“Cannibal Island” AKA “L'île aux Cannibales” was released in 2011 and was directed by Cedric Condon. It is a French documentary.
In the 1930’s, Russia experienced a famine that lasted for over two years. This resulted in a mass exodus of more than 10 million people from the Russian countryside and an influx of peasants flooding the cities, especially Moscow and Leningrad. Due to the burgeoning city population criminal elements grew and caused chaos.
The head of the Secret Police, Genrikh Yagoda, and the head of the labor camp system, Matvei Berman, proposed to Joseph Stalin a plan to relieve congestion in the cities of Moscow and Leningrad. Their plan was to relocate as many as two million people to Siberia and Kazakhstan and place them in special “settlements”. The deportees were peasants that were expected to work the land as forced labor, become self-sufficient, and to export what they grew to feed people in the cities. Stalin called them counter revolutionaries.
In order to control the situation, Stalin made the acquirement of passports compulsory for those people who lived in the city. If you could not prove that you were a city dweller and not a migrant, then you could not get a passport and were subject to deportation. The intent started that only hardened criminals were arrested, but due to a quota system being instated, anyone could be gathered and shipped off to anywhere. If you didn’t have your passport on you, then you were fair game.
Unfortunately, many city dwellers, who left their passport at home to run a quick errand, were gathered up and shipped off as well. In one case, a young girl of about twelve or thirteen, who had been separated from her mother, was arrested.
The deportees were sent to Tomsk, Omsk and Achinsk. From there they were sent on to various labor camps. Numbers vary but approximately 6,000 to 6,700 people, mostly men but at least 322 women, were sent on barges to Nazino Island, in the middle of the Ob River. Some died on the way.
The deportees were given flour, a few tools and almost nothing else. In short order, the criminal element took over the island. Chaos and starvation ensued. The deportees quickly resorted to murder and cannibalism to survive. By the end, approximately two or three months later, perhaps 2,000 people survived. Of those that died, the main reasons were starvation, illness, shot by guards trying to escape, exposure and murdered for food. Cannibalism was rampant throughout the island. In June the settlement was disbanded, and the remaining deportees were sent to other camps. Future colonization plans were abandoned.