On the frozen banks of the Ob River, deep in Siberia, lies an island with no official name. Soviet maps never accurately recorded it. For the few local inhabitants who know its history, it has only a whispered name: Cannibal Island. In May 1933, this small strip of marshy land became the scene of one of Stalin’s regime’s darkest experiments.
Six thousand people were left stranded there, without tools, shelter, or food. What should have been an agricultural project turned into a nightmare of hunger and despair where the line between life and death completely vanished. When summer arrived and the grass grew, it concealed the secrets the snow had witnessed.
Mutilated bodies, bonfires where human flesh was roasted like any other, and survivors whose memories would remain buried for decades under the weight of enforced silence. This is not legend. It is not Siberian folklore. It is documented history, investigated and suppressed by a regime that preferred to forget its own atrocities.
A story that only came to light 60 years later, when the Soviet archives were finally opened. Where are you watching from? If this is your first time on the channel, please consider subscribing. Today we investigate one of the most disturbing chapters in Soviet history. An experiment that demonstrated the depths of human cruelty when hunger, neglect, and fear converge.
In the winter of 1929, Joseph Stalin signed decrees that would forever change the Soviet Union. The forced collectivization of agriculture was not just an economic policy. It was a weapon against any resistance to total state control over farming. Property was confiscated. Farmers considered kulaks, the more prosperous peasants, were especially targeted.
But the resistance was fierce. In regions like Ukraine and Kazakhstan, peasants deliberately destroyed their tools, slaughtered entire flocks, and burned crops before the state could confiscate them. Stalin responded with mass executions and deportations to Siberia. Between 1930 and 1931, more than 10 million people migrated from the countryside to the cities, fleeing the violence.
The urban rationing system implemented in 1930 was crumbling. In January 1933, during an annual meeting in Moscow, Stalin declared that, between January 7 and 12, despite the triumph of socialism, the opposition would not disappear. This was an ideological justification for eliminating internal enemies. Two months later, Genrich Yagod, the future head of the NKVD, had an idea.
If there was a surplus of prisoners and a shortage of agricultural production, why not combine the two? The plan was simple. Two million socially undesirable elements would be resettled in Siberia to build their own collective farms. Yoda began implementation even before Stalin’s approval. During the spring of 1933, more than 800,000 people would be arrested. Each region received a quota.
And here the nightmare began. In the Soviet police, not meeting your quota meant becoming part of someone else’s. The internal passport system, reintroduced in December 1932, provided the perfect tool. These documents were distributed only to citizens deemed useful to the state. And, most importantly, peasants did not receive passports.
This was a deliberate attempt to control the rural exodus. Anyone in the cities without a passport was automatically considered a criminal. The purges intensified, especially in late April 1933. Stalin wanted Moscow to look presentable for the May Day celebrations. And in the cities, there were always people without these documents.
Temporary workers, visitors, people who simply forgot their papers at home. Kuzma Salikov was a minor in Novaknetsk, married, a father of two, and a member of the Communist Party. One day, he went to the market without his passport. During a raid, he was arrested and put on a train bound for Siberia.
He never had a chance to warn his wife. He never saw his children again. A mother left her 12-year-old daughter alone for 10 minutes at a gas station while she bought bread. When she returned, the girl had disappeared. The police deported her alone. Vladimir Novazilof, an exemplary worker with multiple decorations, went down to the basement of his factory in Moscow.
Upon leaving, he was dragged away without any chance of recovering his documents. A 103-year-old man went outside for some fresh air. He was arrested. Igor Mazlov, a party member, went out for a drink with friends. A patrol stopped them in the street. They were all arrested. Galina, pregnant and the wife of a naval commander, was on her way to Lennengrad with all her documents.
Nevertheless, she was deported. In some operations, agents deliberately confiscated documents at the time of arrest. That way, there was no proof of innocence. During the spring of 1933, hundreds of thousands of people disappeared in this way. The train cars were inhumane, overcrowded, and there was no room to sit. Common criminals beat the weak and stole documents.
The journey lasted 10 days with meager rations of stale bread and dirty water. Many died. When someone died, their body was thrown from the moving train. In April 1933, when the first trains arrived in Tomsk, 25,000 people were dumped without warning. In the following weeks, the number rose to 90,000. Tomsk lacked resources; no camps had been built, and no food had been stockpiled.
Yagod’s plan had been implemented swiftly during the repression phase, but the logistics stalled in the bureaucracy. Local officials faced a terrible dilemma: either they solved the problem, or Stalin would deal with them. Someone suggested moving everything further north. There was a river, wooden barges, and an isolated island 800 km to the north, near the village of Nazino.
On May 14, 1933, nearly 5,000 prisoners were loaded onto four barges. Fifty guards accompanied them. The barges sailed for days on the Ob River, partially covered in ice. Snowstorms lashed the prisoners on the open decks. They had no blankets, only the clothes they were wearing when they were arrested—light spring clothing. Many were barefoot.
