Cannibalism in the USSR

[chimx]

I just read a story from the London Times called, "The cannibal hell of Stalin’s prison island." Its on a recent book by Nicolas Werth called Cannibal Island. It looks specifically at gulag deportations in 1933. Over crowding forced government officials to drop off thousands of prisoners on a small island in Siberia. While this was only supposed to be temporary, it turned into at least a month. Cannibalism took over. Here is an account (indirectly) from KGB archives:


Barely 13 when the detainees were dumped on the island, she recalled a pretty young prisoner who was being courted by one of the guards. “When he left, people caught the girl, tied her to a tree and cut her to eat everything they could. They were hungry; they had to eat. When you went along the island you saw human flesh wrapped in rags, human flesh that had been cut and hung in the trees. The fields were full of corpses.” The prisoners were the victims of a ruthless campaign by Gen-rikh Yagoda, Stalin’s secret police chief, to deport hundreds of thousands of people to western Siberia and the steppes of Kazakhstan. The aim was to cleanse Russian cities of “unde-sirables” and use them to populate these inhospitable regions.

In Moscow and Leningrad alone, more than 50,000 homeless petty criminals, gypsies, street children and beggars were rounded up. Others included peasants fleeing famine and citizens not carrying a passport.

stories like this have become available because after this happened, a journalist who investigated the incident after it occurred wrote to Stalin directly, and Stalin then sent in a commission to investigate. That commission's reports were then stored in a KGB archive that is now accessible to historians today.

:(


story (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article1622689.ece), book (http://www.amazon.com/Cannibal-Island-Siberian-against-Humanity/dp/0691130833/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/104-1251364-2222308?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1176584242&sr=8-2)

[Socialist Dave]

Grizzly

[wes]

While I acknowledge there was cannibalism during the famine in the since of the living eating the already dead. This account seems doubtful particularly because of the source.

[chimx]

He is certainly a very conservative author. He wrote the "black book of communism". But just because someone is a conservative author does it inherently mean that he is making shit up. he cites his sources, prove him wrong.

[Raúl Duke]

If I were a director in the USSR (when it existed; during the 50s-60s) I would have made a movie about it.

Maybe it would have outgrossed Dawn of the Dead :P .

[TheGreenWeeWee]

chimx wrote: He is certainly a very conservative author. He wrote the "black book of communism". But just because someone is a conservative author does it inherently mean that he is making shit up. he cites his sources, prove him wrong.

Agreed.

[The Grey Blur]

Wow. Cool horror story.

Shouldn't this be moved to chit-chat though?

[gilhyle]

THere is a single, brief reference in the somewhat unreliable Gulag Archipelago Vol 2 as follows:

" At the penalty work subparty of SevZhelDorlag (Captain - Colonel Klyuchkin) there was cannibalism in 1946-47 : people were cut up into meat, cooked and eaten"

Vol 2 P.409

[TC]

That sounds incredibly made up.

[gilhyle]

I have no desire to defend the quote; but I have no reason either to think it is made up. If I assumed Stalin's camps were half civilised, I would be inclined to that conclusion; because I know they were not, I am inclined to keep an open mind.

[Black Dagger]

Originally posted by chimx+April 15, 2007 07:34 am--> (chimx @ April 15, 2007 07:34 am) He is certainly a very conservative author. He wrote the "black book of communism". But just because someone is a conservative author does it inherently mean that he is making shit up. he cites his sources, prove him wrong. [/b]
What are his sources though? That he has a source, or sources... doesnt make them credible... particularly given the aims of the author? i.e. drag the term 'communism' through the mud as much as possible. I cant discount them obviously - im just saying, the reader has a strong reason to be suspicious of this author from the get-go - his other work you mention (black book of communism) is full of factual inaccuracies, half-truths... lies.... hall of shame stuff as far as 'history' goes.

I dunno, but reading this it reminds of the horror stories widely reported about german atrocities in WWI (later revived for WWII)... gruesome things about cutting off the breasts of nuns, killing kittens and just about everything else (probably even cannibalism)... none of which were actually substantiated. Doubtless all of these journalists had a source or sources for these stories, but the strength of these accounts was not in the veracity of the source but in the application of the stories as a form of war-time propganda.

There's a review on the amazon page for this book which makes this point quite bluntly:


amazon
Review

Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Gulag: A History": Perhaps it is not surprising that Nicolas Werth, the French historian who cowrote The Black Book of Communism, has decided in Cannibal Island to return to an incident he merely mentioned in that vast book. He was right to do so: in its way, this small, brilliant work, the description of a single incident, is every bit as powerful a condemnation of Communist ideology as the Black Book itself.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/069...fa-20/ref=nosim (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691130833/sofa-20/ref=nosim)

[TC]

When i was in Bushian America i witnessed unverifiable and nearly cartoonish atrocities in the CIA secret prison camps, such as cannibalism...yah. Cause every politically motivated "witness" always tells the truth.

[rouchambeau]

That sounds incredibly made up.

Yeah, I guess you're right.

[chimx]

Cause every politically motivated "witness" always tells the truth.

My understanding is that because Stalin sent a commission to investigate the incident, the eye witness accounts and other information came primarily from it in the KGB archives.

[gilhyle]

What puzzles me on this thread is that there are people posting here who dont want this to be true - what does it matter; true of false in this detail, the camps were horrific. Why sweat over cannibalism given everything else that happened ?

[TC]

Originally posted by [email protected] 15, 2007 08:16 pm

Cause every politically motivated "witness" always tells the truth.

My understanding is that because Stalin sent a commission to investigate the incident, the eye witness accounts and other information came primarily from it in the KGB archives.
If some imperialist sympathizer says "there are cannibals here!!!" to some journalist, then of course the soviet government would *have* to do an investigation to see if it was true or not, and they'd surely put the original and unverified claim, repeated by the journalist, in their investigation, which would then be included in their archives, but that doesn't mean it was ever true to begin with.

Just like if some American journalist said "An unnamed senior government aid has reported that there are COMMUNISTS IN THE STATE DEPARTMENT" then whether or not the unnamed source, or the journalist, were telling the truth, or were just full of shit, they're still going to launch an internal investigation.

[chimx]

Did you misread what I wrote? I said that a journalist was disturbed by what he saw, wrote to Stalin about it, and then Stalin sent an independent commission to investigate. That independent commission (not journalists) is what the archives look at.

[Intelligitimate]

On how horrible the camps were: vice president Henry Wallace visited the camp at Kolyma, and didn't even realize it was a penal colony. Also, the Orthodox Christian facist Nazi-traitor Solzhenitsyn had his cancer cured not once, but twice, in the gulags. He was given experimental surgery to remove his canceros tumors in the 50s, when people over here in America are calling for letting prisoners die today.

Chimx, I've seen rabidly anti-communist authors so abuse their primary source material that their books are complete garbage. A good example is Ronald Radosh's Spain Betrayed (http://clogic.eserver.org/2003/furr.html), which contains many previously unseen documents from the Archives, but some of the most dishonest commentary on those materials immaginable. If anything, I would expect Nicolas Werth to be even more dishonest than Radosh.

As far as I can see, there really isn't any point discussing much of anything Werth says. If you want to reproduce Werth's source material, we can comment on that, but given how absolutely terrible Werth's 'scholarship' is in general, I see no point in discussing any of Werth's conclusions or commentary.