In 1933, Soviet authorities dumped roughly 6,700 “undesirables” (peasants, petty criminals, people without proper documents, and others swept up in mass arrests) onto Nazino Island - a remote, swampy, mosquito-infested strip of land in the Ob’ River in western Siberia - with almost no food, tools, shelter, or clothing. Within weeks, starvation, disease, cold, and violence turned it into “Cannibal Island,” where survivors murdered and ate the living and the dying. By August, a Soviet document recorded only about 2,200 survivors (many of them barely alive and unfit for work) out of the 6,700 sent; at least 4,000 were dead or missing.(Vladimir S. | Officer's Notes)