During the crossing, the guards distributed 200 grams of bread per person once a day. When the bread ran out, they stopped distributing it. On May 18, 1933, the barges arrived. Of the nearly 5,000 who had set out, 27 were already dead. Their bodies were thrown into the river. The survivors gazed upon the island, 3 km long and 600 m wide, a frozen swamp covered in snow, a few scattered trees, no buildings, nothing.
322 women, 4,556 men, and 27 unburied corpses. They didn’t know they were standing before the place where more than 4,000 of them would die in the coming weeks. They didn’t know that this anonymous strip of land would become known as Cannibal Island. The true horror was just beginning. The ground gave way beneath their feet as the prisoners disembarked from the boats.
It wasn’t solid ground. It was a mixture of frozen mud, stagnant water, and moss. Snow still covered parts of the island. Guards shouted orders. People were thrown ashore. Dmitri Alexandrovich Sepkov, the local commander, faced the catastrophe. In February, he received a telegram to prepare for the arrival of thousands of people by the end of June.
But on May 5th, another telegram arrived. The first group had already been sent. The river was still frozen. Nothing was ready. After consulting with other officials, everyone agreed. These people couldn’t be housed in the nearby villages. There were violent criminals. They would loot everything and massacre the local population. The solution was that island surrounded by water, a natural prison.
The fact that it was an uninhabitable swamp didn’t seem to matter. When the prisoners looked around, reality hit them. They had been promised tools. There were none. No axes, no shovels, no rope. The trees could provide wood, but there was no way to cut it. Night was approaching. The temperature plummeted. They were powerless. The guards remained comfortably in their barges, anchored on the opposite bank, with blankets, hot food, and protection.
From there, they observed the island through binoculars. And they had clear orders: shoot without warning anyone who tried to cross the river. That first night, despair gripped them. Some made small fires with dry branches. Hundreds crowded together, fighting for position, but the cold was relentless. It snowed again.
Many lay on the frozen ground trying to sleep. Others wandered aimlessly, delirious. Near the flames, a tragic scene repeated itself several times. Those who slept too close to the fire had their clothes catch fire. Some managed to save themselves by rolling in the snow. Others were not so lucky, and the witnesses were forced to watch, powerless to help.
At dawn on May 19, the guards crossed the river to count. They found 295 corpses. They had died from hypothermia, burns, and exhaustion. The dead were left where they fell. There were no tools to bury them. On the third day, the guards returned with flour. But they didn’t distribute bread. They didn’t want the hassle of baking.
Each person received 200 grams of raw flour. It was less food than prisoners received at Awitz or in the Cambodian extermination camps. Most didn’t know what to do. Some tried to eat it dry, choking on it. Others mixed it with river water. But the water was contaminated. Dysentery spread. Within days, the situation changed drastically. People were crawling on the ground.
Excrement covered vast areas. The stench of disease and decay permeated the island. By the fourth day, May 22, hunger had become an inescapable agony. People tried to eat tree bark, roots, grass, and leaves. Some chewed on the leather of their own shoes. Others ate dirt. Nothing provided them with any nourishment.
And then the prisoners united for the first time. They organized and rebelled. Thousands of voices shouted together, demanding food, tools, and humane treatment. The guards, worried about losing control, sailed to the island. But they arrived with a strategy. They announced that distribution would resume, but not individually. The prisoners were to organize themselves into brigades of 150.
Each brigade elected a leader, and that leader received the entire prize. It was a deliberate “divide and conquer” strategy. And it worked. Among the athletes was a minority of actual criminals—thieves, murderers, and sociopaths. They immediately saw an opportunity. They presented themselves as brigade leaders. They were strong, violent, and intimidating.
The guards handed over the flower and returned. Control of the only food fell into the hands of the worst elements. They formed gangs, seized most of it, and brutally beat anyone who protested. The island was divided between the strong who ate and the weak who died. Some gangs began hunting people with gold teeth.
They attacked at night, beating their victims to death, using stones to break their jaws and extract gold. That gold had a purpose. The guards traded teeth for more bread, cigarettes, and salt. The human body had become currency. The guards also hatched their own schemes. They spent days drunk on their barges. Vodka flowed freely. Some went up on deck and shot prisoners at random, turning human lives into target practice. They chose someone on land.
Aim, fire. If they missed, they laughed and tried again. It was entertainment. One guard had a cruel pastime. He forced prisoners to row boats across the river, throwing anyone who couldn’t row well into the water. The OB River was so cold that the victims died of hypothermia within minutes. He watched them struggle and sink.
Then he would get another prisoner and repeat the process. Another guard distributed the food with sadism. He would paddle close to the riverbank and throw pieces of bread to the crowd, as if feeding animals in a zoo. The starving prisoners would pounce on each piece, punching, biting, and trampling people, while the guard laughed with delight. Some guards crossed the river at night looking for young women, offering them food in exchange for sexual favors.
