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How to pronounce ostyak in English?

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In the middle of the Ob River in Siberia lies a forgotten island.
Never officially named, it’s known after the nearest village: the hamlet of Nazino.
But people who live in this desolate region know the island has another, secret name;
a name you will never find on Google Maps.
Over seventy years ago, dark things happened on this strip of earth surrounded by icy waters,
things so horrifying they were kept hidden for decades.
Things which resulted in this nameless place becoming known as Cannibal Island.
An anonymous piece of marshland less than 600 meters wide, Cannibal Island spent the
best part of human history in total obscurity.
Then, in 1933, it was abruptly chosen to be the site of a new kind of Gulag, an agricultural
prison where inmates would work the land for the glory of the Soviet Union.
But instead of a pastoral utopia, the 6,000 political prisoners sent there found themselves
trapped in a nightmare of starvation, with only one gruesome way to survive.
In today’s video, we’re traveling into the heart of human darkness, and uncovering
the horrors of Joseph Stalin’s worst Gulag.
A Prelude to Terror It was a spring night in 1933 when Feofila
Bylina’s parents received their visitor.
She walked with fragile, painful movements, her legs wrapped in filthy rags.
Although she said she was forty, she looked almost twice that age.
For young Feofila, it was likely the first time she’d ever seen a political prisoner.
Feofila’s family were Siberian natives, then known as Ostyaks.
They lived in Nazino, a tiny hamlet on the north bank of the rushing Ob River - exactly
the sort of place easily overlooked amid Russia’s vast wilderness.
Recently, though, they’d started to notice the outside world intruding.
There were the boats that kept pulling up at the nameless island along the river.
The screams in the night.
The gunshots.
And now this.
This strange young-old woman being carried in by guards, in need of a place to rest.
They took the woman to a backroom.
There, by the candlelight, they removed the rags from her legs.
What she saw next would haunt Feofila for the rest of her life.
“I saw that her calves had been cut off,” she recalled decades later.
“I asked and she said, 'They did that to me on the Island of Death – cut them off
and cooked them.'
All the meat on her calves was cut away.”
The woman had come from the new Gulag in the Ob River known as Cannibal Island, the latest
atrocity Stalin’s Soviet Union had perpetrated against its own people.
But the story of Nazino Island - sometimes rendered Nazinsky - doesn’t start with Feofila,
or with that cold May night in 1933.
It started nearly four years earlier, 3,000km away, in a city Feofila had only seen in her
dreams.
In the winter of 1929, Joseph Stalin had set in the Kremlin, pondering his latest decrees.
It was now five years since Vladimir Lenin had died, nearly a year since Leon Trotsky
was sent into exile; and twelve whole years since the Bolshevik Revolution overthrew the
Tsar.
With a flick of his pen, Stalin was about to open a whole new, bloody chapter in Soviet
history.
He called it “Collectivization”.
Collectivization was the order that all peasants in areas such as Ukraine give up their smallholdings
and go work on Soviet collective farms.
This was Stalin’s anemic carrot.
The gigantic stick was Dekulakization, a euphemism for liquidating the kulaks.
Technically, Kulaks were wealthier peasants.
In practice, though, Kulaks were any peasants who disagreed with Collectivization.
And, boy, did plenty of people disagree with Collectivization.
In Ukraine, peasants destroyed their tools, slaughtered their animals, and burned their
crops rather than letting them fall into Soviet hands.
So Stalin did what Stalin did best.
He had everyone who defied him shot, and everyone else sent to the Gulags.
By 1932, Collectivization had led to famine across the USSR, and a Gulag system so overcrowded
that even Stalin realized he couldn’t just keep shoving more people in there.
What the Soviet dictator needed was someone who could think outside the box.
Someone who could devise a brand new method of Dekulakization.
Luckily for Stalin - and very unluckily for everyone else - the Soviets already had exactly
that sort of man.
Guilty Until Proven Innocent On March 11, 1933, Genrikh Yagoda hit upon
an idea that was almost brilliant in its cynicism.
A future head of the NKVD, Yagoda is mostly famous today for being just one in a long
line of people Stalin promoted to the top job, got bored with, and then had shot.
In 1933, though, he was part of the team overseeing the utter mess that was Collectivization,
tasked with making Stalin’s decrees somehow work without starving everyone to death.
So Yagoda hit upon an ingenious solution.
The USSR needed to both set up collective farms while also punishing Kulaks, did it?
Then why not condemn those Kulaks to work on collective farms?
Yagoda’s plan was to “resettle” 2 million dissidents in Siberia, give them tools, and
make them build their own self-sustaining farms.
All these new farms would solve the Collectivization famine, while the miserable Siberian weather
would provide the punishment part.
Yagoda was so pleased with his idea that he started implementing it even before Stalin
