as a victim and a hunter. Inhuman conditions, an island many kilometers away from civilization, hunger, disease and death awaiting everyone. What did the idea of settling the virgin areas of Siberia by the USSR in the 1930s lead to?
"The Grand Plan" in the Soviet "Wild East"
The originator of the plan to colonize the vast areas of Siberia and northern Kazakhstan was Gienrich Yagoda, head of the OGPU - the United State Political Board. This plan was not fully implemented, as the political tops failed to deal with the organization of transports and logistics. After a short time, the mass deportations were halted. However, this did not save the people already sent to distant regions of Siberia. They had to fight to survive.
Jagoda believed that one and a half million people would be able to tame the harsh nature and would take up the role and clearing of forests in order to build villages and towns for themselves. Politicians also believed that by boosting trade and the extraction of natural goods, the cost of deportation would quickly be recovered by the USSR.
From 1932 on, the situation in the USSR worsened. The party raised individual standards of deliveries to farmers, as it wanted to maintain grain exports, which were important for the state. This, in turn, led to an increase in the import of agricultural machinery, which more and more influenced industrialization. However, the harvest did not look too good. Farmers tried to avoid transferring large amounts of crops to the state (the grain was buried, hidden). The solidarity of collective farm owners with peasants was growing. The authorities did not like this, which in the fall of 1932 sent hundreds of OGPU agents to the villages to arrest careless peasants. These were considered "counter-revolutionary elements" and sent for deportation to "labor villages".
Gienrich Jagoda
The party began to pursue the peasants who fled to the cities, criminals, refugees of other nationalities (including their families). They were refused passports. Nicolas Werth in his book "Cannibals Island" quotes one of the OGPU officers:
(...) in order to immediately and definitively catch and banish all these elements, specially appointed policemen from passport offices, under the guidance of the department inspector, check the letters held by janitors and building managers, bypassing the barracks intended for seasonal workers, places where suspicious elements meet, illegal night shelters, attics and cellars, they conduct checks at stations, fairs, bazaars and other crowded places to chase out declassed elements, beggars and thieves from there .
Arrests and forced deportation
As of April 1933, the deportation plans included approximately 750,000 "counter-revolutionary elements" sent by August, and 250,000 from September. Izjasław Aleksandrowicz, the head of the OGPU Transport Department, presented the idea of the so-called "Optimal transport", assuming four convoys a day for 1,800 people (7,200 during the day, 216,000 per month), spread over two transports to Siberia and two to Kazakhstan. In the Soviet Union, as you know, the paper accepted a lot, having little to do with reality. The operation began on May 1, 1933, although the first transports were already sent in April.
Ivan Dolgin, head of the regional Department of Special Settlements:
(...) for the first time the party entrusted us with such a great task:to settle a million people in two or three summer months, in harsh conditions (...). Despite the modest resources and the thinness of the staff, we accepted this difficult task without complaint, because it was entrusted to us by the party and the OGPU (...)
There were street round-ups just to meet the standard of arrest. The most common reason was the lack of documents, e.g. a passport. I will quote a short list of some people arrested and later sent for deportation:
- Wł. Novoivyov, "a Muscovite, a driver at the Kompriesor factory, a three-time leader (...). After work, he and his wife went to the cinema. While she was getting ready, he went out into the street to get some cigarettes. Arrested and deported. ”
- N. W. Wojkin "(...) detained in the street when he was going to a football match. He forgot to take his passport with him. ”
- Maslov, 'a party member, worked in the Moscow gas plant. He invited his friend-engineer and brother-in-law for a glass. All three went out into the street to buy some snacks. A police patrol stopped them at the grocery store. They didn't have their passports with them. They were deported. The engineer and brother-in-law died on Nazin. Maslow survived. "
- Rachamiecjanowa, “12 years old, does not speak Russian. She was passing through in Moscow. Her mother left her at the train station, and at the same time she was trying to buy bread. The girl was detained by the police on charges of vagrancy and sent to Narym. ”
At the beginning of May 1933, transports with about 20,000 people left for Tomsk. The conditions were terrible, most of them did not arrive alive . The criminals who took advantage of their tired and barely living companions quickly found themselves in this situation.
Nazino and "grazing people"
About the guards:
(...) at the time of recruitment, they were promised that the headquarters would take care of them, provide uniforms, shoes, and a flat (...). Meanwhile, they only got old rifles and sent them to the taiga to - as they said - herd the people.
After arriving in Tomsk, it was decided to regroup the people and send those who were considered the most "declassified" to the north by another transport - this time by river. The foreseen place of settlement for about 5,000 people was an island situated between the villages of Nazino and Proletarka, 3 kilometers long and 500 meters wide. They set off on May 18. After arriving there, first the women (332) and then the men (4556) were ordered to get off the barges. The bodies of 27 people who did not survive the journey were then taken away. Witnesses confirm that about 30% of the deportees could not stand, they were emaciated and exhausted. Commander Cepkow ordered bags of flour prepared. Hungry people rushed at them, while the guards started shooting, injuring many people. The attempt to organize the allocation of flour, as well as to build clay stoves, failed. In the first case, people continued to fight each other to get more food in the second, the ground was too frozen to start building ovens for baking bread. The command had gone, leaving the people to fend for themselves.
Cannibals Island
Transport commander, Kolubayev:
On May 20 at 2 p.m. I went to the island of Nazino with commander Cepkow. The crowd was swirling, people were fighting and beating around the sacks with flour, there were corpses everywhere, with a hundred bodies or more (…). It was said that the deportees began to eat the corpses, that they were roasting human flesh. The island was a TERRIBLE, SCARY sight.
People tried to run away, but most often they drowned without strength. Groups were formed. The new people joining were called "hogs" because in the absence of food, they became so . They were often eaten raw because they did not want to attract attention with fire. Witnesses reported that on the island you could see human flesh hanging from tree branches or wrapped in rags that lay on the ground .
Taissa Chokarieva:
There was a guard on the island (...), a young boy. He liked the pretty girl who was sent there. He was protecting her. One day he had to leave, he asked his friend to take care of her, but what could he do about all these people? They grabbed her, tied her to a poplar, cut her breasts, muscles, everything that could be eaten. When the guard came back, she was still alive, he wanted to save her, but she bled to death (...).
We learned about the tragedy of the island of Nazino only in the 1980s. Were it not for the documentation and own investigation carried out by a communist officer and correspondent of the local daily - Vasily Arsieniewicz Wieliczko, the terrible truth probably would not have seen the light of day . According to him, as of August 20, about 2,000 of the nearly 7,000 people sent in several transports remained alive on the island.
Wieliczko prepared a letter describing the situation on the island and sent it to Stalin. Thanks to this, in the autumn of 1933, an investigative commission arrived to investigate the case. Unfortunately, the policy of displacement, deportation and city cleansing continued.