For many desperate women, there was no other option. Some went to the barges and returned with bread. Others went and never returned. A guard told the prisoners, “To you, I am Stalin.” And he was right. On that island, the guards had absolute power over life and death. They were cruel gods ruling a frozen hell. Some tried to escape. Three or four would join together, tying branches together to form rafts. Most drowned.
Those who reached the riverbank were shot. The few who escaped into the forest were hunted down. Kuzma Salnikov, the youngest communist arrested at the market, was a rare exception. In the early days, while he still had the strength, he swam across the frozen river. He managed to reach the riverbank and escape.
Miraculously, he found a job at a distant collective farm, but he never saw his wife or children again. On the tenth day after his arrival, the camp doctor began to notice something disturbing. He examined five recently deceased corpses. Parts were missing. Pieces of flesh had been cut from thighs, buttocks, and calves—intentional cuts made by human hands. He went to Tomsk.
The response was cold. The prisoners were degenerate elements, probably habitual cannibals. He was ordered to ignore it, but he couldn’t because what he discovered was only the beginning of something much worse. On May 21, the doctor took another count: 70 corpses in 24 hours. Five showed signs of systematic mutilation.
The internal organs had been precisely removed. The soft tissues of the limbs had been methodically severed. Some bodies were badly disfigured. These weren’t haphazard wounds. They were deliberate cuts, made with the intention of harvesting. The doctor knew exactly what this meant. The people on the island weren’t just dying of hunger.
They began to devour each other. And worse, they became selective about what they consumed. At first, cannibalism seemed limited to the dead. With so many corpses scattered across the island, freezing and thawing with the temperature fluctuations, there was technically enough meat available for anyone desperate enough to cross that line.
And the line, once crossed, turned out not to exist at all. Because hunger makes no moral distinctions. Hunger doesn’t negotiate. Hunger knows no taboos. And on the island, surrounded by icy water, without food, without tools, without hope, hunger was the only reality that mattered. But there was another factor that complicated any attempt at intervention.
According to the Soviet Penal Code of the time, there was no specific punishment for necrophagy, the act of ingesting corpses. It was a strange legal loophole that no one had thought to address. This meant that people could consume the bodies of those who had already died without facing direct legal consequences.
Killing someone just to eat them was technically murder. The guards used this technicality to justify their inaction. “It’s not a crime,” they argued among themselves. The gangs that controlled the flower trade became even more sinister. They began hunting people alive. No longer just for gold teeth.
Now they hunted human flesh, and their preferred victims were always the same: young people, because they had more muscle mass; women, because they were physically weaker. A 13-year-old girl from the local village of OIAC went to the island in June to collect tree bark for her family’s medicinal use.
It was something the OAC traditionally did, and she saw no danger on the now emptier island. But while gathering bark hidden among the trees, she witnessed something that would haunt her for life. A young prisoner was tied to a popper trunk. A group of men surrounded her with makeshift knives. The OAC girl watched, paralyzed with terror, unable to move or scream.
What he witnessed was so brutal he couldn’t process it. The victim was conscious throughout the attack, and the assailants consumed parts of his body while he was still alive. Some pieces were roasted over a nearby fire. The victim was someone one of the guards, a man named Costia, had been protecting. He had kept him alive on one of the barges, exchanging food for company.
But that day she had gone to a nearby village to gather supplies. Taking advantage of her absence, the gang attacked. When the guard Castia returned hours later, he found the woman still tied to the tree. Technically, she was still alive; her heart was still beating, but she had lost so much blood that she was as pale as snow.
He desperately tried to save her, but it was too late. She died in his arms minutes later. Elsewhere on the island, human flesh began appearing, hung in rags from tree branches. This was the same way game meat is hung to dry in the air. The pieces of the corpse were treated like any other food. They were cut into strips, hung in the sun as soon as they appeared, and left to cure.
Some prisoners sailing near the island in small boats reported seeing clearly: human thighs, arms, and torsos treated with the same indifference as elk or deer meat. One of the cannibals was eventually captured by the guards and formally interrogated. His words were recorded in Soviet archives and survived for decades in the basement of the NKVD.
Reading them reveals something deeply disturbing about the human mind under extreme pressure. It was very simple, he said without apparent emotion in a story that sounded like a shashlik recipe. We’d take willow branches, make skewers, cut the meat into pieces, put them on skewers, and grill them over the fire.
The interrogator asked him if he felt remorse. If he understood that he had killed people, he responded with distorted logic, trying to retain some vestige of moral humanity. “I chose those who were almost dead,” he explained, attempting to justify the unjustifiable. People who clearly wouldn’t survive more than a day or two.
It was written all over their faces. They were leaving. This way it was easier, quicker, without having to suffer for two or three more days waiting for death to come slowly. The justification was sickening, but it made perfect sense to him. Another cannibal, when questioned, had specific preferences which he revealed without shame.
“I only ate livers and hearts,” he stated categorically, never any other parts. Liver and heart are more nutritious. Like someone choosing prime cuts at a butcher shop, he drew moral distinctions where none existed, as if choosing only certain pieces made him less monstrous than those who ate anything.