agreed, sending out quotas of Kulaks for police forces to arrest.
It’s at this point that everything descended into terrifying farce.
In Stalin’s police, failing to fulfil your quota meant becoming part of someone else’s
quota.
So you were extremely incentivized to find dissidents even where no dissidents existed.
That meant if you were living in an urban area with few Kulaks, you went after those
failing the internal passport regime instead.
A hated feature of Tsarist Russia, internal passports had been ditched by the Bolsheviks
after they gained power.
But Stalin had revived the system the previous December.
Distributed only to those doing useful work, internal passports effectively made you a
legal citizen.
Fail to carry one, and you were automatically a criminal.
And, in the cities, there were always enough people without passports to fulfil police
quotas.
Kuzma Salnikov, for example, was a married miner from Novokuznetsk, and a passionate
Communist.
Then one day, he happened to go to a market without his internal passport, just as police
sealed off the building.
He was deported from his home city without even a chance to inform his wife.
He never saw her or his two kids again.
Awful as Salnikov’s story is, it’s just one of many.
There was the 12-year old girl left on a station platform for ten minutes while her mother
went to buy bread.
When the mother returned, her child was gone, abducted by policemen trying to hit their
quota.
There was the 103-year old man who went out on his street for some air.
Or the student who was snatched off his aunt’s doorstep in Moscow.
There was even a pregnant woman deported for not carrying her passport… despite having
it clutched in her hand the entire time.
All across the USSR, hundreds of thousands disappeared this way.
As their families struggled to find out what was happening, Yagoda’s goons loaded those
captured onto trains bound for the wilds of Siberia.
Vagrants, common criminals, political prisoners, kulaks, and ordinary people abducted off the
street all became part of an unwilling exodus into Russia’s frozen interior.
The conditions were so bad that scores died en route.
They were the lucky ones.
The survivors didn’t know it, but they were being funneled toward Hell itself.
The Island of Death Given the immense cruelties it inflicted,
it can be tempting to think of the Soviet system as an infernal machine fine-tuned for
repression.
But that wasn’t the case.
In Siberia, officials weren’t even informed of the thousands of prisoners heading their
way until the first trains appeared.
When 25,000 people were unloaded in Tomsk in April, 1933, local party bosses were basically
like “well, what the hell do we do now?!”
The trouble was that Yagoda’s guys in Moscow had implemented the repression orders lightning
fast, but then let all the logistics get bogged down in bureaucracy.
In crude terms, this is a little bit like the Fyre Festival guy putting all the advertising
in place for a massive party in the Bahamas, but forgetting to supply any food, staff,
or tents.
Only, in this analogy, the Bahamas are a snowbound Siberian wilderness, the missing tents are
unbuilt prison compounds, and everyone is super-terrified that canceling the festival
will result in Stalin holding a rival one-man festival called “Mass Executing all My Siberian
officials.”
By May, 1933, Tomsk was housing nearly 90,000 prisoners, but had yet to receive a copek
for caring for them.
So officials finally decided someone else was gonna have to deal with the problem.
Loading the first 5,000 exiles and 50 guards onto lumber barges, they set them off along
the Ob River, bound for the new island settlement near Nazino village.
It was not a pleasant ride.
Nazino was roughly 800km away.
800km along a river still choked with ice, in a part of Siberia ravaged by snowstorms.
By the time the barges reached what would become Cannibal Island on May 18, 27 settlers
had already died from exposure.
The survivors meanwhile stepped into a nightmare.
The island was a low-lying swampland some 3km long and barely 600 meters wide.
There was no shelter, just trees the settlers were meant to cut down and use to build huts.
But the officials in Tomsk had forgotten to give them any tools.
And now here they were, standing on a blanket of snow as night set in, with no way of getting
lumber to build shelter.
Left with no choice, the prisoners slept out in the open in the driving snow.
By the time May 19, 1933 dawned, another 295 were dead.
And so began a fight for survival that would make the Hunger Games look like the Very Lovely
Games.
Almost all the unlucky souls sent to Cannibal Island were city dwellers who’d been caught
without their passports.
They had none of the agricultural skills real Kulaks would’ve had, none of the survival
skills.
And this would soon become a very serious problem.
On the barges, the prisoners had been given a lump of bread each day to keep them alive.
But now the guards could no longer be bothered to turn the flour they brought with them into
bread.
Instead, they simply handed each prisoner 200 grams of flour as sustenance - less food
than even prisoners in Auschwitz or Cambodia’s Killing Fields had to live on.
Already desperate, many of the settlers mixed the flour with dirty river water, leading
to an outbreak of dysentery.
It was only the second day, and already Cannibal Island was a horrorshow.
