Tag: Stalin

Stalin’s workers’ paradise: CANNIBAL ISLAND

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal documentariesLeave a comment

One of the most horrendous abuses of the Stalinist era was the mass deportation of 6,700 prisoners to what became known as “Cannibal Island”. This was a small island called Nazino in the Ob River in western Siberia (now the Tomsk Oblast). The island was 3 kilometres (1.9 miles) long and 600 meters (660 yards) wide and had no possibility of feeding the thousands of new residents.

The only thing the prisoners had was a little raw flour, but no tools and no clothes or shelter from the harsh Siberian climate. They had two choices: to starve, or to tear each other apart for food.

This documentary follows the development of the Soviet Union into a brutal dictatorship under Joseph Stalin in the early 1930s. Stalin was determined to industrialise the still largely rural economy, and his main tool was collectivisation, which forced the peasants onto State farms, to better harvest food and other resources for the growing urban proletariat. Famine followed, and the exodus of millions into the cities.

To control the population, Stalin’s secret police the OGPU led by Genrikh Yagoda introduced compulsory passports, available only to city dwellers – peasants were sent back to work the land. Anyone found without a passport for any reason was arrested and declared “socially harmful”, and thousands were shipped off to Siberia or Khazakstan every month, where there were rich resources, but hardly any people to garner them. The police and militia were given arrest quotas, so there was no avenue of appeal and no mercy.

Those arrested were shipped to usually freezing climes in whatever clothes they were wearing. One young girl was deported after her mother stepped off the train at a transit in Moscow to buy some bread. In Spring 1933 alone, 73,000 people were arrested and deported from Moscow and Leningrad. Thousands were deported on May 1 (May Day) 1933. These deportees, called “outdated elements”, were headed for the island of Nazino.

The first group of deportees to Nazino were petty criminals, delinquents and even vagrants, peasants who had left their villages looking for work in the cities but could not get passports. After them came the mostly innocent civilians arrested for not having passports on them, even if they had just left them at home or popped out for a packet of cigarettes without them, or were passing through the city and hadn’t needed one. It didn’t matter if they were party members or valuable workers. What they had in common was no knowledge of how to survive outside the city or to work the land.

With no preparations in place to feed or house the thousands of deportees, authorities decided to unload the barges full of prisoners on the island near the village of Nazino which soon became known as Cannibal Island. A week after being confined to the island, doctors started reporting incidents of cannibalism. News of this was sent back to Tomsk, but the response was to send another 1,000 prisoners and no extra food.

Within 13 weeks, over 4,000 of the deportees had died or disappeared, and most of the survivors were in ill health. Those who attempted to swim across the river to safety were killed by armed guards. The survivors formed gangs which preyed on the others and ate what food was available, including human flesh. The guards ignored the cannibalism and concentrated on shooting those trying to escape; there was in any case no provision in the Soviet criminal code against necrophagia (eating the dead). One survivor reported:

“I only ate livers and hearts. It was very simple. Just like shashlik. We made skewers from willow branches, cut it into pieces, stuck it on the skewers, and roasted it over the campfire. I picked those who were not quite living, but not yet quite dead. It was obvious that they were about to go — that in a day or two, they’d give up. So, it was easier for them that way. Now. Quickly. Without suffering for another two or three days.”

Young women were particularly preferred by those hunting for meat, and the guards claimed that escapees would take a “cow” – a young, naïve person who was glad to join the escape, but was chosen as a walking meat larder for when the others ran out of food.

Although this happened in 1933, it was not until the 1980s, in the preliminary days before the fall of the Soviet Union, that the archives were opened and historians were able to review the report of Vasily Velichko, a Soviet propaganda worker who had dared to investigate and had even written to Stalin about it. Stalin had ordered a commission of enquiry. These reports were finally published in 2002 by the human rights organisation Memorial. One eyewitness report sighted by the organisation stated:

“They were given a handful of flour. They mixed it with water and drank it and then they immediately got diarrhoea. The things we saw! People were dying everywhere; they were killing each other … On the island there was a guard named Kostia Venikov, a young fellow. He fell in love with a girl who had been sent there and was courting her. He protected her. One day he had to be away for a while, and he told one of his comrades, “Take care of her,” but with all the people there the comrade couldn’t do much really… People caught the girl, tied her to a poplar tree, cut off her breasts, her muscles, everything they could eat, everything, everything … They were hungry, they had to eat. When Kostia came back, she was still alive. He tried to save her, but she had lost too much blood.”

This is a thorough documentary, with plenty of historical images and film clips. That makes the recreations a bit confusing. Obviously, the guy playing Velichko is an actor, but what about the narrator, who tells us he is Ivan Portman, and that his grandfather was arrested in May 1933 and deported, making this seem a personal rather than just a historical account? He is portrayed by French actor/director Fabrice Pierre with English voiceover by actor Geoffrey Bateman. The documentary is basically a recreation of the Velichko report and the commission of enquiry, told by animations and live actors, together with commentary by (real) historians. This is never really made clear.

But overall, it’s a fascinating glimpse of an event from almost a century ago that sheds light on modern politics too. People are still crammed together in inhuman conditions all over the world. A billion people go to sleep hungry each night around the world. When food ceases to exist, death is one option, eating each other is the other, and when it happens, it is not too surprising. The only question is whether it will be done cooperatively like the survivors of Uruguayan Air Force flight 571 in 1972, by some sort of lottery as shipwrecked sailors often did, according to racial or other rankings as in the Donner Party, or just degenerate into a kind of survival of the fittest as individual predators or by Lord of the Flies or Yellowjackets tribalism, as happened with the gangs of Nazino. Unfortunately, the last option is probably the most likely.