The doctors assigned to the island lived in constant terror. They slept in small tents on the shore but didn’t dare venture out after dark. Bands of cannibals completely controlled the island at dusk. Even professionals with some official authority were potential targets. Chepov, the local commander who had chosen the island, remained in the region but refused to intervene directly in what was happening.
When the doctor pleaded for action, the authorities argued that the orders were clear: keep the prisoners isolated. The guards were authorized to shoot anyone attempting to escape, but they were not instructed to maintain internal order. Let them sort it out amongst themselves was the official position. Some guards, later questioned about why they didn’t intervene in cases of blatant cannibalism, offered justifications that revealed much about the prevailing mentality of the time.
They said they eliminated cannibals by shooting the fugitives. In Soviet criminal slang, a “cow” was a naive newcomer invited by a seasoned criminal to participate in an escape attempt. The newcomer was usually flattered by the attention, unaware that he was merely provisions for the journey.
The criminal kept the cow alive during the escape until the food ran out, then killed and ate it. It was such a common practice in the underworld that it had its own name, and the guards used it to justify indiscriminate shootings. If they escape together, one probably plans to eat the other. So, by killing them, we prevent cannibalism.
It was a twisted logic that robbed them of their conscience. On May 25, the situation on the island worsened dramatically. Another barge arrived with 1,500 more prisoners. These people were in even worse condition than the first group. Many could barely walk. Some were visibly delirious, shouting nonsense. The new arrivals had no idea what awaited them.
Upon reaching the ground, they saw the earth covered in frozen excrement, half-decomposed corpses, and pools of blood. The smell was indescribable. Groups of skeletal prisoners from the first group watched them with hungry eyes, calculating, assessing. The gangs viewed the new prisoners in a literal and disturbing way.
These people still had some body fat; they still had muscles that hunger hadn’t completely consumed. They were valuable targets. That same night, several new prisoners disappeared. A woman arrived in that second group. She was from a village near Lennengrad; she was 40 years old, but suffering had aged her decades. Her legs were wrapped in dirty, bloodstained rags.
Somehow, using a strength no one knew she still possessed, she managed to cross the river and crawl to the village of Nazino. Fyopila Belina’s family, native inhabitants of Oiac, opened the door and found her unconscious. They carried her to a back room. By candlelight, Fyopila watched as her parents removed the rags from her legs.
What they saw horrified them. The woman’s legs bore devastating wounds. The flesh had been removed from her calves, leaving only the exposed bone covered with loose skin. When they asked her what had happened, she whispered, “They did this to me on the island of death. They cut me up and cooked me. They ate my legs while I was still alive.”
She explained that several men had attacked and immobilized her. They deliberately kept her alive. “Fresh meat lasts longer,” one of them said during the attack. “If we kill you, it will spoil quickly. We’d better keep you alive and take the pieces we need.” They planned to return for more, but she managed to break free and crawl to shore. On May 29, the guards finally arrested three men between the ages of 20 and 30.
They were caught red-handed, not just consuming human flesh, but literally in the process of killing someone specifically for that purpose. It was the first officially documented case of murder followed by cannibalism. Two days later, on May 31, three more cannibals were arrested. And over the following weeks, some 50 people were eventually captured and charged with forming what official documents refer to as cannibal brigades.
But everyone knew these were the most brazen. When reporting these arrests to their superiors, the guards used a telling phrase: they called the captured individuals habitual cannibals. The implication was clear: these people were already cannibals before arriving on the island. It was an absurd justification, but a convenient one. It allowed them to blame the prisoners themselves instead of admitting that the system had created the horror.
In the village of Nadino, on the north shore, the inhabitants of OIAC began to feel genuine fear. They could see the island from their homes. At night, they saw fires across the water. They heard screams when crossing the river, when the wind blew in the right direction. And occasionally, when the wind was especially strong, an unmistakable smell reached the shore: burnt flesh.
But it wasn’t fish meat. It wasn’t game meat. It had a different smell, sweeter, more nauseating. Some Ostecacos sailing nearby reported seeing meat hanging from the trees. At the end of May, Tepov finally returned to Tomsk to meet with Vlov, the Communist Party secretary for the Alexandrovsky district. He could no longer ignore the situation.
He prepared a detailed report. Widespread cannibalism, mass murder, total collapse of order. The district committee ordered immediate evacuation. Of the nearly 7,000 people sent to the island since mid-May, fewer than 2,200 were still alive. More than 4,500 had died. The island was abandoned in mid-June 1933, exactly one month after the arrival of the first barges—30 days that witnessed the total collapse of human civilization.
In July 1933, rumors began circulating in the rural areas along the Ob River. Stories spread among the peasants about an island where prisoners had cannibalized each other, where the Soviet government had abandoned thousands to their fate, where screams could be heard across the water for weeks on end—but they were just rumors. No one had any proof.
No one dared to investigate. Vasili Velichko was a Communist Party instructor working in the region supervising collective farms. He was about 30 years old, a dedicated party member, and a sincere believer in socialist ideals. When he heard these rumors, they deeply disturbed him. In July, Velichko received official orders to investigate another collective farm in the area and prepare a report on productivity, worker morale, and compliance with party directives.
