Timesuck with Dan Cummins - Short Suck #41: Stalin's Cannibal Gulag: Nazino Island

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

In 1933, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had his secret police goons round up hundreds of thousands of former farmers and he sent them into Siberia to create labor camps where they would be forced to work. Many would die along the way, including the over 6,000 unfortunate enough to end up on Nazino Island, where innocent people were dumped with no food other than raw flour, no clean water, no shelter, no medicine, and no protection from each other. Starvation and desperation quickly led to cannibalism, mutilation, and death.For Merch and everything else Bad Magic related, head to: https://www.badmagicproductions.com

Before the Russians arrived, Nazino Island was a beautiful, peaceful place. Or if not beautiful, the swampy Siberian island at least wasn't something out of Dante's nine circles of hell. The Ostiac ethnic group, an indigenous people of Siberia, had lived in the harsh climate since at least the 16th century when the name first started to appear in official Russian records. They almost certainly had been living there for quite some time before appearing in official records, and they would continue to live there into the 20th century. As one elderly peasant woman would recall in 1989, we were living in Ergonquina. Every spring, we left for the island of Nazino to harvest the poplar bark that we sent downstream.

It was our only source of income. The whole family went along and we took enough food to spend the seas in there. In the 1930s, any peaceful harvesting on this island would be interrupted by a campaign on the part of Russia's communist government, the Soviet Union's communist government, to send away hundreds of thousands of of Kulaks, land-owning peasant farmers who did not love handing their hard-earned and hard-worked farms over to the communists. People who didn't fit into Stalin's idea of what an industrial worker-led society should look like. To achieve control over Russia's major cities and institute a brutally repressive surveillance state after tens of thousands of these peasants had fled the

countryside into urban areas following the state's seizure of their farmland, the Soviet government would plan to send these displaced and disenfranchised peoples. to the outer reaches of Russia to sustain the Soviet Union's rapidly industrializing economy. Except, there was no real plan for how to do this that was even remotely humane. Everything was hastily cobbled together. People were quickly kidnapped and arrested, moved, and placed into holding camps, places that had no provisions, no capacity to handle the thousands of people who had no fucking idea why they had been detained and what was going on.

And then many of these people were unceremoniously dumped onto, an island. A very cold, completely undeveloped island. Deportees began to arrive on the island of Nizino in May of 1933, an area initially intended to hold them only briefly, but would be, for many, their final resting place. Their only food was some bags of raw flour. There was no freshwater, only contaminated river water. There were no shelters, only the harsh Siberian winter. If desperation was the goal, there would have been no better place to induce it. And when people get desperate, they'll eat whatever or whoever they need to to survive. Words and ideas can change the world.

I hated her, but I wanted to love my mother. I have a dream. I'll plead not guilty right now. Your only chance is to leave with us. In early February of 1933, Gendrick Yagoda, the head of the OGPU, the Secret Police and Intelligence Service of the Soviet Union at this time, and Matisse. Berman, the head of the Gulag system of labor camps maintained in the Soviet Union from 1930 to 1955 jointly presented Soviet dictator, huge piece of shit, Joseph Stalin, with a vast plan for

deporting millions of anti-Soviet elements in the cities and the countryside to Western Siberia and Kazakhstan. The previous three years had seen the deportation of over two million Kulaks, aka prosperous peasants and their families. And now the men thought it was time to move into a a new much more extensive effort to deport, quote, all elements, polluting the socialist society currently being constructed. They decided to target six categories of people. One, Kulax, who had not been yet decoulaxized in the preceding years. Two, peasants who were, quote, sabotaging the state's procurement plans

and other politico-economic campaigns undertaken by the state, holy propaganda. Three, Kulaks who are hiding in farms and workplaces or escaping from the country. side. Four individuals expelled in the context of cleaning up in the USSR's western frontiers. Five, urban elements refusing to leave cities in the context of passportization. Six, individuals whom the courts and the OGPU's special jurisdictions have sentenced to terms of less than five years, with the exceptions of, quote, elements particularly dangerous from a social point of view. Okay. The plan was simple. All of these elements. would be deported as labor colonists. That's a nice word for slave, with the same status as the Kulaks deported between 1930 and 1931. They would be deprived of their civil rights,

put under house arrest in a labor village, put to special use within state economic structures, mostly in brutal fields of timber, mining, and farming. According to the plan, about three quarters of these labor colonists, what they estimated to be about a million and a half people, would work on farms and in the forest. Within two years, they were supposed to have, quote, freed the state from any expense for their support and begun producing merchandise that would allow the state to recover the expenses incurred in the operations of deportation and settlement of the contingents. Holy shit.

So in essence, you know, they would pay off their deportation over two years of hard labor, deportation that they wanted no part of. Can you imagine? Can you imagine being kidnapped, sent off to Siberia and be like, hey, we're going to have you out here for a couple years so you can pay off the expense you know that we had to pay to get you out here i never wanted to shut the fuck up uh that's basically what it was uh the rest about 500 000 people would work in fishing crafts and mining while at the same time conducting a small side operation this is a quote too from the soviets while at the same time conducting a small

side operation in order to feed themselves uh they had to get a side hustle so they didn't starve This was called deportation colonization And it had been part of the Soviet plan since the Russian Revolution Back in November of 1917 At a meeting of delegates of the committees of poor peasants Oh, there are stupid fucking names in the Soviet Union Vladimir Lenin announced a new policy to eliminate What were believed to be wealthy Soviet peasants, aka Kulax

If the Kulaks remain untouched, he said If we don't defeat the freeloaders, The Tsar and the capitalist will inevitably return oh man they they should have returned it was fucking way better than the czars than it was other than the soviets uh cool acts were thought to be more sympathetic to a monarchistic uh or capitalistic upper class and thus under communism you know they had to be eliminated and given that the royal family had been deposed

and murdered and there was now no longer a scapegoat for the russian revolution to run on the coolax they made a great new scapegoat for this uh regime in july of nineteen committees of the poor We're created to represent poor peasants, which played an important role in the actions against the Kulaks and led to the process or led the process of redistribution of confiscated lands, inventory, and food surpluses from the Kulaks. This launched the beginning of a great crusade against grain speculators in Kulaks before it would be dismissed in December of 1918. The Committees of the Poor confiscated roughly 50 million hectares of Kulak land. And by confiscated, just, you know, just stole it. And this would prove to be a lasting political tool.

Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin, announced the, quote, liquidation of the Kulax as a class, December 27, 1929. Now we have the opportunity to carry out a resolute offensive against the Kulax, break their resistance, eliminate them as a class, and replace their production with the production of Kul Khases and Sovkosses. He said those last two terms referring to collective farms and state-owned farms. The Apollet Bureau of the All-Unified Farms, Communist Party formalized Stalin's decision in a resolution titled

On Measures for the Elimination of Kulaq's households in districts of Comprehensive Collectivization on January 30th, 1930. All Kulaks were now in one of three categories. One, those to be shot or imprisoned as decided by local secret police. That's awesome. Two, those to be sent to Siberia, the North, the Urals, or Kazakhstan, after confiscation of their property. These guys were just fucked.

