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[narrator] In 1933,

6000 prisoners declared socially harmful

to the Stalinist Regime,

were deported to the island of Nazino.

An isolated spot in the middle of a Siberian river.

Unloaded without provision or tools

these deportees underwent torture by starvation

to the point they ended up tearing one another into pieces.

To this day the inhabitants of the region call the spot

Cannibal Island.

[harmonic music]

[ominous music]

In the early 1930 the Soviet Union was perusing

the program of rapid Industrialization to

the determent of the rural areas which was subjected to

increasingly demanding state contributions.

At a time when the harvest was already proving to be mediocre.

[ominous music]

Gradually food shortages and then famine

reached a large part of Russia.

The peasant exodus intensified in the zones stricken by famine.

To Stalin, it was evident that these peasants

were counter revolutionaries.

Against this backdrop

between January the seventh and twelfth 1933

came the annual meeting in Moscow that

brought together all the ruling classes of the Soviet Union.

Starlin, in his inaugural speech,

developed his new theory.

Despite the triumph of socialism

and the elimination of the exploiting classes

opposition does not disappear, it just take different forms.

Henceforth, criminality and social deviance

constitute the main threat to the building of socialism.

[ominous music]

On January 21, Stalin wrote to Genrikh Jagoda,

Head of the political police, a secret directive

ordering him to call a halt to the massive exodus of peasants

from the Ukraine and the Northern caucasus.

Special patrols were sent out onto the roads

and into the train stations to intercept the fleeing peasants.

Though most of the fugitives complied those who refuse

to return home were sent to work the land

in Siberia or Kazakhstan.

By the spring of 1933 more than 800 000 people

had been arrested.

In order to better control the migratory flows

and to limit the huge rural

exodus was hindering the movement

of supplies to the major cities.

As well as to cleanse the cities of the unproductive elements.

The administration decided to make possession of a passport

compulsory for city dwellers.

This internal passport would replace all other forms

of identity papers. In under twelve months

twenty seven million city dwellers had duly

received their passport.

All those refused a passport was given ten days

to return to their native region.

Between March and April 1933, in Moscow alone,

seventy thousand applicants was refused and forced

to leave the city.

Some inhabitants, knowing in advance

that they have never been issued a passport

did not report to the administration

and instead went into hiding.

Special militia were formed across the city

to weed out these individuals,

variously described as parasites

socially dangerous or socially harmful

to the building of communism.

Spring 1933, Moscow and Leningrad

saw more than seventy three thousand of these

undocumented citizens, arrested then transferred

to special villages in Siberia or Kazakhstan.

[morose music]

On May the first 1933

thousands more undesirables

were sent to the Tomsk transit camp

for special settlers in Siberia.

From there they would be transferred

to the Island of Nazino, located 800km to the north

[harmonic music]

[music continues]

But who were these men and women?

How did they end up on this lost island?

My name is Ivan Portman.

A few months ago, an historian friend of mine

called the Nazino affair to my attention.

My own grandfather had been arrested in Moscow in May 1933,

before been deported to Siberia.

He never came back.

I have always wanted to know what happened?

Perhaps he ended up on Nazino or else, where?

That's why I find myself in Russia

on the trail of the Nazino prisoners.

I decided to make for the center of Moscow,

on the Sakharov museum.

It's home to a vast collection

of archives devoted to the Gulag

and political repression in the Soviet Union.

Since the fall of communism and the opening

of the Soviet archives

it has been impossible to trace

the story of the tragic episode.

It is because a young party instructor Vassily Velichko,

took the initiative of conducting his own enquiry

into the circumstances in which

thousands of deportees had perished.

Even daring to write to Stalin himself,

that this story reached our ears.

As the administration could no longer could hide it blunders,

a Commission of Enquiry was launched in September 1933.

Its purpose was to verify the truth of the information

send by comrade Velichko

and the validity of the declarations of hundreds

of survivors who claimed they had been wrongly been deported.