It was a routine bureaucratic procedure, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the rumors surrounding Nutsino. So he made a decision that was both brave and dangerous. Without informing his superiors, without official authorization, he decided to investigate on his own. He deviated from his assigned route and traveled to the Nazino region.
It was a risky decision that could easily cost him his career, or worse. Unauthorized investigations into potential state failures could easily result in his own arrest. But Vlichko felt he needed to know the truth, needed to see it with his own eyes. The journey to the island was difficult. The region was remote, accessible only by boat or precarious trails through Tiger.
But in August, two months after the evacuation, Vichko finally arrived, and what he found confirmed his worst fears. From a distance, the Siberian summer was in full swing. The island seemed almost beautiful. Tall grass grew everywhere, green and lush under the August sun. Wildflowers dotted the landscape. The trees swayed gently in the breeze.
It seemed peaceful, almost idyllic. But when Velichko set foot on that soil, as he began to walk across the island, the grass revealed its terrible secrets. Decomposing corpses were scattered everywhere, hidden by the tall vegetation that covered them. Some had been partially buried, probably by survivors clinging to the last vestiges of decency.
But most had simply been left where they fell, and many, many more, showed clear signs of mutilation. Missing limbs, ripped torsos, exposed ribs, fractured skulls—presumably to access the brain—bones with cut marks, and in some cases, tooth marks. It was a killing field that resembled a medieval battlefield. Velichko meticulously documented everything, counting the bodies, examining the wounds, taking detailed notes, and then beginning to interview witnesses.
The residents of OIAC who lived nearby were the first to speak out. They were initially reluctant, but they did speak. They spoke of the nighttime screams, the smell of burning flesh, the bodies floating downstream, the woman who arrived with severe leg injuries, and the local children who had witnessed horrific things.
Each testimony added to the horror. Velichko also managed to interview some of the guards who had overseen the island. Most became defensive, justifying their actions. “We were just following orders. We couldn’t intervene without authorization. The prisoners were animals, not people.” But some, perhaps burdened by guilt, spoke more frankly.
They described the chaos, the hunger, the violence, the cannibalism. They admitted to shooting people for fun, exchanging food for sex, and watching people die without lifting a finger. Vichko even managed to locate some of the few remaining survivors nearby, too weak or traumatized to be transferred to labor camps.
Their stories were utterly devastating. Dull eyes, monotonous voices, recounting horrors in language that seemed devoid of emotion. For weeks, Velichko worked tirelessly. He gathered testimonies, cross-referenced accounts to verify the facts, and examined official documents about how many had been sent and how many survived. Slowly and meticulously, he pieced together a complete picture of what had happened.
In the autumn of 1933, back in civilization, Velichko sat down to write. His final report consisted of eleven densely written pages. It was detailed, precise, and utterly devastating in its conclusions. He spared no detail. He described the lack of tools that made building shelters impossible, the absence of food that guaranteed mass starvation, the brutal weather conditions that killed hundreds of people on the first night, and the systematic negligence that transformed the experiment into a massacre.
He documented cases of cannibalism with the coldness of a professional investigator. Numbers, dates, descriptions of injuries, testimonies from multiple sources. He built an irrefutable case that something monstrous had happened. But there was something interesting and revealing about the tone of Velichko’s report. He was deeply involved, clearly affected by what he discovered.
He expressed genuine outrage at the inhumane treatment of the prisoners. He used strong language. He condemned those directly responsible. Yet, curiously, he never questioned whether the entire project should have existed in the first place. He never asked why thousands of innocent people were arbitrarily arrested.
He never questioned the quota system. He never criticized the fundamental forced deportation. He only criticized the execution. In the same way that someone criticizes a poorly implemented plan, not the underlying concept. If they had sent tools, if they had sent food, if they had been properly prepared, then it would have been acceptable. The system was fine.
The implementation was flawed. It was the quintessential Soviet mindset. But even within these ideological constraints, Velichko’s report was profoundly courageous. He sent copies not only to regional authorities but directly to Moscow, and a copy was sent expressly to Stalin personally. It was an act of astonishing bravery, or perhaps dangerous naiveté, since criticizing the system’s shortcomings, even those of its execution, could easily lead to being branded an enemy of the people.
But Velichko apparently believed the truth had to reach the highest levels. The report reached the right offices at the right time. Some officials with a shred of conscience read it and were truly shocked. Not so much by the cannibalism itself—atrocities were common knowledge within the Gulag system—but by the potential publicity. If this information leaked to the West, if foreign journalists uncovered it, the international humiliation would be immense.
The Soviet Union was trying to present itself as the future of humanity: a paradise for workers. The cannibals on the Siberian islands didn’t fit into that narrative. An investigative commission was quickly established in November and December of 1933. But not to deliver justice or punish the true perpetrators, but to control the damage, verify the accusations, and determine who could be sacrificed without compromising the entire system.