Three, those who would be evicted from their houses and used in forced labor colonies. And all this because, you know, these assholes had the audacity to work hard enough to save up enough money to buy their own farms and then work them before the Bolshevik revolution. These people were not exploitive nobles. They were not treacherous land barons. They were just farmers. This is how the Soviets treated them. They othered them. Made the landless poor think that they were the enemies when the Communist Party was the enemy of everyone.

But why send them to Siberia or anywhere else? Why not just kill them all if they were enemies of the state? Well, the answer to that question goes back to the Russian Revolution. You see, at the time that the Bolsheviks were taking power back in 1917, Russia was not quite capitalist enough to become fully communist, at least in a Marxian sense. I know that sounds contradictory. Let me explain. Most Russians were peasants tending the land of large landlords. Until relatively recently, many of these peasants had been serfs.

a not so free, peasant type person, obligated to work for their lord, who could be sold similar to a slave, practice only outlawed in 1861, by which actually slowly phased out over the decades that followed. This meant that there simply wasn't enough sites of heavy industry, places like factories, mines, and mills, to support the new communist working class. Without those heavy industries, all they would have was a shit ton of farmland, and their lives would basically be the same as they were before. Then there was the fact that Karl Marx argued that only through a modern industrialized economy could a true proletariat class be developed. So in order to become truly communist, a lot of factories needed to be built and a lot of farmers needed to become factory workers whether they wanted to or not. The Soviet Union had another more practical need for industry. Stalin wanted to develop heavy industries like coal, oil, and steel because he feared that the capitalist West would invade the USSR. are. He presented the need to industrialize as a life or death struggle. Do you want our socialist

fatherland to be beaten and to lose its independence, he asked in February 1931 in a speech? At the outset of Stalin's first five-year plan in 1929, a plan that intended to pave the way for rapid industrialization, the formation of a new national identity, and pretty much the complete takeover of Russian society, politics, and the economy, Stalin instituted impossibly high production figures for factories to stir up enthusiasm and national pride. But if you wanted people to work in factories and not tend to the land, you also had to find a way to feed them, which meant you had to tend the land, quite the catch-22, and to the Kulax doing double duty as both scapegoat and communist Russia's food source.

They were putting a really weird spot here. Party activists helped the state political directorate, the secret police, deport 1,803,300 192 of these people to labor colonies and camps in just 1930 and 1931. The peasantry was also required to relinquish their farm animals to government authorities, but most of them ended up slaughtering them first, eating the meat, hiding what they couldn't eat. Peasants would also try to hide grain. Peasants who did not show signs of literal starvation were suspected of hiding food. And then the communists forced them to give up their grain stocks, essentially their seed stocks,

or what they would use to plant grain the following year. and that led to a massive famine between 1930 and 1933 that would end up killing between 5.7 and 8.7 million people. And that's the kind of shit that happens when you put appointed fucking idiots in charge of areas where expertise is actually needed and important. Let's see some of that going on today. And so now in February of 1933,

Yagoda and Berman hand over their plan to deport two million Kulaks based on their, quote, success. The plan went like this, to ensure the success of this deportation colonization, 1,000 labor villages at the rate of one village for every 2,000 elements or about 500 families would be hastily built. Each village would consist of a hundred living units of 650 square feet, each sheltering 20 people, each deportee thus being allotted 27 square feet of living space, a little over 5 feet by 5 feet of living space per person, smaller than a prison cell. During the first year, baths, an infirmary, a hygienic station for removing lice and other parasites, stables, and a garage for machinery were to be constructed.

During the second year, a school, a cafeteria, a reading room, a store, and so on were to be constructed. For the construction of these labor villages, the managers of the OGPU and the Goulag estimated that they would need 3,385,000 cubic meters of wood, 10,288, metric tons of iron and sheet metal, 6,929 metric tons and nails, 2,591 square meters of glass and other materials. And you'd need a whole administrative department, police force, and economic management system

for all this. But now the problem was, how the fuck were they supposed to get all of that out to the middle of nowhere? The report acknowledged that this was a problem because the whole point of the deportation colonization was to populate the furthest reaches of the USSR. are. They estimated they would need about 2,416 trucks, 90,000 horses, and 1,200 tractors to get everybody out there before work on the settlement could even begin. Thus, the report concluded with a long list of expenses that Egota and Berman expected Daddy Stalin to pay expenses amounting to almost 1.4 million rubles.

There was just one problem with that. Unlike before, when the beginnings of the famine were so localized, the USSR was now in the middle of a nationwide famine. because the Soviets were fucking idiots and there was a huge resource resource shortage. But the USSR didn't want to admit that they didn't have the resources to fight their Kulak enemies and provide for the communist people of Russia

via what was essentially slave labor because that would make them look weak. And so the new plan was approved by the Council of People's Commissars on March 11th, 1933, and after a month of bargaining, they agreed to settle 28,000 deportees during the winter,

and then 250,000 to 275,000 over the whole. whole of 1933 in western Siberia. The OGPU's representative in Western Siberia, listed in sources by the sole name of Alexiev, who was the regional head of the political police there, would be informed that one million people would arrive between winter and summer of this year to be settled as far as possible from any railway in case the Kulax either tried to escape or tried to join up with each other and mount a resistance.

So a much bigger number overall there than the the 250 to 275,000. So I guess a million over a year's worth of time, 275,000, you know, by the end of 1933. Soon this plan would be underway. At first, many of this round of this current round, excuse me, of deportees were people from Moscow, Leningrad, other cities,

who have been unable to obtain internal passports. Part of this passport. I fucking hate the communist, the way they talk about shit. They just fucking, they literally just make up words. The fucking Soviets who just like, here's a fucking word combo that sounds cool

that's just completely nonsense. The passportization campaign had begun in 1932 to issue internal passports to all residents of major cities

with one of their objectives being to cleanse Moscow, Leningrad and other great urban centers of the USSR of superfluous elements not connected

with production or administrative work as well as Kulax, criminals and other antisocial and socially dangerous elements

according to a 1932 to Politburo document. What they were really trying to do was just punish people, not just landowners, but non-landowners as well, punish people who were leaving the countryside because of all the land that was being seized and people who were being brutalized

and even those who were not in the bourgeoisie were like, fuck this, but millions of people arriving in cities threatened the whole urban rashing system that had begun laboriously set up beginning in 1929. Back then, some 26 million city dwellers were among those participating in the,

rationing system by the end of 1930 that rose to almost 40 million so in other words Stalin had a lot of mouths to feed Stalin said he was deporting people to punish them for leaving the countryside and abandoning the communist mission but the real obvious reason was he did not have the means to feed all these people who are fleeing the countryside and heading to the cities fleeing the countryside because of his own fucking stupid policies so he creates a problem and then that problem leads to an even worse problem and now he fixes that by just punishing these people who have already been punished. You know, he didn't, he didn't have the means to feed people because his ignorant and

haphazard political directors were, they were destroying Russian society. And before we explore Stalin's horror any further time for this week's first of two, Mitchell Sponsor breaks. If you don't want to hear these ads, please sign up to be a space lizard on Patreon, get the catalog ad free, get these episodes early and more. Thanks for listening to those ads. And now let's return to examine Stalin's cruel deportation plan, that culminated in what was essentially the death camp of Nazino Island.