If all this is a little much for you, best switch off now.
From here on in, things are only gonna get worse.
The Theater of Cruelty By May 22 - four days after the barges arrived
- the prisoners had already reached new depths of suffering.
The freezing rains were killing people nightly, while those who’d managed to build fires
were lying too close to them and burning to death.
On top of that, the guards hadn’t returned to give out more flour since the meagre 200
grams everyone received on the first day.
At this stage, the prisoners were still just about clinging to enough of their humanity
to organize in protest.
They started a riot.
They made enough noise that the guards eventually sailed one of the boats over from the opposite
bank to see what was up.
When the prisoners said they wanted food, the guards agreed to restart the flour rations.
But not on a person by person basis.
Instead, all surviving prisoners would have to self-organize into brigades of 150.
Each brigade would have a leader, and that man would be responsible for distributing
the flour quota.
It was at this point that any solidarity on Cannibal Island was lost forever.
Among the settlers were a minority of violent criminals and outright sociopaths.
Seeing the key to their survival, they presented themselves to the guards as brigade leaders.
The guards just shrugged and gave them the flour.
And so began the awful process of starving to death for all but a handful of prisoners
on the island.
You may be wondering why people didn’t try to escape.
Why they didn’t brave the river and make a break for it.
The answer is that they did.
Remember Kuzma Salnikov, the Communist miner who got arrested at the market?
Well, in the early days, when he still had his strength, he managed to swim across the
icy water to the opposite bank and escape into the wilderness.
Miraculously, he eventually found a collective farm where he was able to live out his days.
But Salnikov was an exception.
Most prisoners who braved the harsh waters of the Ob drowned.
Those that made it to the bank were shot at by the guards.
Those who escaped, the well-fed guards then hunted through the wilderness for sport.
Which brings us neatly to the cruelty of Cannibal Island’s guards.
From the safety of their barges, they got drunk, went on deck, and shot prisoners for
fun.
Other times, they would sail over, take a hunk of bread, and hurl it into a crowd, enjoying
the way the prisoners fought one another for a scrap of food.
Some of them would trade these hunks of bread for sex with young female prisoners.
Yet others would order the criminal elements to rip the gold teeth out older settlers in
exchange for cigarettes.
Cannibal Island would’ve been a legendary nightmare if the guards had just dropped the
prisoners and sailed away.
By staying, they transformed a disaster into a deliberate massacre.
On May 25 - one week after the barges landed - the camp doctor made a gruesome discovery.
Examining the corpses of five prisoners, he noticed the first signs of cannibalism among
the settlers.
When he relayed the message to officials back in Tomsk, he was told the prisoners were degenerate
and obviously “cannibals by habit.”
Not two days later, another barge arrived, carrying an additional 1,000 prisoners to
the island.
Did these guys come bearing any extra food?
Ha.
What do you think?
Death in Siberia By late May, the island’s survivors had
left their humanity far behind.
The stronger prisoners had split into gangs that roamed the narrow island, terrorizing
those weaker then themselves.
Murder for food had become commonplace.
And still it wasn’t enough.
As a cold June dawned in remotest Siberia, the starving survivors did the only thing
they could.
With all these bodies lying around, they simply started eating them.
From this point on, things get so gruesome that there really doesn’t seem any point
in us reporting them with our usual mix of stylistic flourishes and witty asides.
Much better to just let those who were there speak for themselves.
One convict was later questioned by authorities over eating human flesh.
His answer survives in the records: "It was very simple.”
He said.
“Just like shashlik.
We made skewers from willow branches, cut it (the corpse) 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."
But the horrors of Cannibal Island didn’t just with the eating of the dead, or even
the nearly-dead.
The Donner Party, this was not.
This was madness on a deranged scale, like a painting of Hell by Bruegel the Younger.
A 13-year old girl from the local Ostyak population happened to go to the island to collect bark
during the June chaos.
She later recalled seeing a female prisoner being returned by one of the guards she’d
been sleeping with for food, a man called Kostia.
In her words: “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.”
It was not long after this that Feofila Bylina’s parents opened the door of their hut to a
40-year old woman who looked like she was 80, and had her legs wrapped in rags.
Not long after that they removed those rags and saw her calves had been sliced off for
food.
It seems that the combined effects of extreme hunger, the active sadism of the guards, and
the lack of oversight created something very dark on Cannibal Island.
An place where people didn’t just eat other humans to survive, but took a perverse pleasure
from torturing them beforehand.
