Nazino, Siberia. Barges unload the 6,114 deportees on Nazino Island: a total of 322 women, 4,556 men, and 27 corpses. On May 27, another 1,200 deportees joined the first group. The “Nazino Affair” refers to a social survival experiment conducted by Soviet authorities in 1933 on Nazino Island, about 800 kilometers north of Tomsk, in the Alexandrovsky District of Tomsk Oblast. Four thousand people died in the summer of 1933 from starvation or cannibalism among their cohabitants. The subjects (defined as “declassed and socially harmful elements”) were deported to desolate Siberian lands, such as Nazino, for the purpose of testing their social reliability and simultaneously establishing settlement colonies. In the years that followed, Nazino became known in the USSR as Cannibal Island or Ostrov ljudoedov, due to the cannibalistic incidents that occurred among the deportees on the island, deprived of food, supplies, and other necessities, left alone by the authorities from the very day of landing. The story and the details of the entire operation became known to the international public after the dissolution of the Soviet regime and the opening of government archives in the 1990s. Nicolas Werth used the documents to write Cannibal Island, an investigative book that focuses on both the Nazino affair and other similar experiments conducted by the Soviet government during its years in power.