The deportees would be a very group, merchants and traders, peasants who had fled the countryside, and anyone who didn't generally fit into the idealized worker-class structure. You know, it could just be somebody who went out to buy cigarettes or snacks without their passports and were unlucky enough to get arrested. That would amount to a lot of people. Between March and July of 1933, 85,937 people living in Moscow alone were arrested. Almost 90,000 people. arrested, deported, because they lacked passports, while 4,776 people living in Leningrad were

similarly deported. In accordance with this plan, the deportees would pass through three transit camps at Tomsk, Omsk, and Achinsk. The camp, these transit camps have been opened in 1930, 1931, in connection with the first two waves of deculacization and large open spaces between the freight stations and the rivers since autumn of 1931. However, these camps had no longer been in use and the hastily constructed huts had fallen into ruin. On assuming his office, on March 19, 1933, the head of the Tomsk Transit camp,

Gorgi Kus Nyatov, stated that the camp consisted of, quote, a single rundown hut, dating from 1930. All the other huts half demolished were unsuitable for housing anyone. So this program is off to a great, This is so very Soviet. This is so very like a bunch of dipshits getting to a fucking, you know, poorly painted, poorly lit boardroom, wearing their fucking stupid, you know, military uniforms when most of them had not even fought in the military.

And, uh, you know, just a bunch of old dickheads. And they're like, well, that's what we need to do. And they were just something that just, you know, like sounded like it would please stall. And he'd be like, excellent. We can get rid of two million. Do it. And then they would just, you know, give that directive to some lesser bureaucraters like, What? This is insane. It's impossible.

But they can't say that, or they'll be fucking killed. Or at least, you know, kicked out of the party, sent off to a gulag or something somewhere. So now they got to fucking try and do it possible. And it just leads to just nonsense like this. It's just something that should have never ever happened. It was just stupid from the very beginning. Authorities plan to build huts and shelter others intense, but construction could not be completed before May 1st. So they wrote back to central authorities to say that the convoys, maybe they should hold off.

Maybe they shouldn't arrive until, like, you know, mid-May or so at the very, very earliest. But then, you know, other Soviets, they have their orders. And they're like, nope, that's impossible. And the convoy arrived in April. And it arrived to a wasteland. And authorities who had no idea how many people were coming, what shape they would be in, what they needed, are just trying to like deal with this mess now. There was no food supply system for the camps, like none at all. Within three weeks, from April 9th to April 30th,

more than 25,000 people arrived from Ukraine, the North Caucasus, the Volga regions, the Black Sea, from Moscow and Leningrad. They were already starving. Most of them, authorities wrote that many of the people who arrived there were no more than, quote, semi-cadhavers, and there were only about 40 beds in the infirmary. So that's cool.

We've got thousands and thousands and thousands of people that are semi-cadavars, and we got 40 beds. A report by Vasili Arsenevich, Valichko. the local communist party head in Narimskai, the district of the West Siberian cry, would describe some of the deportees that he saw like Gorsova, saying, quote, or writing quote, an old woman, her husband is an old communist, chief officer of the Murum Railway Station, who has worked there 23 years, her son works there as an apprentice engine driver. Gorsava came to Moscow to buy a suit for her husband and some white bread.

her documents did not help her. So she went out to get some bread and got fucking napped. There was also a Voikin. And then it's for some reason his last couple, middle name and last name are abbreviated to just Nick and Voss. A communist youth organization member since 1929, worker of the plant, red textile worker in Serpokov. Serpukov awarded bonuses thrice at his weekend headed to a football match. Passport had been left at home apprehended. So this is like a dude who is a dedicated.

Communists, you know, fucking awarded bonuses, and he goes out to watch a soccer game, forgot his passport at home, and he gets napped. I mean, imagine doing something as innocuous as just forgetting to grab your driver's license when you leave your apartment and then some Soviet equivalent of an ice goon grabs you, throws you into a fucking, you know, equivalent of a van, and you end up on a fucking road to Siberia. There were whole families that had been rounded up, like M. Yurofimovich. I love that all these people have super long names. Thank you very much. It's great. 32 years old, deported with his wife and nine-year-old daughter because he had sold tobacco illegally in 1931. Oh, what a hardened criminal. Get that tobacco seller off the streets. Not even being a party member or being related to one could save you. There was the case of Pieter Saul, 51 years old, a quote, Taylor deported from

Sochi, his daughter and son-in-law are party members and are in the diplomatic service abroad, deported because he owned his house. Jesus, how dare he own a house? Sometimes you got deported because of something as simple as providing for your family, as in the case of Natalia, Barra Bonova, who was arrested during a roundup in Sochi, in a Sochi, like, basically a supermarket. She has to be allowed to go home, or at least to take her children, including an infant. Nope, they didn't let her do that People thought she was arrested for having bought A kilo of dolphin fat From some shady character at the market

She tried to She tried to buy something She wasn't supposed to, so fuck her forever And based on the comments I see online On a lot of posts today, I see people still rationalizing Horrible inhuman acts With that simplistic rationale of Well, it was illegal

So they shouldn't have done it So fuck them What if that type of person would sign off On like police executing J-Walkers or having the hands cut off of kids who shoplift candy I mean, you know, they committed crimes If they wanted to keep their hands

They should have bought that candy But they wanted to keep their heads Well, they should use a crosswalk I feel like there's always been Those idiots in the world Just like very black and white thinkers Just no nuance Are they just fucking stupid or cruel

Or both? I constantly wonder Is there just a lot of fucking idiots in the world I don't want to think that But it seems so true so often the time I'm like, God, the world is full of so many fucking morons sometimes it didn't even fucking matter why you got deported

as in the case of Maria Lavarcova 35 years old a quote waitress in the Riviera hotel in Sochi according to her statements her husband is a battalion commander in Amur province

holds two red flag decorations deported with her father age 71 her mother age 70 and a brother age 22 reasons unknown you know who fucking cares

that her husband is a decorated commander you know some goons felt like grabbing her, so they did. Whatever, fill a quota. A. Popova, 30 years old, was, quote, arrested in the Tuopsa train station where she'd gone to meet her niece. Popova works in the port. Cannot in any way be considered a parasitical element.