It is possible with the aid of the commission documents

to reconstruct in detail the spiral of events

leading up to this terrible deportation, come abandonment.

And, but for the initiative of this junior party manager

there were doubtless had been no trace of this chilling tale.

I decided to travel to Tomsk, which is in the heart of Siberia

more than 4000km from Moscow.

In Tomsk, I go to the museum of the history

of soviet political repression located in

former secret police barracks

that also served as a prison from 1923-1944.

The museum itself possesses a large collection of archives.

[ominous music]

But who were these individuals described as socially harmful?

In what circumstances were they arrested,

then sent to Tomsk,

only to end up on Nazino.

A first group of deportees was in fact made up of prisoners

arrested and sentenced in the proceeding months,

between one and five years detention in camps.

Rather than hardened criminals

as the authorities had dubbed them,

these were petty delinquents,

most of them repeat defenders. Convicted of theft,

trafficking etc.

But the police had,

without hesitation, arrested and deported

those whose only fault was to left their papers at home.

Or people who were simply passing through

Moscow and Leningrad.

Vladimir Novozhilov, Moscovite, driver for the Kompressor works.

Awarded bonusses three times.

Wife and child dually registered in Moscow.

He was about to take his wife to the cinema after work,

while she was getting ready, he went down into the street

to buy some cigarettes, rounded up and deported.

Nikolai Voiken, member of the communist youth since 1929

worker at[indistinct] factory,

bureau member of his workshop's party sale.

Thrice commended, arrested in the street on his way

to a football match, he had left his passport at home.

Igor Maslov, party member, worked at the Moscow gasworks.

He had invited an engineer friend and his brother in law

round to his house for a drink. They all went out

to buy some hors d'oeuvres

and were arrested by a police patrol

at the food store, they hadn't take their passports with them.

Deported.

The engineer and brother in law died on Nazino,

Maslov survived.

Rosa Rakamizhova, 12 years old. Did not speak Russian.

Passing through Moscow, her mother left her alone

at the station, while she tried to buy some bread.

The little girl was arrested by the police as a young vagrant

and deported, alone.

Delina Gorbunova, wife of a naval reserve commander

of the cruiser Aurora. Arrested while transiting

through a Moscow station on her way home to Leningrad.

She was pregnant, she had all her papers with her

and her train ticket for Leningrad.

Gave birth on the island of Nazino.

[emotional piano music]

All of those rounded up spent very little time

at the police station before being loaded

without a trial of any kind into special police convoy's

bound for Tomsk.

"Just go, they will look into your case there."

That was the standard given by police officials

to the protest from those arrested,

were not even given permission to warn their families.

[morose music]

In general all their documents were confiscated by the police

so as to avoid any subsequent accusations.

Because achieving the targets was the main objective.

Those who succeeded in keeping their old papers

often had them extorted during the ten day journey

to the camp in Tomsk by the common law criminals

Who use them to roll their cigarettes.

According to the testimony of the Tomsk camp commander

the outdated elements from Moscow and Leningrad

who arrived on May the 10th, were particularly restless.

On the second night, disturbances broke out.

His statement records that the prisoners had only received

a piece of bread and salted fish since their arrival.

The guards had opened fire on anyone who attempted to escape.

The day before, they had also taken away seven prisoners

to enact a execution. The situation remained very tense.

As saturation in the camp was reaching disaster proportions

the priority was to get rid of the more troublesome elements

by sending them to other camps.

On May the 14th several thousand prisoners

are thus loaded into barges for transportation

to the Alexandro-Vakhovskaya labor camp further north.

It was therefore decided to unload the prisoners

on an Island facing the village of Nazino.

In the middle of the river Ob.

70 kilo meters downstream of Alexandrovsky.

[emotive music]

[anticipatory music]

According to the initial report made by the doctor

and the two officers in charge of the health situation

on the island,

the practice of extracting gold crowns turned into

fully fledged trafficking.

Using and abusing their power,

the guards set up a reign of terror not hesitating to

execute prisoners on the spot.