Investigators were sent to the region. They interviewed witnesses. They examined the island. They verified the figures. And they confirmed that everything in Velichko’s report was true. Every horrific detail, every devastating statistic, was true. Chepov, the local commander who had chosen the island, was thoroughly interrogated.
His defense was simple and, within Soviet logic, virtually irrefutable. He had followed orders to the letter. Nothing more, nothing less. The prisoners were sent months earlier than planned, Sepkov argued. He had no resources, no tools, no prepared food, but he had orders to keep them isolated in one place. That is exactly what he did.
If I’m guilty of anything, it’s only of obeying orders. It was a defense difficult to refute within the Soviet system. Orders were unchangeable. Disobeying meant being the next deportee. Jeep had carried out his orders with the resources available. Technically, he had done exactly what he was told. The commission agreed.
Chepov was not punished. He remained in his post. The 50 guards who directly oversaw the island fared only slightly worse. All were expelled from the Communist Party—a considerable punishment in Soviet society—and all were arrested. But their sentences were surprisingly light: 12 months in ordinary prisons, not in forced labor camps.
Most were released before the end of 1934. Twelve months for overseeing the deaths of more than 4,000 people, for shooting prisoners for sport, for exchanging food for sex, for witnessing cannibalism without intervening—for all the atrocities committed. Twelve months. Meanwhile, some 50 prisoners were executed. Those accused of forming cannibal brigades were swiftly tried in courts that had already reached a verdict.
They were all found guilty, all sentenced to death, and shot. They were convenient scapegoats. The Yagod resettlement program was officially canceled. Mass deportations to Siberian agricultural settlements were ordered to cease. Instead, attention returned to the traditional Gulag forced labor camps. At least in the camps, there was infrastructure, barracks, tools, and food.
It was a brutal system, but it was a system nonetheless. As for the survivors of Cannibal Island, their fates varied drastically. The commission assessed each one. Only about 300 were deemed healthy, strong, and mentally stable enough to continue in the Gulag system. These 300 were distributed to various labor camps throughout Siberia. The remaining approximately 1,900 survivors were considered too weak or traumatized to perform heavy forced labor.
They were sent to small settlements along the Nazina River, and even smaller villages further upstream, where perhaps they could recover. But even this rescue proved deadly. Conditions in these settlements were not much better than on the island. Food shortages, brutal cold, and disease persisted. And now, these survivors were physically ravaged and psychologically shattered.
Hundreds died during transport to new locations. Their weakened bodies simply could not withstand another journey on icy barges. They died en route and were thrown into the river. Hundreds more perished in the first few weeks after arriving at the settlements. In the end, of the approximately 6,700 who had been sent to Natsino Island during May 1933, probably fewer than 1,500 were still alive six months later.
A mortality rate exceeding 75% in six months. Velichko paid the price for his courageous investigation. He was dismissed from his party post and expelled. He lost his job, his position, his future in the party bureaucracy. But, surprisingly, he was neither arrested nor executed. Perhaps because his report had been useful to his superiors, he eventually managed to rebuild his career.
During World War II, he became a war correspondent, reporting from the front. Later, he wrote about the development of socialism in Siberia. But never, not once in his entire life, did he write or speak publicly about what he discovered on that island in 1933. As for Yagod and Burman, the architects of the resettlement plan that gave rise to Nazino, they eventually met their own dark end, but not because of Nazino.
Stalin had other reasons, other paranoias, for eliminating them. In 1937, during the Great Purges that consumed the Soviet leadership, Yagoda was suddenly arrested. The charges—treason, conspiracy to assassinate Stalin, sabotage, and espionage for foreign powers—were all fabricated. He was executed in 1938 with a shot to the back of the head.
Burman followed a similar path. In 1938, he too was arrested. He was executed in 1939, also with a shot to the back of the head. There is a bitter and dark irony in this. The men who sent thousands to die in inhumane conditions were ultimately consumed by the very machinery they helped to build and operate. But the fate of Yagoda and Burman did not bring justice to Nazino’s victims.
Because these victims had already been forgotten, their names weren’t properly recorded. Their families never learned exactly what happened. Kuzma Salikov, the youngest who escaped, never saw his wife or children again. They probably spent years searching for them, asking questions that no one would answer. The 12-year-old girl deported alone likely died on the island or shortly afterward without understanding why this was happening.
Galina and her baby vanished into thin air. The island remained abandoned for decades. Occasionally, local hunters or fishermen passed by. They avoided landing. The place had a sinister reputation. Nature slowly reclaimed the island, but the truth was simply dormant, waiting. For 50 years, Cannibal Island remained a secret jealously guarded by the Soviet state.
The inhabitants of the Natsino region had a vague idea that something terrible had happened there decades earlier, but the details were hazy, distorted by time and a persistent fear of speaking openly about the regime’s crimes. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, and even after him, under Khrushchev, Brev, and their successors, certain topics were simply off-limits in society.