But fuck her for, I don't know, being a good aunt. If she didn't want to get deported, she shouldn't have grabbed her niece, right? She shouldn't have went to give fucking, I don't know, candy to her niece or just give her hug and tell her she's cool or something. A lot of people died in transit, including the five-year-old brother of 18-year-old Yvgeny Markovkina, who was deported with her siblings because her father, who had died in 1931, had been a, quote, shady operator in the past, whatever that means. That sounds like just some bullshit. Like when you can't think of, like, a real good reason to do something bad to somebody, oh, no, she's, she's shady. Or at least her dad is.

Oh, yeah. Her dad's shady as shit. What do you do? shady stuff. Stop asking questions. Nobody was authorized to leave the convoy when the five-year-old died

so his body was simply and coldy thrown out of a fucking window. That's cool. More than 500 deportees would die during the days following their arrival over the course of the next two months

May and June of 1933 another 1,700 deportees would die. A majority of them, quote, as a result of the general weakening of the organism. And that's Soviet speak for starvation.

Of course, only the fucking Soviets were right that way would explain somebody starving to death that way did they starve to death yes there was a

they died as a result of a general weakening of the organism can't you just say they starved yeah not that is what I said I said the general weakening of the organism fucking cult

but this first convoy not the only ones who would suffer there during the summer of 1932 massive arrest campaigns had overloaded the prison Reaching 800,000 people incarcerated in the spring of 1932. February of 1933, Nikolai Kralenko, the People's Commissar of the Justice Department,

proposed to decongest the prisons and to settle several hundred thousand inmates in these new labor villages. At the beginning of March, 1933, the Politburo approved Kralenko's proposal. Excuse me, a rail convoy holding criminal deportees left Moscow, April 30th, and a similar convoy left Leningrad on April 29th, with both. arriving at Tomsk, May 10th, saturating the Tomsk camp, already overloaded, with more than 6,000 extra people, many of them suffering from syphilis, and most between 16 and 30 years old. And these criminals, by the way, not criminals in a significant way. Mainly it sounds like crimes due to circumstance.

They'd mainly been convicted of theft, hooliganism. That sounds like some more bullshit. Like if you just don't like somebody, you want to throw them in jail, what they do? Ah, they're a hooligan in? There were a hooligan in it up. Damn hooligans. They did stuff like resold products that were in short supply, received stolen goods. And, you know, a quote unquote stolen good could just be some food that wasn't authorized by the Soviets.

Other kinds of trafficking often engaged in by people who are fucking starving. Thanks to unjust governmental policies. These people were criminals in the same way that some starving Palestinian kid in Gaza who shoplifts to try and keep himself alive. is technically a criminal. They were also different from the other deportees and that they were already hardened from prison life, most used to doing bad deeds out of desperation. It didn't have family members

that they needed to protect or take care of. They're only out for themselves. And also, again, they were starving. The daily food ration during the trip was 300 grams, around 11 ounces of bread per person, which meant upon arriving at Tomsk, that these criminal groups immediately began beating the non-criminal city dwellers and stealing their food and clothing, right, desperate times.

And then they were all stuck there. The rivers were not navigable, as chunks of ice made traveling impossible. And even if they had been, none of the barges meant to transport the deportees had arrived, meaning none of these people could be relocated as planned. And said Moscow now ordered more checks of the convoys to figure out who they were, what their papers said, their reason for deportation. Historians assume this is because family members of prominent party members were deported and those party members had complaint. And these checks found that up to 20% of the deportees were, quote, individuals completely unsuited for labor, old, invalid, simple-minded, or blind.

My God, one of five of these people are elderly and or physically disabled and or mentally disabled and are blind. Authorities concluded that this was because the round-ups had occurred at public places like train stations, markets, and get this, hospices! fucking hospices. That's wild. They kidnapped elderly people, just, you know, looking for a place to die in peace. Just some soulless following orders, you know, bullshit. This was not about labor or industrialization at all.

This was about getting rid of mouths to feed. Mows that Stalin did not value. One of these mouths was Mark Peravavavavav a hundred and three years old. Yes, he was 103 years old. and he was, quote, deported in the convoy from Piatigorsk. It proved impossible to determine his biography and the circumstances in which he had been taken away because he's unable to stand up, completely decrepit,

does not speak. Jesus! They fucking just put a skeleton on this convoy. There was also Evdakia. Evdakia Kotelnikovah, 85 years old, quote, without family, cannot stand up, half naked bedridden. This is actually a quote describing her to in the official documents.

A decomposing semi-cadava unable to speak or move. This is truly some evil shit. There was also Elizabita Zola Tarevna Tarevna. Fuck me. Tareva. Zola Tareva. Eighty-five years old. Without family, unable to move about on her own, was expelled from Kese

Lovatsk on the pretext that she was a former owner of a factory and a prostitute. Oh, totally. Yeah, we got to get this 85-year-old prostitute out of here. My God. Love how communist leaders decided that anybody

who owned something was evil, by the way. And now they damn near owned everything. There was also Miran Karatenko, 76 years old, and his wife, 75 years old. quoted, or both, quote, deported from, my God, these words, mean, mineronia, voody. Fucking Soviet small towns, awesome. 90% invalid, reason, deprived of their civil rights.

Simulator parasites refusing to work on the collective farm. Oh boy. I wonder if they refused to work on the farm because they were 90% invalid. And in their mid-70s. authorities weren't too worried about these people causing trouble during their death deportations because they were most of them sounds like nearly dead already but the prisoners being deported you know those people stealing food and stuff to feed themselves they worried the authorities at tomsk they seem like the types of people who might head out to western siberia maybe recruit people to their cause maybe mount a rebellion or simply so some chaos real uh real fucking deviance so it was decided that these people would be divided up amongst the city dwellers and sent to the furthest, least accessible areas that were already far away, local authorities near Nazino Island were informed on May 5th that 5,000 such deportees were on their way. Like the authorities at Tomsk, they had no place to put these deportees.

They had no supplies at all to give them, no food to feed them. Their own supplies had almost run out because the river had been frozen over since October. Indeed, the authorities only had 30 pairs of men's trousers, six sheets of tin, enough to make about two dozen buckets for them to shit in and a few hundred pairs of hemp boots uh-huh they wrote back saying that it would be weeks the earliest before they were ready to take anybody at all

but they knew as well as anybody that once Moscow made up his mind the deal was done better for worse and usually for worse so 5,000 deportees left for the island on four river barges on May 14th with about a third of them being quote criminals from the prisons and now before we find out what is in store for these poor Bastards on the island. Time for today's second and two sponsor breaks. Thanks for listening to those sponsors. Now let's return to find out what happens in hell on the Zeno

Island. The deportees were kept below decks on the barges as they traveled to the island and apparently fed a daily ration of 200 grams or seven ounces of bread per person per day. So about seven slices of bread a day. No meat, no fruit, no veggies, no vitamins. No medicine. A lot of these people desperately needed. 20 tons of flour, though, were all also transported, but the barges contained no other food, cooking utensils or tools, just a fucking shit ton of flour outside of that bread. Four kilos a person would last about 10 days, but only as to flour was, you know, made into bread, which it wasn't, which it couldn't be, because they didn't have tools, they didn't have ovens.

