Bizarre Buffet Podcast – All You Can Eat Weird
We are going to go back in time to 1933 to Nazino Island, aka Nazinsky Island, AKA CANNIBAL ISLAND… A very isolated island located in Siberia, Russia. This island became known as one of Stalin’s worst Gulags. A tragic and chilling story that’ll equally disgust you, but make you laugh! @Bizarre Buffet , we try to keep even the topic of Cannibalism lighthearted !
Listen to ” Cannibal Island ” Right Here !
Click Image To Listen, or find your preferred streaming platform right here !
Watch ” Cannibal Island ” on YouTube
Find Bizarre Buffet Online
Support Bizarre Buffet On Patreon
Follow Bizarre Buffet On Instagram
Like Bizarre Buffet On Facebook
Subscribe To Bizarre Buffet On YouTube
Follow The Host’s Of Bizarre Buffet
Follow Marc Bluestein On Instagram
Follow Jen Wilson On Instagram
Follow Mark Tauriello On Instagram
” Cannibal Island ” – Episode Credits
Hosted By Mark Tauriello, Jen Wilson, & Marc Bluestein.
Original Episode Story Concept By Mark Tauriello
Show Notes By Mark Tauriello
Original Episode Art By Mark Tauriello
Audio and Visuals By Marc Bluestein
” Cannibal Island ” – Show Notes
Cannibal Island
1Intro: If you were in Hunger Games/ Battle Royale…do you think you would actually survive?
This week’s episode, we are taking a trip to NAZINO ISLAND …aka….Cannibal Island, for all you can eat…human.
What’s the story behind Cannibal Island?
POLITICAL CLIMATE / REIGN OF STALIN
We are going to go back in time to 1933 to Nazino Island (aka Nazinsky island)… a very isolated island located in Siberia Russia. This island became one of Stalin’s worse Gulag.
During this time, head of the OGPU secret police, Genrikh Yagoda, came up with a plan to Joseph Stalin, the general secretary of the Soviet Union.
The plan was to resettle up to 2 million people to Siberia and Kazakhstan in “”special settlements””… These deportees were to be sent into sparse undeveloped areas of land basically to fend for themselves while also making these dead areas productive. After this proposal was submitted to the USSR, it was approved.
This was mainly because there was a huge famine happening in Russia and overcrowding in the Gulags. So in theory, taking prisoners and having them work on cultivating these unused areas of land, it would solve the over crowding and the food famine.
The Deportees/ Passportization
To fuel this new agenda, the USSR needed to continue to find ways to arrest people and send them to these new gulags.. so then came Passportization.
The passportization campaign in the Soviet Union began with a decision by the Soviet Politburo on 27 December 1932 to issue internal passports to all residents of major cities, and one of their objectives was to “cleanse Moscow, Leningrad and the other great urban centers of the USSR of superfluous elements not connected with production or administrative work, as well as kulaks, criminals, and other antisocial and socially dangerous elements.”[11]
The plan was to target the “undesirables” and push them out. This could literally be anyoine… If they didn’t like how you were dressed , the end. People were incentivized even to nark on their neighbors/ police for the smallest things for a reward.
Who were the Deportees?
Deportees were primarily former merchants and traders, peasants who had fled the ongoing famine in the countryside, petty criminals, or anybody who did not fit into the idealized worker class structure.[citation needed] Their backgrounds meant they were not issued passports, and they could be arrested and deported from the cities.
The biggest thing was they would target citizens who simply did not have an internal passport. However, if you had an internal passport, that too couldn’t save you at times.
One example, a pregnant woman was walking to the super marker. She had her internal passport literally in her pocket. A secret cop approached her and immediately arrested her because she wasn’t holding her passport as she passed by the cop. She wasn’t even allowed to take it out of her pocket to show him. Immediately she was arrested.
Ordinary people were snatched off the street and sent to the gulags, mixed in with actual criminals. Never to see their families again.
The idea of sending these prisoners to dead lands, they would be forced in building up the land hence helping fix the famine issues… but clearly, this didn’t work out…
So lets talk about CANNIBAL ISLAND and the Set Up
5,000 prisoners were shipped out of the Gulags to be shipped to Nazino Island. Nazino was 800 kilometers out from any sort of city, in a river surrounded by ice and constant storms .
The island was practically sinking into a swamp, 3 kilometers l (2 miles) long and 600 meters wide.
No shelter at all, just trees.
During the journey, conditions were so bad that 27 prisoners died on the ship while it was on its way to Nazino Island. It should also be noted that out of the 5000 prisoners, only 300 of them were women.
Upon arriving to this island, nobody was provided with tools, shelter, clothing, nothing.Left with no choice, the prisoners were forced simply to sleep in the snow. They could not even make shelters out of lumber since there were no tools provided for them.
Within 2 days on the island ,another 295 were dead. ..and So began the fight for survival. HUNGER GAMES… quite literally.
Almost all of the people sent to this island were simply city people caught without their passportts, so they did not have any agricuktural skills or much outdoors experience., making this a big problem.
On the barges the prisoners were rationed a small amount of bread to keep them alive (from guards who guards the island so they would not escape)
After that, eventually that small amount of food would run out, so the guards began to distribute small sums of flour to the prisoners, and they would be responsible for turning it into food.
This is less food than what people in Cambodia killing fields and aushiwitz were given.
So with this flour…a lot of the prisoners mixed it with dirty river water to create food, but instead it backfired and there was an outbreak of dysentary,..causing more deaths.
They were also faced with freezing rain! And again, this was all on DAY 2 on cannibal island.