Luckily, the suffering was now so bad that not even the Soviets could ignore it.
In mid-June, a month after the first barges landed, the Tomsk authorities abruptly dissolved
the settlement.
The surviving prisoners were evacuated to other collective farms, the guards were returned
to Tomsk, and Cannibal Island was abandoned.
In total, over 6,700 resettlers had spent time on the island during that horrendous
month.
Fewer than 2,200 of them survived.
The remaining four and a half thousand had all perished, killed by the elements or murdered
for food.
By August, the summer grasses had grown so high that they completely concealed the bodies
still rotting there.
Only locals like Feofila Bylina had any knowledge of the nightmare that had unfolded on the
island.
But the story of Cannibal Island isn’t quite over yet.
We still have to deal with the aftermath.
Stories that Can’t be Told The fact that we know anything about all this
is due to one man.
Vasily Velichko was a Communist instructor who lived locally to the collective farms
that stretched along the Ob above Tomsk.
In July, 1933, he began to hear the first rumors of the catastrophe that had befallen
the Nazino farm.
The whispers of cannibalism, of unparalleled suffering.
Without mentioning it to his superiors, he decided to go investigate.
It was a hard trek, and Velichko didn’t arrive on Cannibal Island until August.
At first, nothing looked out of place.
There were tall summer grasses, sparse trees, and a handful of Ostyak people going about
their business.
It was only when Velichko stepped onto the island that he found the grasses’ secret:
the half-eaten bodies lying out of sight.
Over the next few weeks, Velichko interviewed the Ostyaks, the local villagers, anyone who
would speak to him.
Slowly, he began to build up a picture of what had happened.
Of the catastrophe Soviet neglect and bad planning had caused.
That fall, Velichko submitted an 11 page report to Moscow, outlining his findings.
Care to guess what happened next?
That’s right!
Velichko was fired from his job and kicked out the Party, and his report dropped into
the black hole of the state archives.
But not before a handful of officials with a sliver of humanity left had read it, and
set certain things in motion intended to make sure another Cannibal Island never happened
again.
A moratorium was placed on the resettlement program, with labor camps instead brought
back for dissidents.
In Tomsk, the 50 guards who’d overseen this squalid reign of terror all had their Party
memberships revoked and were jailed.
While we’d love to tell you they wound up in a Gulag as bad as Cannibal Island, the
sad truth is that they nearly all served a mere twelve months in regular jails before
being released.
As for Velichko’s report, it stayed “lost” in the archives until the collapse of the
Soviet Union.
It wasn’t uncovered until 1994, and only then after some Ostyaks who’d been alive
at the time had started agitating for a memorial to be erected on the island.
But, grim as the history of Cannibal Island is, it’s worth remembering that it was just
one example in a decade of Soviet terror.
At the same time that the starving prisoners were turning to cannibalism at Nazinsky, a
vast famine was sweeping Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
In Ukraine - the most fertile republic in the entire USSR - Stalin set impossible food
quotas so high that even where food was grown it was confiscated and taken to the collective
farms.
In the ensuing disaster, somewhere between 3 million and 7 million peasants starved to
death.
As on the Ob River, there were tales of cannibalism.
Of families forced to kill their weakest child for food to survive.
Of children who ate their own parents after they died of starvation.
And this was just the beginning.
After the horrors of famine, Collectivization, and Dekulakization receded, the Great Purge
got underway.
Three quarters of a million denounced and killed.
Then came the deportations of the Tartars, the internal exiles of dissidents, the expansion
of the Gulag system, the doctors’ purge in Moscow… the list of crimes is almost
endless.
Cannibal Island may be gruesome, but it’s worth remembering that it’s just one minor
chapter in two decades of suffering unleashed by Stalin.
A suffering still not dealt with properly even today.
We can find stories like this gruesome, even ghoulish.
We can choose to look away, as many did.
But the fact remains that disasters like this happened in recent history, more often than
we’d like to admit.
It may just be an anonymous stretch of swampland in the middle of a remote river.
But Cannibal Island should be a place that the world tries its hardest not to forget
- a monument to a very human kind inhumanity.

In the middle of the Ob River in Siberia lies a forgotten island.

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ostyak::noun | Spocien Dictionary

ostyak

noun

a member of the nomadic Ugrian people living in northwestern Siberia (east of the Urals)

Type	Words
Synonyms	khanty
Type of	russian

ostyak::noun | Spocien Dictionary

ostyak

noun

a Ugric language (related to Hungarian) spoken by the Ostyak

Type	Words
Synonyms	khanty
Type of	ugrian, ugric

How to pronounce ostyak in English?

ostyak::noun | Spocien Dictionary

abandonment

Related words

ostyak::noun | Spocien Dictionary

abandonment

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