During the afternoon of May 18th, the barges unloaded their passengers on Nazino, which had been chosen as an interim point while authorities made preparations for a more permanent settlement elsewhere seemed like a good choice because they could be then taken in small groups off the island by boat to the furthest reaches of Western Siberia, where they wouldn't be able to coordinate with each other, would have no choice but to toil for the communist regime or die. The 322 women and 4,556 men, oh my God, these poor women who disembarked on May 18th could observe a swampy island, about three kilometers or almost two miles long, and just 660 yards wide. nowhere near enough space to support this many people.

And the island had no shelters, no sewage system, no wells, nothing. Fortunately or unfortunately, the number of people about to be dumped there already getting smaller. 27 bodies were brought ashore, having perished on the journey. Over a third of the deportees were already too weak to stand up at this point. Over a third. Many of them elderly, the deportees struggled to shore with 50 or so guards, including the two newly recruited commanders, until nightfall, the commanders tried to count the deportees and perform a roll call.

But the list they had were largely illegible, had the wrong names, wrong number of total people. Finally, with the boat captain, threatening that he wanted to be paid for an extra day if he had to stay the night, they just counted out the number of men and women, you know, like approximately, and just call it a day. Who cares if they should be here or not? Once the deportees have been set down on the island, Commander SEPCOF ordered the 20 tons of flour to be unloaded, and then a fight broke out all sacks of flour were being unloaded

and the guards opened fire they wounded i.e. shot several people who would not receive any medical attention after that incident Sepkov ordered the convoy to cast off and unload

the stalks of the flower on the other side of the river where they would be protected from any quote attack but they would not be protected from the damp in the cold in fact because they were not enough sacks a product always in short supply

in the fucking shithold that was the Soviet Union a large portion of the flower loaded on the barges had been directly poured onto sandbags that were now poured out directly onto the ground. The local inhabitants were stupefied by this abundance, which was soon covered with snow, for a few hours after the boats were unloaded a snowstorm set in. The deportees began to light wood fires in the hopes of warming themselves by the next morning. The island was a blanket of snow and ash. Sepkov, accompanied by his assistance, the three health officers, and the two new

commanders who had arrived from Tomsk tried to organize an initial distribution of flour at the the rate of a pound of person. Most of the deportees, well, they didn't have cups, they didn't have tumblers, they didn't have any container at all to hold their precious ration in. So they would just hold out their hands or hold out like a shoe or like bundle up a coat and that would be how they would grab their flour that they had fucking no ability to do anything to. What the fuck?

They're just literally dumping cups of flour into people's shoes on an island with nothing on it, a frozen barren island. It would have been so much kinder just to fucking gun them all down with machine guns. After two hours, this distribution degenerated into a disorderly scramble. Dozens of deportees were trampled. The guards opened fire again. They shot several more people, again, would not receive medical attention. So SEPCOF now decided to institute some new rules.

Now the distribution would be made by so-called brigadiers, a bunch of ruthless or perhaps desperate deportees immediately monopolized the available brigadier positions. And they stole the flower. stole the flour. Meanwhile, dead bodies really starting to pile up. Now about 100 people have died while many others have been reduced to moaning, crawling around on the ground, begging commanders to give them some actual bread. And then deportees start to eat each other. The authorities tried to mobilize, tried to set up shelters to construct ovens, take ovens from homes of nearby inhabitants. Sepkov wanted to see what food he could find in a nearby village. He handed over authority of the island to two commanders and then left, but he wouldn't be able to find what he needed. The area is so fucking desolate and the situation grows even worse. The deportees, they had started mixing river water. The only water they had access to with their pound of flour a day. They did just like fucking mush. They were trying to choke down. They're also just straight up drinking this water, you know, because they got to drink something

and now they get dysentery. So now they're shitting their brains out. They're throwing up. They're fucking dehydrated. They're starving. Also, many of them never even got any flour, right? Because it was stolen again, like by the brigadiers or by the guard. or by other deportees to try and get rations weaker deportees started to trade their clothing, their coats, their shoes, whatever they had for any kind of food.

A pair of shoes was soon worth three, one kilo loaves of bread or five salted fish. Somehow some guards are getting some shit in besides just flour, the island. I'm sure they're just fucking taking advantage of these people robbing them, you know, with what they charge for it. An overcoat could be exchanged for a two kilo loaf of bread, a

package of tobacco, one or two golden dental crowns. If you made one of these trades, you might enjoy your overcoat for a little while, you know, but then you perhaps trade it back to somebody else for bread once you start to starving. As early as May 23rd, people are extracting gold crowns from the jawbones of cadavers to give those to the guards or other deportees for food. As more and more people die, this turns into a regular business. Meanwhile, the guards do not hesitate to execute those who, quote, cheat during the distribution of food. So if you manage to sell a piece of bread for an overcoat, you could quickly find yourself attacked

or shot dead. Two sub-commanders, Chikilev and Sulya Manov committed their share of atrocities as well, along with Vlaisenko, the commander of the Nizino village. They would inflict, according to a report, quote, blows and injuries on special settlers. Systematic non-distribution of provisions and deportees who did not know how to swim were thrown overboard, like of the barges, and drowned. These people were truly living in hell. Sarapkin, commander of the nearby village of Proletarca,

quote, amused himself by having special settlers on, excuse me, amused himself by having special settlers row the boats. Those who rode badly were just thrown into the water. Several deportees drowned this way. So they're just killing people to amuse themselves. Sub-commander, Sulya Manov, was especially harsh, ostentatiously, eating huge quantities of sugar in front of starving deportees

and announcing he had had so much sugar that he had lost his taste for it. Well, it is sadist. When the deportees tried to escape the island on small primitive rafts, they were shot according to Sepkopf's orders. Some of them, though, they got away, but they mistakenly believed that there was a nearby railway

station. Most drowned or died of hunger on the way there. By the summer, authorities would see hundreds of dead bodies washed up on the shores of the Ob River. But soon, all anybody would really see was the cannibalism. Rumors had started the day after the deportees arrived on the Zeno, and on May 23rd, physicians wrote that people had succumbed to eating fellow deportees. In five cases, they wrote, quote, the liver, the heart, the lungs, and fleshy parts of the bodies, breasts, calves, had been cut off.