So 4 days in, the prisoners were faced with freezing rain (causing more deaths) and it was so cold that the prisoners lucky enough to figure out how to create a fire…. Would burn to death from sleeping TOO close to the fires to escape the brutal cold
Protest Leading to Brigade Leaders:
The guards did not return to provide them with flour,… so the prisoners created a riot/ protest on the island to get the guards attention. They immediately took their boats and headed toward the island. Upon arriving, the prisoners protested that this is ridiculous, and they at least needed to be provided with more flour.
So the guards heard them, and rationed more flour, however, not to EVERYONE. Instead all the prisoners needed to assemble into separate bregades/ communities of 150 people… and once that was done they had to select a “leader” who would be responseble for collecting the flour from the guards and rationing them to the remaining 149 people in their zone .
However, this was a terrible idea. Some of these people on this island were criminals/ socio paths/ and had selfish motives. And some of these people were the leaders of the brigades where they would hoard the flour and not distribute it to the rest.. so as a resuly MANY MANY MANY people starved to death
ESCAPE ATTEMPTS AND CRAZY GUARDS
It was so bad that many tried to escape the island by braving the icy river but either froze to death or drowned. A few made it to land where they died anyways due to the elements. And then there were the ones that were hunted for sport from the guards who caught them trying to escape.
These guards were just as crazy…. For fun they would get drunk and use boats to drive past the island where they would shoot at the prisoners. They would also throw a loaf of bread into a crowd of prisoners just to see how they would all fight over it.
Some people would trade these hunks of bread for the female prisoners for sex.
Behavior got worse and worse,
People began to rip gold fillings and gold teeth out of other prisoners and provided them to the guards in exchange for cigarettes and food items.
Having the guards staying, it created even more bad behavior by the prisoners.
CANNIBALISM
7 days in, the camp Doctor examined some of the corpses found one the island, finding 5 corpses that had clear characteristics of CANNIBALISM.
He relayed this to the officials, and the officials said that the prisoners were simply degenerate and cannibals by nature (and maybe even cannibals before being arrested and place one the island)
2 Days later another 1000 prisoners were shipped to this island…
This created more chaos. By now, stronger prisoners created gangs that took over the island, singling out the weak an reaking havoc… They would rape women, kill for food, possibly even kill for pleasure.
The winter of June was around the corner, and now they were even more screwed. To put it into perspective, winters can get as cold as -40 degrees .
The starving survivors did what they could to survive, which was to eat the corpses lying around from the dead prisoners.
One survivor recalls how they cannibalized the corpses as..
“We made skewers from willow branches, cut it into pieces, stuck it on the skewers and roasted it over the camp fire. I picked those who were not quite living, but not yet dead. It was obvious that they were about to go- that in a day or two they would give up.”
MORE CANNIBALISM !
The horrors were more than just cannibalizing.
During the harsh June, a 13 year old girl native living close to the island, visited the island to collect birch / tree bark . She said she saw a female prisoner being returned to the island from one of the guards she was sleeping with for food. She describes what she witnessed in the following ..
“I saw the people catch the girl, and tie her to a poplar tree. They cut off her breasts, her muscles, everything they could eat. Everything. They were hungry and had to eat. When the guard ( Kostiav who is a bastard ) came back, he tried to save her but by then she had clearly lost too much blood”
It was not long after, the same girl’s family took in one of these prisoners that they thought was an elderly woman. She looked about 80, and her legs were wrapped in rags. Well, she wasn’t 80 at all, she was only 40 . When they removed the rags from her legs, they saw that her calves were sliced off and used as food.
Children also ate their own parents after they would die.
THE END OF CANNIBAL ISLAND
The extreme hunger, sadisitc guards, and over sight is what created this hell island. The suffering became so bad, the soviets could not longer ignore this… Soon after, the prisoners were removed from the island and relocated to other places around the country.
6700 settlers were banished to this island.
2200 survived
4500 total dead
By august, the grass grew so high on the island it covered a lot of the bodies… and only locals know of the islands existence and the nightmare that took place there.
Aftermath and 1994 Resurgence:
Vasily Velichko lived close to the farms…. In August 1933 he heard rumors about this island. On his own, he decided to investigate…. (this was shortly after the prisoners were removed). Upon stepping into the island, things looked overgrown and ordinary… until he found dead bodies in the grass . Many of them half eaten.
He then interview local villagers, and was able to connect the dots as to what happened on this island . He wrote an 11 page report to Moscow about his findings on Nazino island (calling out the soviet neglect, and cannibalism and bad planning) .
Of course, he was not taken seriously. He was fired from his job, and kicked out of the communist party. His report disappeared into a filing room never to be looked at again. A handfuls of officials did read it, and made sure that nothing like a cannibal island ever happen again… so SOME good did come out of his 11 page report.
The 50 guards responsible for the chaos of Cannibal Island were fired from their jobs and sentenced to 12 months in a prison (slap on the wrist)
Velichko and his report of Cannibal Islan didn’t become known by anyone until 1994 when the collapse of the soviet union happened, and this report was finally shared with the public… 61 years after this had happened.
Locals demanded a memorial to be placed on the island, which is was, and every June (the month this began) locals hold a ceremony on the island to honor the victims.
The story has inspired many films and novels such as Battle Royale, Hunger Games, Netflix’s The Bad Batch,
End: I find it horrifying and fascinating that something this horrible once existed, though very short lived, it was truly hell on earth. From the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1994 unearthed so many horror stories about events/people/etc swept under the carpet and forgotten about (quite similar to the story of Dyatlovs Pass) . All of this makes me wonder what other horrible experiments have taken place that we have yet to hear about. And with the current state of the world, and in America, it’s just as horrifying because I can already see political/ social trends that are sending us back to these times.
Subscribe/Follow
