Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #242956 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 248 pages

Review
Review of the original French edition: "The mind-blowing story of a bureaucratic utopia that turned into carnage. A 'micro-history' that forms a representative example in a country where the inconceivable became the norm.
(Thomas Wieder Le Monde )

[An] absorbing new book. . . . After detailing the lead-up to the deportation of the 'socially harmful elements' and the political situation surrounding it, Mr. Werth zeroes in on the Nazino affair to illustrate the policy's devastating effect.
(Martha Mercer New York Sun )

Few books have captured the human tragedy of Stalin's bloody reign so succinctly or with such force.
(Douglas Smith Seattle Times )

Cannibal Island is a grim tale of ten thousand 'anti-social elements' deposited on an empty Siberian island in the Ob river in the 1930s. But, more than that, it is a story of how the brutal purge machinery was oiled and run at its lowest level.
(Paul E. Richardson Russian Life Magazine )

Nicolas Werth's excellent history of the Nazino gulag is a portrait of a place that went from terrible to unimaginable.... In a strong field, Cannibal Island is one of the grisliest and most unpleasant accounts of gulag life.... This one ranks as one of the more memorable exhibits in the gallery of horrors.
(Graeme Wood Weekly Standard )

This is an utterly harrowing account of the 'bloody implementation of a utopia' and an exemplary analysis of the Soviet state, with its 'number culture' and 'pseudocategorizations' -- all of this underpinned, of course, by the most spectacular cruelty.
(Richard King Sydney Morning Herald )

Often the details in a single instance sear more deeply than the most gruesome tally of large numbers....Werth describes in rich detail the transformation of the vast western Siberian wilderness into the dumping ground for millions of 'de-kulakized' peasants, minority groups from the borderlands, the socially marginal, criminals, and the utterly innocent....These 'special settlements' are a part of the gulag's least-known history. Werth corrects that in plain and clear language, leaving the story to convey its own excruciating eloquence.
(Robert Levgold Foreign Affairs )

Nicolas Werth's book is the stuff of nightmares. It recounts the fate of 6,000 'special settlers', rounded up in Moscow and Leningrad in 1933 and sent to the island of Nazino in the Ob River in Western Siberia.
(Carla King Irish Times )

[A] chilling piece of historical reconstruction
(London Review Bookshop )

The author demonstrates encyclopedic erudition and provides nuanced explanations. Ample quotations from reports and letters of government officials give the book its sense of immediacy. In other words, the volume is both scholarly and absorbing, which is a rare combination.
(Michael Jakobson Slavic Review )

In short, this remarkable case study of dysfunction and terror makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of Stalinism.
(JeffreyS.Hardy H-Net Reviews )

[This book] mark[s] a quantitative leap forward in data now available in English on these important and complex problems that had previously been much neglected.
(Stephen G. Wheatcroft American Historical Review )

Werth's meticulous approach to the study of social order and administrative norms in the Stalin era is likely to be of real interest to specialists in GULAG studies, camp memoirs, and Soviet culture in general. Clearly and forcefully argued, Cannibal Island does an excellent job of reconstructing the way in which Soviet officials and institutions operated in the 1930s. Readable enough to serve as a good source for undergraduates working on research papers in Soviet history and culture, this volume would make a good addition to even the most modest university library collections.
(Emily D. Johnson Slavic and East European Journal )

Review
Perhaps it is not surprising that Nicolas Werth, the French historian who cowrote The Black Book of Communism, has decided in Cannibal Island to return to an incident he merely mentioned in that vast book. He was right to do so: in its way, this small, brilliant work, the description of a single incident, is every bit as powerful a condemnation of Communist ideology as the Black Book itself.
(Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Gulag: A History" )

From the Inside Flap

"Perhaps it is not surprising that Nicolas Werth, the French historian who cowrote The Black Book of Communism, has decided in Cannibal Island to return to an incident he merely mentioned in that vast book. He was right to do so: in its way, this small, brilliant work, the description of a single incident, is every bit as powerful a condemnation of Communist ideology as the Black Book itself."--Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History