On one of the bodies, the head had been torn off, along with the male general organs and part of the skin. These mutilations constitute strong evidence of cannibalistic acts. Yeah, you think? in addition they suggest the existence of serious psychopathologies yeah of course on the same day may 21st the deportees themselves brought us three individuals who had been caught with blood in their hands and holding human livers our examination of these three individuals did not reveal any extreme emaciation but rather external signs of degeneracy these individuals were immediately turned over to the head of the guard oh totally what they weren't doing this because they were starving they were doing it because they were just degenerates these damn landowners owners, these people who dared fucking leave their houses without their passports, over the course of the following weeks, the same health officials submitted three additional reports describing similar cases in all, quote, several dozen bodies found with the liver, hardened lungs cut out. According to these reports, the guards made no attempt to isolate the individuals who were caught in possession of human flesh or in the act of eating, since it could not be clear if they had killed the person whose body parts they were eating, and cannibalism was not necessarily against the Soviet legal coat. that's just that's great uh you can easily have your life destroyed over leaving your apartment to go to a soccer match without your fucking ID but cannibalism that's fine that's totally fine

we don't have a law for that but murder would soon be provable and the authorities would decide they had to do something another convoy would arrive May 27th of about 1,200 people straining the already non-existent resources and on May 29 three people caught eating human flesh young criminals raging in age from 20 to 25 were arrested and taken to a nearby prison three other cannibals were arrested two days later having admitted to killing a man and eating his liver and kidneys for some reason the authorities tried to downplay this

by saying that though a dozen cases of cannibalism yeah had been reported those who had done it had indulged quote by habit because they've been cannibals for a long time yep good old propaganda no they're just doing this because they like it they like it I mean, we could give them all the food they want, and they would still eat each other, because that's just, that's what these degenerates do. They fucking eat each other.

I mean, come on, you know, they're landowners. That's what they do. Their cannibalism has nothing to do with any Soviet and forced starvation, obviously. Well, this was a convenient explanation for what was happening on Zeno Island. Eyewitnesses would describe, you know, fucking horrible atrocities. Oh, my God. One of the things that eyewitnesses would describe was seeing women specifically, the poor women on this island were attacked. you know, the most, it seems.

They were savagely attacked by cannibals who cut off their breasts and calves, according to one report. As one eyewitness would say, on the island, there was a guard named Castilla Venikoff, a young fellow. This is so ridiculous. Not ridiculous. This is just so evil. 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. That is, that's like something of a horror movie. She was still alive. After they tied her to a tree, cut off her breast, cut off God knows what else, and we're eating her.

Many of these women died. Some of them survived of those who survived several reportedly went mad after these traumatic attacks. Yeah, I fucking, I bet. Can't imagine moving past that much trauma. I'm sure a lot of them were raped, a bunch too. Two of the testimonies in particular mentioned, quote, the wife of a communist leader whose breasts were cut off, and that was what finally got authorities to deal with a problem. My God, some communist leader who had his wife ended up there. He was like, hey, guys, come on.

Can we do something about the island? my wife got her tits cut off and why were they so focused on eating breast by the way still higher ranking authorities simply concluded that the reports of cannibalism were overblown. Indeed, they were being spread by the deportees themselves to gain sympathy to work against the communist cause

and you know what? I bet a bunch of foreigners who ended up on the island. I bet they're there to stoke tensions and try and destroy the Soviet regime. This is actually what they were saying. The joy of living in a propaganda state. If there's ever news you don't like, you just dismiss it. You just call it fake news, and you just keep right on doing your terrible shit.

Sadly, it just fucking works like a charm. Now these assholes started arresting some deportees, not for cannibalism, but for spreading counter-revolutionary propaganda. Oh, such another common tactic of the propaganda state, right? Convince people that the truth is a lie and that lies are the truth. Corrode your citizens' perception of reality by consistently calling truth propaganda and by calling your actual propaganda truth. About 50 people would be arrested. They were fucking happy to trade the island of horror for a prison cell. And then many of them would end up, though, being quickly released, sent back to the island.

Eleven of them would be sentenced to death in July of 1933. At least one of the cannibals arrested would say, while waiting for his death sentence to be carried out, that waiting in a prison with a roof over his head and a bowl of hot broth to eat was way better than being on Nazino Island. Yeah. Meanwhile, of the 1,200 people who had arrived May 27th, Many of them were suffering from typhus. Local authorities were worried in June of 1933 about a typhus outbreak.

Who cares? Why would you be worried about a disease outbreak? What is it going to make things worse? I mean, things are bad right now. But if we let this typhus run rampant on the island, it's going to be a real horror show. When Commander Sepkoff got back from his mission at the tail end of May, he was ordered to transfer within one week all of the deportees to, quote, appropriate places designated by the settlement plan. and to mobilize the area's residents to feed the deportees. He managed to mobilize about about 20 usable boats,

each of which could take a couple dozen people to take the deportees to their, quote, final settlement sites. Five such sites were upriver about 60 to 120 kilometers or 37 to 74 miles from the island. Within two weeks, the island was almost completely emptied, and on June 12th, only about 157 deportees remained. Several hundred more deportees died during transfer, adding more numbers to the some 1,500 to 2,000 deaths that had occurred on the island

and the hundreds who had escaped only to drown or starve. About 2,856 deportees were sent by a boat to the upstream settlements, and when a count was made at the end of June, it confirmed that about half of the approximately 6,000 who had arrived on the Zeno had disappeared or died. Now the survivors found themselves in a situation almost identical to the one they'd faced on the island, except now there were more or less left of their own devices.

During this stage, a large number of deportees tried to escape on improvised rafts, but once again would perish when their rafts would sink or when they would be shot by guards or they would just get lost and end up on shore and go off somewhere in the Siberian tundra and freeze to death or starve. In the meantime, worded what happened and I guess they're not freezing to death. Well, no, they probably were freezing death. They could freeze the death. They could hypothermia at night. In the meantime, word of what had happened in Nazino reached Siberia's highest political authorities. One of the officials at Nazino Volosov had decided to send a report to the big boss of Western Siberia, a dude named Robert Ica.

It's funny to hear a Robert show up about what was going on, now dubbed the Nazino affair. Bear tell Bob, bear tell Bob that, whew, it's just not going good in Nazino. The letter would arrive on June 10th. It would describe the utter failure of the plan, the chaos that had infected the island before deportees had been moved away. Even plans to remedy the situation had utterly failed, like when authorities managed to get some tools like axes to build shelters, but then didn't want to hand them out because they were afraid of arming insane hungry cannibals with axes. That's fair. June 21st, a meeting was held by a commission of officials that arrived on site more than a month after the first passengers arrived on the Zeno, and after most of them had already left. They decided that the number of 1,970 dead. There's probably way more than that.

reported by health officials was, quote, grossly exaggerated for obvious political reasons. Fake news. Uh-uh. I know a lot of people saw these women get, like, chopped up and eaten, but that actually didn't happen. They're fucking people who just hate the Soviet Union. Mm-mm.