Killing to steal an overcoat or a pair of shoes.

Those who had been deported by some stroke of misfortune

were the most vulnerable.

Though the guards were brutes, the commandants

weren't to be outdone.

One would amuse himself by using the special settlers

as they were known, as rowers.

He would throw anyone who rowed badly into the water

and drowned several deportees this way.

Another will systematically beat prisoners.

Extorting their clothes against improved rations.

Forcing them to dive into the icy water to retrieve game

he had shot.

The most serious charges concerned the murder

of deportees shot by guards

as if they were shooting animals for sport.

In their defense, the guards and commandants interrogated

by the Commission of Enquiry sited orders given by Tsepkov

to open fire without warning on all those trying to escape.

Many prisoners tried their luck

by assembling large dried branches.

Three or four together would manage to build a kind of raft

and allow themselves to be carried by the current.

But most drowned or died of starvation.

Valery is the mayor of Nazino.

He takes me top the island on his boat.

He doesn't talk much but just his presence speak volumes.

The day after the landing on the island

the first rumors surfaced about corpses being butchered

and human flesh been cooked and eaten.

During the two weeks that followed,

the same health officers describe similar health cases.

Several dozen bodies were found with the liver,

the heart, and lungs removed.

But the first case of murder followed by a cannibalistic act

was only established on May 29th.

The three guilty men, aged between 20 and 30 years old

were arrested and taken to Alexandrovsky prison.

Three more cannibals were caught on May 31st.

[eerie music]

In all, around a dozen cases of cannibalism were recorded.

According to the doctors, the individuals involved

had committed cannibalistic acts out of habit...

because they had been cannibals for a long time.

Habitual cannibals.

Several of the guards questioned by the Commission of Enquiry

for having shot, as if shooting animals for sport

and deportees who are attempting to escape on improvised rafts,

justified their actions by claiming

they were probably cannibals

with their cow, in the villains argo.

The cow was a novice invited by convicts to take part

in an escape attempt.

In general he was flattered to be associated with known crooks.

What he didn't know ,however, was that if rations ran out

he would be killed and his kidneys and blood consumed,

usually raw.

The fugitives did not light a fire

for the fear of being spotted.

[morose music]

The situation on the island of Nazino was further worsened

on May the 25th by the arrival of another convoy

of fifteen hundred outdated elements.

The state of health of this second group was even

more appalling than the previous one.

Commandant Tsepkov returned to Nazino on May 31st,

accompanied by Vlasov, Communist Party Secretary

for the Alexandrovsky district.

He made a long report on what was happening.

Having listened to the report the district bureau ordered

the transfer of all prisoners on the island

to more appropriate locations. Which was done.

Almost all the deportees was transferred to five sight

to five sights upstream on the river Nazino.

During the transfer several hundreds of prisoners died.

But news of what have been happening on Nazino

reached the ears of those at the highest political levels

who took steps not to let word of the scandal leak out.

Tsepkov was relieved of his functions and replaced

by a younger more energetic commandant

who attempted to improve the situation.

But he had no time to worry about the 2000 survivors

of the island of Nazino as already he had to face

the arrival of further elements from the transit camp in Tomsk.

The Nazino survivors were left to their own devices.

At the very moment when the parties regional authorities

were trying to conclude the Nazino incident,

a young communist official Vassily Velichko

instructor propagandist and correspondent

for a local newspaper

decided to conduct his own inquiry into the situation

in the work settlement camps in

the Alexandrovsky district.

Velichko was the first official who had taken the trouble

to listen to and to pass on the complaints of these

Nazino deportees.

Stalin received the letter on September the 30th

and ordered that it be circulated between the highest

ranked party leaders.

A Commission of Enquiry was set up to set light on events.

The higher ranked regional party officials

received severe reprimands,

which didn't prevent them in continuing their careers.

The lower local officials were sanctioned more harshly.

Tsepkov and Kulibayev

were sentenced to three years in a camp.

[somber ending music]