Here's How Joseph Stalin's Cannibal Island Was Discovered By The Public

In 1933, Soviet soldiers shipped over 6,000 people to Cannibal Island (also named the Island of Death). According to Atlas Obscura, the prisoners were given no tools, shelter, extra clothing, or food, save some flour that could not be cooked without proper utensils and thus had to be eaten as it was or mixed with river water, causing dysentery. Hundreds died the first night. Guards shot anyone who attempted to cross the Orb River for the other shore (via Radio Free Europe). There was violence over any meager resource. Starving, the captives quickly began killing and eating each other. Some were killed and devoured — others had body parts sliced off and were left to attempt to survive.

“I saw that her calves had been cut off,” a resident of a nearby town, who later met a former Cannibal Island prisoner, remembered. “I asked and she said, ‘They did that to me on the Island of Death — cut them off and cooked them'” (via Radio Free Europe). Prisoners seized another girl, a witness recalled, “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” (via History Collection). The guards did little to stop the horrors.

After a month or two, over 4,000 people had died from violence, disease, and the cold, and the Soviet government ended the social engineering experiment on Nazinsky Island, shipping the frail survivors elsewhere. Though the survivors and residents of nearby villages knew what happened during those bloody months, as did Stalin and the U.S.S.R. leadership, the wider public of Russia and the world would have to wait half a century to hear the tale.

ncG1vNJzZmhqZGy7psPSmqmorZ6Zwamx1qippZxemLyue82erqxnmJq%2Fpr%2BMoaawZZqkwKa8x2aqrZmcnru0ecKapaehkpa5brXSpZinnF2srrR5w6KqnKemmr%2BmsIybsGasmJp6scHBpaCcZw%3D%3D