The gulags existed. Everyone knew it. Mass deportations took place. Everyone knew someone who had disappeared. But there was little investigation. And Cannibal Island was forbidden even to mention. It was only in the late 1980s, during Mikhail Gorbachev’s Glasnost—the policy of openness that allowed unprecedented government transparency—that the Soviet archives began to slowly reveal their darkest secrets.
Journalists and historians finally gained access to documents that had remained sealed for decades. They ventured into the basement of the former NKVD, now the KGB, searching through dusty boxes of classified reports, and found unimaginable things. Velichko’s report was rediscovered in the late 1980s.
When the researchers first read it, they were completely shocked, despite having seen numerous documents about Soviet atrocities. The scale of Nazino’s horror was staggering: the meticulous documentation, the total collapse of humanity in just one month. All recorded in a cold, bureaucratic language that, somehow, made it all the more unsettling.
Numbers, dates, clinical descriptions. It read like a report on an agricultural harvest, not a human massacre. But even after the report was discovered, it took years for the story to reach the general public. The Soviet Union was nearing its final collapse. In 1991, the country would cease to exist, fragmenting into independent republics.
There were massive economic crises, explosive political tensions, the disintegration of an empire, food shortages in the cities, and rampant inflation. A cannibal island in 1933 wasn’t exactly a priority when the present was crumbling around it. It was the local Oiacs, the native inhabitants of the Natsino region, who finally forced the public to confront the issue.
In the village of Nutsino and its surroundings, the older generations still remembered. Many were still alive, in their seventies or eighties. They had seen the barges arrive as children or teenagers. They had heard screams while crossing the river for weeks. They had found bodies floating in the water. Their families had sheltered fugitives, and now, for the first time in their lives, they could speak openly without fear of arrest.
In June 1993, exactly 60 years after the events, a group of local residents organized a ceremony. It wasn’t an official government event. It didn’t have Moscow’s approval. It was a local initiative. Ordinary people decided it was time to acknowledge what had happened on those lands. They crossed the river to the island in small fishing boats.
They carried with them a simple wooden cross they had made themselves. It wasn’t elaborate, just two pieces of wood nailed together, in the traditional style, but it held profound meaning. On the cross, they carved a carefully chosen inscription in honor of the innocent victims of the years of wickedness. It was a phrase that said much without saying everything.
Years of ungodliness was a way of referring to Stalin’s regime without explicitly saying so. Innocent deaths was an acknowledgment that these people were not criminals. Some survivors from the island were still alive in 1993. People who had been 20 years old in 1933 were now 80. They had carried these secrets, these traumatic memories, for six whole decades.
And now they could finally testify publicly. Some were returning to the region for the first time since the evacuation 60 years earlier. It was an extremely difficult journey, both emotionally and physically. Many were weakened by age and illness. But they felt a deep need to be there to see the island once more and honor those who did not survive.
Some of these people wept as they set foot on the island again. Others remained in absolute silence, gazing at the grass where so many had perished, touching the ground where friends had died, recalling names that no one else knew or cared to remember. Theophila Bellina, who had witnessed the horrors as a 13-year-old Osteiac girl, still lived in the region.
She was over 70, but the memories were as vivid as ever. She participated in the cross-placement ceremony. For her, it was a moment of profound validation and emotional catharsis. Finally, she had official permission, or at least social permission, to remember, to speak about the deeply wounded woman her family had harbored, to publicly admit that the nightmare had been real, not a traumatized childhood imagination or an exaggeration of distorted memories.
The ceremony was small and intimate. Only a few dozen people attended, some survivors, their faces marked by time and trauma. Many local residents had grown up hearing rumors about the island. An Orthodox priest blessed the cross and prayed for the dead. There were no politicians giving empty speeches, nor television cameras turning the whole thing into a spectacle.
There was no attempt to exploit the tragedy for political gain. It was a private moment of collective mourning, silent recognition, and shared remembrance. But the relocation was the beginning of something larger. In 1994, a year after the ceremony on the island, Velichko’s report was finally published for the first time.
Russian newspapers published lengthy excerpts. Historical journals published detailed analyses, and for the first time, the outside world learned the whole truth. Cannibal Island was not an urban legend invented by enemies of the Soviet Union. It was not exaggerated anti-Soviet propaganda fabricated by the West during the Cold War.
It was documented history, meticulously recorded by one of the Communist Party’s loyal researchers. It was an official archive with undeniable names, dates, and numbers. Television documentaries were produced. Academic historians wrote articles for specialized journals. Investigative journalists interviewed the last survivors, in a race against time before these voices were silenced forever.
And gradually, the story began to sink deep into the Russian and international public consciousness. The reaction was diverse and revealingly complex. Some Russians were genuinely horrified, confronting yet another dark chapter of their national past, one that had remained hidden for so long. They held candlelight vigils, silent demonstrations, and demanded official government recognition of the victims.