"In this gripping new work, Nicolas Werth documents the horrifying story of the forced deportation of 'socially-dangerous elements' from Moscow and Leningrad to the forbidding island of Nazino. With the use of dramatic new documents from previously classified Soviet archives, he chronicles for the first time in English the atrocities that unfolded on 'cannibal island.' This is an absorbing, indeed chilling tale of savagery, highlighting in microcosm the brutal realities of Stalinist socialism in action."--Lynne Viola, author of The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements

"Werth has as solid a command of the Soviet-era archival documentation as anyone. But while he lays out a synthetic, institutional panorama of a segment of Soviet bureaucracy, he can write at the same time a story full of suspense, in a crisp and lucid style. He certainly does both with shattering effect in his Cannibal Island."--Jan T. Gross, author of Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland

Customer Reviews

An interesting glimpse into the 'second' Gulag
As the author states this was the 'second' so called GULag, where people weren't sent to camps for hard labor but rather deported to various parts of the Soviet Union, such as this section of Siberia, to populate a place not even the Tsars, who tried for 350 years, could. The story in and of itself is quite fascinating and surprising in many respects. The bureaucracy and the obvious Soviet policies are who and what one could easily blame, but those on the bottom also took part in this disaster.

The numbers prepared for deportation were constantly being changed, the monetary funds allocated for these people as well as the horses, tools, and equipment they were to receive their new lives. Always rounding down since those in charge thought if anything extreme occurred those settlers already living there would lend a helping hand. I was surprised by the fact that to oversee this large landmass and its thousands of settlers the OGPU (precursor to the NKVD) had only 44 men, of whom many were clerks and of those clerks many came from the deportees themselves! At least one of their stories is recounted. Militia were also raised to help guard these prisoners and many times these men would let power go to their heads, they didn't want to be here and would beat prisoners and steal their food and/or clothing.

Many of those coming to this Island and other stops along the way were already suffering from the famine that was gripping a large portion of the Soviet Union, their eventual deaths could hardly be prevented. They were arrested usually because they had come to Moscow trying to escape the famine conditions of their homes. The quotas so many hear about when it comes to the Stalinist government are shown here. Aside from criminals, those already in prison, those labeled Kulaks, etc, were people who were simply snatched from train stations who were either passing through Moscow or had just come to Moscow with all their papers and documentation on them. Some Muscovites were snatched off the street because they didn't have their passports on them but had left them at home, no excuses would save them. It's hard to understand how something like that could happen, although it should be mentioned that a few weeks after these people had been deported their stories were checked and many were freed, but they were not yet allowed to return home!

What happens after these people are deported can be seen by the title of the book, there were cases of cannibalism and there emerges the story of a whole violent criminal class that had committed cannibalism in the past, all of this is recounted in the book. Many of those that committed such acts were not starving, which pointed to the fact that they had done this previously. Thus it was also concluded that such acts were not a sign of famine conditions. This book will go to show that the history of the Soviet Union cannot be viewed in black and white terms, there are many variables which need to be understood and these events have to be looked at on a case by case basis. Many of those who died were bullied and killed by the guards or the enormous criminal element they were with. How can one measure out an equal share of the blame to the government for putting them in such a position and to those who did the actual killings? Also interesting is the fact that previous Kulaks who were displaced were not subject to such conditions, they built their settlements and went on with their lives. But these men were used to these conditions and used to living on their own apparently, these elements from the urban centers of Moscow and Leningrad, combined with criminals, could not account for themselves like Kulaks and peasant farmers. An enormous number also tried to run away, while some might have been successful, too many died trying to cross the river Ob while others were undoubtedly lost in the Siberian wilderness. There are accounts of dozens if not hundreds of drowned bodies laying on the shore for kilometers on the opposite river bank of the Island. Just as an example, for the entire year of 1933, 367,457 people 'disappeared', of them 151,601 were recorded as dead and 215,856 as "fugitives". (pg. 181).

It is a fascinating look at a failed project, the inquiry launched into it after the majority of those deported died also shows that the government wouldn't simply stand by, someone had to pay. Those that eventually paid the price were the lower level functionaries, sentenced to various sentences of one to three years in camps. An excellent edition to literature on the "second Gulag" which few know about and an intriguing look into the Soviet Union of the 1930's.