The full documentary can be seen on Tubi:

https://tubitv.com/movies/100024747/cannibal-island

Cannibalism in the Ukraine: GHOUL (Petr Jákl, 2015)

On By Cannibal_StudiesIn Cannibal films2 Comments

Ghoul is a “found footage” movie, a postmodern affectation that pretends it is a documentary that has been ‘found’ after some gruesome disaster. The genre was popularised (although not originated) by the Blair Witch Project in 1999 which, like Ghoul, had young film-makers heading off to investigate the paranormal, and wishing they hadn’t. One of its most famous antecedents was Cannibal Holocaust in 1980, which was purportedly a documentary about missing documentary makers, and was (purportedly) believable enough to lead to a court case in which the actors had to be produced to prove they had not in fact been killed in some sort of snuff movie. This was of course great publicity for the film, as was the fact that it had been banned in several jurisdictions. The very first film in the genre was probably Punishment Park in 1971, in which anti-Vietnam War demonstrators are supposedly dropped in the desert and hunted by Nixon’s cops.

The main point of interest in this film (the found footage itself being unoriginal and totally preposterous) is the fact that it is set in The Ukraine which, at the time of writing, is again suffering from decisions taken in Moscow. The “Holodomor” (literally “murder by starvation”) was an event that took place in the Ukraine in 1932-3, during which the population was deliberately decimated by the collectivisation of the farms and seizure of food stores. As starvation set in, corpses began to disappear, and the government response was simply to put up signs saying, “Eating dead children is barbarism”. Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, the history of Nazi and Soviet mass murders between the wars, examines the incidents of cannibalism in the Ukraine and Poland, and concludes “With starvation will come cannibalism”. When there is no bread or other meat, human flesh becomes the currency. Snyder describes several reports, including an orphanage in Kharkiv where the older children began eating the youngest, who himself joined in, “tearing strips from himself and eating them, he ate as much as he could.”

Pretty difficult to invent a story worse than such a reality. So to add some spice, we have in Ghoul an amateur film crew from America who are fascinated by cannibalism (as, apparently, are very many people: this blog is currently receiving over 10,000 views per month – THANK YOU for reading!) They are researching evidence of cannibalism during the Holodomor, as part of a planned television series on cannibals of the twentieth century. They are conducting interviews in Kyiv of elderly survivors of that time, but they are also hoping to interview a man named Boris who was arrested rather more recently for eating a colleague, confessed to the crime under hypnosis, but then was released, as the body was never found. He said that he was made to do it. By whom, they wonder.

The crew are taken to a local psychic/witch, who tells them that paranormal entities were behind that murder. The crew dismisses this as superstition, getting drunk and getting her to perform a séance involving a pentagram, in which they mockingly summon the ghost of Andrei Chikatilo, a notorious serial killer and cannibal who killed and partially consumed dozens of women and children in the late 1970s and 1980s.

The next morning is full of strange and uncanny events, but the crew are unable to leave for help. The Ukrainian psychic tries but fails to evict Chikatilo’s presence, with no luck: he’s back now, and killing again. The idea is that Chikatilo forced Boris, their reluctant interviewee, to kill and eat his victim. He possesses (as in takes over the body of) a cat, then Boris, who proceeds to chase the young filmmakers, screaming, through various dark, gothic passages.

WTF? (Or що за біса as they say in The Ukraine). The film’s poster (below) says “INSPIRED BY TRUE EVENTS”. But where is the connection between Stalin’s attempted genocide in the 1930s and the ghost of a cannibal who had been active in Russia in the 1970s and 80s and was executed by a bullet behind his ear in 1994? Well, turns out Chikatilo had a brother that disappeared during the famine, and his ever-loving mummy told him the brother had been kidnapped and eaten. This may have just been to make him behave better (spoiler: didn’t work very well). So anyway, he decided to become a cannibal, specialising in small children. A real piece of work, and not one you’d want to reawaken from the dead.

I find hand-held filming annoying even in the hands of an expert, and this lot are supposed to be a bit sloppy, so the picture is jumping all over the place, to the point of seasickness. Reminds me of my dad’s Super-8 home movies (although he didn’t have a cannibal ghost to film, just bored kids). If you are patient enough to put up with the soundtrack (annoying bangs meant to scare you) and the shaky camera, the concept of a massacre being presented through the dispassionate eye of a video camera is interesting, in that it could be interpreted as the way the universe indifferently watches the suffering of its animals as they eat each other or, more immediately, the way the world watches as Russia tries to cannibalise Ukraine.

But besides the irritating camera work and the noisy things that go bump in the night, the plot is absurd – you have a historical tragedy, an imaginary murderer and the supposed ghost of a real murderer, who is somehow able to take over cats, people (including during sex) and of course kill people. The whole thing is frankly a bit of a yawn. It somehow managed to get to 22% on Rotten Tomatoes, with the LA Times critic summing it up well:

“Ghoul” can’t decide whether it should be about cannibals, serial killers, ghosts or demons. The found footage trivializes rather than reflects the horrific events that serve as the film’s basis.

According to IMDB, Ghoul was the highest grossing horror in Czech history. It also won the Vicious Cat Award at the Grossmann film and wine festival. Not sure if that will impress you or not.

The full movie was available on YouTube last time I checked, but all the dialog is in Czech and Ukrainian. Even if you speak both fluently, I wouldn’t bother.