Others were emotionally numb. So many Stalinist atrocities were already known—the Holodomo, the Great Purges, the relatives, decades of goolags—that one more seemed merely a statistical confirmation of what they already knew. And some, surprisingly and worryingly, actively denied or minimized them. They argued that the figures had been exaggerated by Russia’s enemies, that the victims were probably criminals who deserved punishment, that it was Western propaganda infiltrated into the archives.
Denial is a powerful psychological drug. In the international community, Nutsino’s story generated brief but intense interest. It was so extreme, so cinematically horrific, that it seemed almost fictional: cannibals, an isolated island, Siberia. It seemed like the script of a horror film, not a documented true story.
But the documentation was solid and irrefutable. The testimonies were numerous and consistent. The archives were official and bore state seals. There were even photographs of the island taken during the 1933 investigation. There was no honest way to deny what had happened. Every year since 1993, without exception, at the beginning of June, the inhabitants of Nazino come to the island and lay flowers at the monument.
It is a silent and profoundly moving ritual. There are no bombastic political speeches, no grand state ceremonies with authorities, no photographers documenting for posterity, just a few people, usually descendants of the Ocs who witnessed the events or relatives of the survivors, crossing the river in respectful silence, laying simple flowers at the foot of the wooden cross, perhaps praying according to their beliefs, perhaps simply remaining silent, remembering those whom the world would rather forget.
The original cross has had to be replaced several times over the years. The spring floods of the OB River are violent and unpredictable. When the snow melts in the distant mountains, the river rises dramatically, increasing its level by several meters in a matter of days. The water covers much of the island, and the current frequently uproots the cross, but it always rises again.
For academic historians studying totalitarianism, Cannibal Island has become a fascinating and deeply disturbing case study. It perfectly illustrates how totalitarian systems can create conditions where the unthinkable becomes not only possible, but inevitable. It was not the deliberate sadism of a sadistic official that led to cannibalism in Nazino.
It was systematic negligence, bureaucracy, institutional indifference—the machine treating humans in a way that seemed to process statistical numbers, not real lives. What makes Nazino especially disturbing for history students is not just the cannibalism itself. Similar atrocities occurred in other contexts of extreme famine throughout human history.
What makes Nazino unique and especially reprehensible is that it was entirely avoidable. It wasn’t a natural famine caused by drought or an insect plague. It wasn’t a wartime siege where an external enemy deliberately cut off supplies. It was a poorly planned social experiment, even worse executed and abandoned when it failed.
The victims were not violent criminals deserving of severe punishment for actual crimes. They were ordinary people caught in completely random and arbitrary police raids, transformed into criminals by a bureaucratic system that needed to meet absurd quotas. There is a profound lesson in Nazino, but it is one that humanity seems terribly incapable or unwilling to learn across generations.
Systems that treat people statistically will always end up creating their own delusions. It may not be an isolated island. It may not be literal cannibalism, but systematic dehumanization will inevitably lead to horror. Today, seen from afar, sailing along the Ob River, Nazino Island appears peaceful and even beautiful.
The trees grow denser now. Birds sing in the short Siberian summer. The river flows indifferent to human history. A casual visitor would never imagine what this land witnessed just a few decades ago. But beneath the grass that turns green every summer, buried evidence still lies: the bones of people whose names have been lost forever.
Some bear distinctive marks—knife marks, teeth marks—silent witnesses to unimaginable final moments. The monument erected by the locals in 1993 makes no mention of the victims’ names. No one knows exactly who is buried on that island. The inscription on the cross is generic: “To the innocent slain in the years of ungodliness,” yet within that generality lies a powerful universality.
Vasily Velichko died decades ago, probably without knowing that his report would eventually be published and read by millions. However, his meticulous work survived, preserving the truth that the Soviet regime desperately tried to conceal. Fyophila Bellina also died of natural causes. But before she passed away in the 1990s, she told her full story to researchers who were finally able to hear it.
Her testimony, combined with that of the villagers and other survivors, created an undeniable documentary record. The story of Cannibal Island deals with many different things, depending on who examines it: extreme hunger. Certainly, it deals with human survival under impossible conditions, but above all, fundamentally, it deals with systems—political and bureaucratic systems that prioritize abstract ideology over concrete humanity, that treat people in ways that resemble the processing of disposable resources, that allow bureaucrats to decide life and death.
Decisions made without ever seeing the faces of those affected. The physical island, 3 km by 600 m, remains. Every June, flowers are left at a wooden cross to combat flooding. It is a small, silent, seemingly insignificant act. But it is also a profound and important act of resistance.
Resistance against convenient forgetting, against comfortable denial, against the notion that some crimes are too numerous, too distant, too ancient to be remembered with respect and dignity. The island remains, the memory persists, and the lesson, eternal and terrible, patiently awaits each new generation willing to hear it.
If you’ve reached the end of this investigation, you’ve witnessed one of the darkest chapters in history. A story that remained hidden for decades and almost vanished forever. The fight against oblivion continues every day. If you believe that stories like this should never be forgotten, subscribe to the channel. Turn on notifications so you don’t miss our in-depth investigations into the most disturbing and silenced events in history.
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