Nazinsky: Stalin’s Cannibal Island

The fact that Stalinists aren't treated like Nazis in modern society disgusts me

There’s an old Russian joke that goes something like this. “Why is Hitler only up to his neck in blood? Because he’s standing on Stalins shoulders.”

"A very human kind of inhumanity" Such a fantastic line.

I’m glad you mention how important it is to remember these awful events in history. Too often I hear people complain how these events put a damper on their life and want to forget it. It’s important to remember even if is hard to hear about.

"Why didn't they just escape?" I mean sure, you can escape a Siberian prison, but then you're still in Siberia... and good luck with that.

After studying Russian history, one quote stuck with me; "In Russia, even the rocks are guilty." That land has been home to unparalleled suffering and cruelty on a scale that defies comprehension.

It took me 2 tries to get through ‘Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin’ by Timothy Snyder. It was so dark and so depressing that I was having nightmares. A couple years later I picked it up again and got through it. The sheer number of deaths and suffering of people in the Bloodlands is truly horrifying.

I was born about 200 km away from that place and no one ever told me this story during school time. Truely, who forget its past risks to repeat it.

And these are just the stories they bothered to record

I worked with a woman who’s mom had grown up in Stalin’s Russia. She was smuggled across the frontier into Norway in a suitcase when she was 15; she weighed 60 ish pounds. She was my age, and looked 20 years older. Men in uniforms sent her into frightened hiding under her desk. And she hated Stalin with a barely sane rage I have never seen in my life. She was terrified that “they” would come get her, even after the Berlin Wall fell, even after Yelsin took over. She would tell anyone to fear the day our country followed a man rather than our principles. She had food hidden everywhere in her house, even cans of soup under the sink in the bathroom. She knew what it was like to be hungry, and she never forgot. She finally died of a heart condition associated with being starved as a child. RIP, Lana...

My grandmother was 5 or 6 when Stalin died. She remembers the day distinctly because there was a woman outside wailing and screaming while tearing at here hair, when she asked her parents why the woman was crying, they told her it was because Stalin died. Even with the horrible oppression he was guilty of, the Soviet people still loved him. That's how powerful propaganda is. It was only after Pravda began to expose the crimes of the dictator it once served that the people realized the truth.

God damn. This was only 90 years ago. Not even a century. My neighbour is 90 years old. It's insane to think I just had a casual chat this morning with someone who was alive while all this was going on somewhere else on the planet... Hell, it's insane to realize the horrors going on somewhere else RIGHT NOW while I'm just sitting here in my quiet rural apartment trying to assemble my stupid IKEA closet....

My grandmother was taken to Siberia. She was the youngest of 3 children, maybe 6 or so. She was also the only one who came back alive, her teenage sisters and parents all starved to death. They were taken to Siberia in trains used to transport cattle and dropped off at some ramshackle, abandoned village with a few dilapidated houses that had holes on their roofs etc. A small village was located not very far away, but the people there were so brainwashed by the government to believe that these poor souls were their enemies, criminals etc that they didn't help them. My grandmother told me stories of how people would pick undigested grains out of excrement to make food out of them, later on digging up the dead from their shallow graves when things got really tough. Women and children (they were separated from men) went into the freezing taiga to cut down trees all day (they still had to work for the government), many died on their way back because they were so weak and exhausted they couldn't walk, freezing to death where they lay. My grandmother survived, because her mother told her to go to the village and beg for food and one Russian lady had it in her heart to feed her every now and then, that's how she survived. Unsurprisingly, she has mental health issues. Sometimes she gets confused and thinks that it's still soviet times or that me and my siblings were alive back then. She developed a cold personality, preferring solitude and the company of books rather than people, which made it hard for my father (her son) growing up and in turn for us on some level as he had anger issues and such. She's 82 now and still cries to this day when she remembers the things she witnessed. She said that she will forever remember the Russian woman that saved her but is heartbroken because she doesn't even know her name and never got to thank her.

The kind of story you don't want to hear, but at the same time needs to be told. Thank you for that.

If a place can legit become haunted, I'd imagine a scenario like this would cause it

all of russian history can be summed up with.....”and then things got worse”.

The fact that we know about this because of one man makes me wonder what sort of terrible, gruesome things we DON'T know about.

Isn’t Stalin awesome guys? Can’t believe there are freaks that praise that villain

The fact that they were trying to make “self sustaining farms” IN SIBERIA, is something I just can’t get over because it’s so insane😳All that farmland in arctic climates😳

The speed at which this all unfolded is terrifying. 4,500 people dead on 1 tiny island in a month. The cruelty is shocking.