No. Don't fall for Western lies. They people had a great time on the Siberian island. I mean, they didn't have to work. You know what? They were basically on vacation. Who doesn't love to go on an island vacation? Shut the fuck up.

They're doing fine. The authorities proceeded to exhume and count the bodies and three graves, said that the grave diggers were also inclined to inflate the number of those who had died, because they got more rations, they got more shitty-ass bread. If they buried more body, you can't trust a greedy-ass grave-digger.

Then they went up the river to settlement number one, as the official record would describe it, a virgin space along the river, a primitive clay oven, rude huts made with pine branches, under which the declassets elements

refused to take shelter, preferring to gather in the open around wood fires. A single wooden hut, just the way they ride it. They could. They got perfectly good shelters of sticks, but they're just being dicks, and they don't want to stay inside of them. A single wooden hut, which serves as lodging for the commander and the guards, the contingent consists of the most declassay elements of the cities,

truly the refuse of society. They all proudly advertise the fact that they come from Moscow or Leningrad. They were all extremely dirty. Oh, yeah, you think? lice ridden, amazeated, uh-huh, without shoes, yeah, dressed in rags, of course. Some of them are naked, since they have been there. It is clear that none of them has washed, and despite the fine weather that has now come, none of these elements wants to bathe in the river.

When they saw us coming, the declassays gathered together and began demanding that they be released, each one claiming that he had been exiled here for no good reason. Most of these elements, they don't want to even call him humans, most of these elements refused to work, despite the commander's injunctions, we'd rather die than work, the bold is said openly. In any case, we've been brought here so that we'll die of hunger. We'll run away. That doesn't scare us. I made a speech telling them that those who went to work

would get increased rations along with tobacco and clothing and eventual liberation as well, while those who refused to work would receive only the minimal rations. As for those who tried to escape, they would be referred to the OGPU's Troika. I hate to admit that very few reacted positively to my speech. Most of them are incorrigible Rare individuals who agree to work

Do so slowly and carelessly These people suck None of them are smiling None of them are fucking whistling They didn't offer me a hug They didn't tell me how great Soviet Union is They're all fucking Oh, I'm sad

Oh, I had to fucking My wife got to eat Boohoo Oh they cut her breasts off right for me Boo whew God the rationalization of just whoever wrote that. And people do that shit all the time.

They just twist the truth to make themselves look and feel so much better than they should. If you believe these deportees have done nothing to deserve this, they're just, you know, poor humans getting fucked over by a tyrannical regime,

well, you're probably gonna, you know, feel terrible if you have at least a shred of a conscience. But you'll feel so much better. If you just paint them as just nothing but incorrigible parasites, the dregs of society, enemies of the state

who deserve whatever terrible fate they have been allotted. Don't even want to hear their story fuck them. They did that shit to themselves. That's such an easy way to go through life, right? Anything bad happens to people around you? Well, fuck them then. They're not me. I'm doing good. One of humanity's greatest strengths is it has to be just our ability to lie to ourselves. Just convince ourselves that black is white, white is black, you know, whatever's just the most morally convenient. One of these people shouted, you're starving the people, we're eating one another.

That person and 14 or so other hot heads were arrested. My God. What did he say? They were eating each other. Arrest him. Some of the people in charge of all this were punished by the people above them who had created the situation, a situation destined to fail. That was very Soviet. Commander Sepkov, stripped of his responsibilities, received a severe censure to be recorded in his personal party membership file, according to a report. It was then decided to transport the deportees once again to new settlement sites

near the confluence of the Bob and the Zena Rivers as the sites that Sepkopf had chosen were now inaccessible by boat because the water levels had dropped too much. Now the plan was to create a utopian

prospective economic plan for developing the resources of the district in 1933. Uh-huh. Nothing about the Soviet Union was ever utopian. I love it's like, listen, I know this is shit now.

I know this is like a, I've been an island where a lot of people got their tits cut off and eaten and just starved and were crawling around. You know, they were 100 years old and just, you know, fucking asking for a little bit of flour to be poured in their shoe as they shit themselves to death. But, pretty soon, it's going to be a utopia. Before the year was up, the deportees were expected to have cleared 500 hectares.

Sowed them in rye, accumulated sufficient reserves of wood for construction and heating, gathered enough fish, berries, and mushrooms the last winter. That's reasonable. He's starving, traumatized, maimed people. Oh, yeah, they should be able to easily do that. after this meeting the district authorities left they left a new commander commander fraulov in charge and he actually did get to work in a few weeks he located a crew of construction workers had him build a actual settlement village

where the remaining survivors from site number one about 250 people began to live in mid-July but fralov had no time to transfer approximately 2,000 survivors who were living further upriver in site 2 to 5 also had to deal with some additional 4,200 individuals now on their way from tromsk to nizino they were mainly large numbers of elderly and disabled people along with women and small children

who had according to a report no value in terms of economic development and whose presence in cities turn them into quote garbage can zones let's get these garbage canned kids out of here three such convoys would arrive between the end of June and July 18th uploading about a hundred kilometers

or about 62 miles upstream from Nazino according to fall off this round went a lot better because the deportees received buckwheat soup, 500 grams of actual bread, and after two or three days, some dried fish. And since they had a public bathhouse now, typhist not as much of an issue. Only 23 people died in the first few days. Only 23 of these fucking garbage can kids. What a win.

After a week on the island, these deportees were also sent to their, quote, final resettlement sites. Apparently no one got their tits cut off, big step up. But most of them did refuse to work. and tried to escape. Hmm. According to the master plan laid out just a few months before in February

after those deportees passed through. The rest of the year would see a total of 200,000 deportees passed through this area on their way to resettlement zones if they survived Cannibal Island.

But then that would not happen. That was a plan, but then the plan was scrapped because Vasili Valekko, a young journalist slash propagandist, that was all that existed in Soviet Union, had started looking into

what had happened on the island. He would spend nearly three weeks on the island trying to figure out what had happened if the reports of the massive success of resettlement to western Siberia were actually true. When he completed his report, he sent it to his immediate superior, Levitz, the secretary of the party committee of the Nariom region,

and also, he sent him to Bob, because he sent it to Bob Ica and to Stalin himself. That was pretty bold for a 25-year-old bureaucrat, but it was actually something Stalin encouraged. He thought it was good for people to go above the heads of their managers because he thought that upper-level managers usually just gave him flattering or good news that wasn't always true. Volichko denounced a, quote, series of errors and causes of negligence that had led to, quote, stunning collapse of a great project for the colonization of a Siberian region.

