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Out of context: Reply #899
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- drgs-1
A plot for a patriotic musical practically writes itself
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na…
The Nazino tragedy was the mass deportation of about 6,700 prisoners[1] to Nazino Island in the Soviet Union in May 1933. The deportees were forcibly sent to the small, isolated island in Western Siberia, located 540 kilometers (340 mi) northwest of Tomsk, Russian SFSR, to construct a "special settlement" and to cultivate the island.
Deportees were primarily "lumpenproletariat and socially harmful elements", meaning former merchants and traders, peasants who had fled the ongoing famine in the countryside, petty criminals, or anybody who did not fit into the idealized worker class structure.
About half were so-called lumpenproletarians from Moscow and Leningrad. The authorities who were to be in charge of the labor camps were first informed that they would be sent on 5 May. These authorities had never worked with urban deportees and had no resources or supplies to support them.[17]
The deportees were kept below decks on the barges and apparently fed a daily ration of 200 grams (7 oz) of bread per person. Twenty tons of flour – about 4 kilograms (9 lb) per person – were also transported, but the barges contained no other food, cooking utensils, or tools. All supervisory personnel, two commanders, and fifty guards were newly recruited and had no shoes or uniforms.
The barges unloaded their passengers during the afternoon of 18 May, on Nazino Island, a swampy island about 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) long and 600 metres (660 yd) wide. There was no roster of the disembarking deportees, but on arrival 322 women and 4,556 men were counted, plus 27 bodies of those who died during the trip from Tomsk.
Over a third of the deportees were too weak to stand on arrival. About 1,200 additional deportees arrived on 27 May.[19][1] A fight broke out and guards fired on the deportees as the twenty tons of flour were deposited on the island and distribution began. The flour was moved to the shore opposite the island and distribution was tried again the next morning, with another fight and more firing resulting. Afterward, all flour was distributed via "brigadiers" who collected flour for their brigade of about 150 people. The brigadiers were often criminals who abused their privileges and ate everything themselves.
Initially there were no ovens to bake bread on, so the deportees ate the flour mixed with river water, which led to dysentery.[20] Some deportees made primitive rafts to try to escape, but most of the rafts collapsed and hundreds of corpses washed up on the shore below the island. Guards hunted and killed other escapees as if they were hunting animals for sport. Because of the lack of any transportation to the rest of the country except upstream to Tomsk, and the harshness of life in the taiga, any other escapees who made it across the river and evaded the guards were ultimately presumed dead.
Order on the island quickly broke down and devolved into chaos: the majority of the population were city dwellers, most of whom knew nothing about basic agricultural practices such as clearing and cultivation that would make the island properly habitable. The sparsity of resources led to gangs forming, who began to terrorize and dominate weaker settlers. People were frequently murdered in fights over food, money, and the bodies of those in possession of anything of value such as gold tooth fillings and crowns were often looted. The latter were used for exchange for food and cigarettes by gang members.
In the meantime the guards established their own reign of terror, extorting settlers and executing people for minor offences despite being apathetic towards the gangs. The guards were also assigned to keep the settlers in and killed people who attempted to escape. Even the doctors sent to monitor the island's population, who were supposed to have protection, began to fear for their lives. The lack of proper food and the frequency of death by late May led to cannibalism becoming widespread, to the point that settlers eventually began murdering individuals for the sole purpose of consuming them.
On 21 May, the three health officers counted seventy new deaths, with signs of cannibalism observed in five cases. Over the next month, guards arrested about fifty people for cannibalism.
In 1989, an eyewitness reported to Memorial:[28]
"They were trying to escape. They asked us, "Where's the railway?" We'd never seen a railway. They asked, "Where's Moscow? Leningrad?" They were asking the wrong people: we'd never heard of those places. We're Ostyaks. People were running away starving. They were given a handful of flour. They mixed it with water and drank it and then they immediately got diarrhea. The things we saw! People were dying everywhere; they were killing each other ... On the island there was a guard named Kostia Venikov, a young fellow. He fell in love with a girl who had been sent there and was courting her. He protected her. One day he had to be away for a while, and he told one of his comrades, "Take care of her," but with all the people there the comrade couldn't do much really... People caught the girl, tied her to a poplar tree, cut off her breasts, her muscles, everything they could eat, everything, everything ... They were hungry, they had to eat. When Kostia came back, she was still alive. He tried to save her, but she had lost too much blood."