During the spring of 1933, Stalin's police rounded up nearly one hundred
thousand people as part of the Soviet regime's "cleansing" of Moscow and
Leningrad and deported them to Siberia. Many of the victims were sent to
labor camps, but ten thousand of them were dumped in a remote wasteland
and left to fend for themselves. Cannibal Island reveals the shocking,
grisly truth about their fate.
These people were abandoned on the island of Nazino without food or
shelter. Left there to starve and to die, they eventually began to eat
each other. Nicolas Werth, a French historian of the Soviet era,
reconstructs their gruesome final days using rare archival material from
deep inside the Stalinist vaults. Werth skillfully weaves this episode
into a broader story about the Soviet frenzy in the 1930s to purge
society of all those deemed to be unfit. For Stalin, these undesirables
included criminals, opponents of forced collectivization, vagabonds,
gypsies, even entire groups in Soviet society such as the "kulaks" and
their families. Werth sets his story within the broader social and
political context of the period, giving us for the first time a full
picture of how Stalin's system of "special villages" worked, how
hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were moved about the country in
wholesale mass transportations, and how this savage bureaucratic
machinery functioned on the local, regional, and state levels.
Cannibal Island challenges us to confront unpleasant facts not only
about Stalin's punitive social controls and his failed Soviet utopia,
but about every generation's capacity for brutality--including our own.