He described in detail what had happened from the deportee's arrival to their evacuation. He laid the blame on local officials who had no idea what to do with the people they'd been given, couldn't even help them once they were in the permanent settlements as people continue to die at a rapid rate. By August 20th, he reported barely 2,200 people remained alive out of the 6,600 to 6,800 who had arrived from Tomsk. This horror show had only begun a little over two months before in May, right? So much atrocity in such little time. Valichko said that some of these people who had died, or were still suffering there,

were party members or relatives of party members who had been unfairly detained by lazy officials. They had asked Valichko to help them while he was investigated, and now he was. He would be the first person to ever report their grievances to any kind of higher official. His letter to Stalin would arrive in Moscow in the beginning of September of 1933. Stalin read it immediately requested that it be circulated amongst the members of the Politburo. On September 23rd, the Politburo assigned a high official to look into the matter who started a commission that would end up visiting several settlement villages, all of them in a terrible state of dilapidation, that contradicted official reports.

According to one document, the huts are half buried. A roof made of branches Through which the autumn rains pour No windows Inside rows of pallets With a little dry grass to serve as a blanket Half naked emaciated Dirty, lice-ridden individuals lying there

Outside the huts The more vigorous ones Warm themselves around wood fires When the local commander was asked Why did the deportees stay outside? He replied, all the declassays Right, the undesirables, are used to living around wood fires. They've always done that.

This is just how these people live. They're urchants. They're forest elves. He said, they do it here too. We also went to the huts into which had been crowded people suffering from dysentery, tuberculosis, scurvy, and syphilis, along with severely emaciated individuals. They were all lying on pallets covered with a blanket of grass that hadn't been changed for weeks that emitted a pestilential odor of manure.

When we asked, why are these individuals in such a state? We were told they had always been. sick. What is happening with these people? They just say the dumbest shit. Oh, what's going on here? Where are these people sick on these palates? Oh, that's how they've always been. They were born that way. They fell out of their mom's vagina, landed right on a pallet, and they're a pallet creature. They're a pallet slug. They look like a human, but that's actually a pallet slug.

What the fuck? Fucking Russia's so fucking weird. God. When we asked, why are these individuals in such a state? We were told they'd always been sick. and emaciated, and that in any case they cannot be cared for because there was a lack of everything. We estimated that there were at least 800 bed-ridden sick people. A few rare, able-bodied individuals were constantly bustling about building huts.

At one settlement site, the commission noticed a piece of land that had been cleared and sown about one hectare in area. It was obvious. All of this had been a colossal failure. Therefore, the commission recommended that the case of the survivors be, quote, rapidly re-examined lest the least socially dangerous ones leave

Forbidding them to reside in cities Subject to Special Rules To send the more dangerous ones back to Tomsk camp At least until spring And completely evacuate all the sites Where the Deportees in the 1933 Contingent had been installed On November 1st, Robert Ica

Fucking Bobby Bob met with his officials Russian Bobby Met with his officials Agreed to sanction about 10 Who had been in some way involved With the Nizino affair both SEPCOF and Fraloff would be expelled from the party now

and sentenced to up to three years in a fucking gulag in a camp for having, quote, sabotaged the implementation of the state's 1933 plan for colonizing the NARIM region. So they were set up to fail and then scapegoated, which is also just so Soviet. But the committee did concede that the contingents of deportees

were completely unsuited for colonizing the Siberian Great North. And they instructed the party's central committee not to send any further contingents to Western Siberia. As a result, the Nazino atrocity directly led to the end of large-scale settlement plans in the Soviet Union and to the end of using deportees from urban declassay elements and criminal backgrounds for future settlement plans. But of course, the Soviet government would never admit that they had fucked up massively, so that, you know, that would make them look bad, so they just didn't admit that.

Valichko's report will remain classified until the human rights organization called a memorial would conduct an investigation in 1998, over five decades after these events, and the tragedy was not finally made public knowledge until 2002, when reports from a September 1933 special commission by the Communist Party were published by Memorial. Today, Nazino, much the same as it was, you know, before this happened, and actually a little ways afterwards, a swampy island in the middle of a river in a sparsely settled, far-flung, desolate region of Russia,

except today different sites commemorate the victims of the Nazino tragedy and every June a ceremony is held both on the island and in the town of Nazino in honor of the victims people whose last moments on earth may have been amongst the most terrifying any person could possibly experience and all of that was government sanctioned all of it was legal right nice reminder that legal does not always equate to good or fair or ethical

I hate when people you know just get real fucking anal and it's like Well, I shouldn't have broke the law. Well, sometimes laws suck. And people should break them. Sometimes they're unethical. So glad the Soviet Union fell. What an incredibly shitty political experiment. Now if somebody could just please fucking kill Putin.

Please die, Putin. Please, you motherfucker just die. So that Russia can move in a more humanist direction. That would be awesome. Or I guess, you know, he could die and it could go the other way. You know, if that evil snake gets his head cut off, what other monster might rise up to sit on his throne? But also, maybe somebody good could show up, finally hold the reins over there.

You know, Putin can be eliminated, hopefully painfully and slowly. Could Russia, for maybe the first time ever see the formation of a new kind of government that does not exploit and abuse and oppress its many beautiful people? Such resilient people to endure all that. Such a perpetual shame that they have to endure it. Now, we live in such a beautiful world that actually does have enough resources for all of us to be able to live comfortable lives, you know, away from tyranny. But our world always has, you know, a certain amount of terrible, greedy, small-minded, selfish fuckfaces living in it who just bully their way through life and create so much needless suffering for those around them.

And for what? So they can continue on with their never-ending misguided quest for fulfillment. So they can fight for more and more power in a futile attempt to fill the deep, fucking hole inside of them that more power will never, ever, fill. I wish I could force literally every able-bodied person in the world to smoke enough weed I guess you don't have to be able-bodied smoke weed. I wish I could force everybody over the age of about,

I don't know, 16. To smoke enough weed, take enough magic mushrooms, Molly, undergo enough fucking therapy until they finally felt, you know, a decent amount of empathy and experienced enough ego death to see what a hollow way to live

this is. My experiment might not work. But at the very least, holy shit, it would be a great party. Be the party to end all parties. You know, none of us are here for very long. We don't actually have to use our limited time to fuck over others to get enough for ourselves. Hopefully, one day, collectively, humanity will understand that. And stories like these will be read and or heard by shocked and appalled people from a better world, way in the future, people who just can't wrap their heads around. What the fuck was wrong with us?

And that's it for this edition of Time Sucks Short Sucks. God. Whenever I feel like, I don't know, frustrated with something I should just tell myself, well, at least you're not alive in Soviet Russia. At least you're not living back in Soviet Russia. If you enjoyed this story, check out the rest of the Bad Magic Productions Catalog, beefier episodes of time. What did I just say?

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