During the spring of 1933, Stalin\'s police rounded up nearly one hundred thousand people as part of the Soviet regime\'s cleansing of Moscow and Leningrad and deported them to Siberia.
Cannibal Island challenges us to confront unpleasant facts not only about Stalin\'s punitive social controls and his failed Soviet utopia, but about every generation\'s capacity for brutality--including our own..
Werth sets his story within the broader social and political context of the period, giving us for the first time a full picture of how Stalin\'s system of special villages worked, how hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were moved about the country in wholesale mass transportations, and how this savage bureaucratic machinery functioned on the local, regional, and state levels.
For Stalin, these undesirables included criminals, opponents of forced collectivization, vagabonds, gypsies, even entire groups in Soviet society such as the kulaks and their families.
Werth skillfully weaves this episode into a broader story about the Soviet frenzy in the 1930s to purge society of all those deemed to be unfit.
Nicolas Werth, a French historian of the Soviet era, reconstructs their gruesome final days using rare archival material from deep inside the Stalinist vaults.
Left there to starve and to die, they eventually began to eat each other.
These people were abandoned on the Island of Nazino without food or shelter.
Cannibal Island reveals the shocking, grisly truth about their fate.
Many of the victims were sent to labor camps, but ten thousand of them were dumped in a remote wasteland and left to fend for themselves.
During the spring of 1933, Stalin\'s police rounded up nearly one hundred thousand people as part of the Soviet regime\'s cleansing of Moscow and Leningrad and deported them to Siberia
