Nazino tragedy

The Nazino tragedy (Russian: Назинская трагедия, romanized: Nazinskaya tragediya) was the mass murder and mass deportation of around 6,700 prisoners to Nazino Island,[1] located on the Ob River in West Siberian Krai, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Soviet Union (now Tomsk Oblast, Russia), in May 1933.

Sent to construct a "special settlement" and to cultivate the island, the deportees were abandoned with only scant supplies of flour for food, little to no tools, and virtually none of the clothing or shelter necessary to survive the harsh Siberian climate.

[2][4] The original report on the incident was made by Vasily A. Velichko, a Soviet propaganda worker, and passed to Joseph Stalin and to other members of the Politburo.

[6][7] In February 1933, Genrikh Yagoda, head of the OGPU (a secret police), and Matvei Berman, head of the GULAG labor camp system, proposed to Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Soviet Union, to resettle up to two million people to Siberia and the Kazakh Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic in "special settlements".

The deportees, or "settlers", were to bring over a million hectares (10,000 km2; 2,500,000 acres; 3,900 sq mi) of virgin land in the sparsely populated regions into production and become self-sufficient within two years.

[8] Yagoda and Berman's plan was based on the experience of deporting two million kulaks and other agricultural workers to the same areas that had occurred in the previous three years as part of the dekulakization policy.

[citation needed] The original plan targeted several types of kulaks, peasants, people living in the agricultural areas of Soviet Union's western territories such as the Ukrainian SSR and the Lower Volga, North Caucasus and Black Earth regions of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.

The Soviet passportization campaign began with a decision by the Politburo on 27 December 1932 to issue internal passports to all residents of major cities, with one of their objectives being to "cleanse Moscow, Leningrad and the other great urban centers of the USSR of superfluous elements not connected with production or administrative work, as well as kulaks, criminals, and other antisocial and socially dangerous elements.

"[9] 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.

Those arrested in connection with the cleansing of Moscow prior to 1 May 1933 (International Workers' Day) were assigned to a transit camp in the city of Tomsk.

[citation needed] According to the plan proposed by Yagoda and Berman, the deportees would pass through transit camps at Tomsk, Omsk and Achinsk.

[11] A report by Vassily Arsenievich Velichko, the local Communist Party head in Narymsky District of the West Siberian Krai, gave twenty-two examples of people who had been deported:[1] It is hard to tell how many, even who (died), because declared documents had been confiscated at the time of arrest, or by police organs at the detention centers, or on the train by criminals who used them to smoke.

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.

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.

People were frequently murdered in fights over food or money, and the bodies of those in possession of anything of value such as gold tooth fillings and crowns were often looted.

The lack of proper food and the rising death toll by late May led to cannibalism becoming widespread, to the point that settlers eventually began murdering individuals for the sole purpose of consuming them.

In a period of thirteen weeks, of the roughly 6,000 deportee settlers intended for Nazino Island, between 1,500 and 2,000 had died due to starvation, exposure, disease, murder or accidental death.

[citation needed] The report on the situation at Nazino Island, which had been sent to Stalin by Velichko, was distributed by Lazar Kaganovich to members of the Politburo and was preserved in an archive in Novosibirsk.

In October, the commission estimated that of the roughly 2,000 survivors from Nazino Island, half were ill and bedridden and that only about 200 to 300 were physically capable of working.

[23] Local officials and guards at the island attempted to dispute Velichko's report but were instead reprimanded, receiving prison sentences ranging between twelve months to three years.

[citation needed] After the initial investigations in late 1933, the events at Nazino Island were forgotten as they were suppressed from being made public; only a small number of survivors, government officials and eyewitnesses knew of their occurrence.

In 1988, at the time of the glasnost policy in the Soviet Union, details of the affair first became available to the general public through the efforts of the human rights group Memorial.