It wasn’t a bad plan, as far as plans go, if one takes any trace of morality out of it, any considerations of human decency, and looks at it from strictly a pragmatic point of view. Russia, under the brutal Bolshevik reign of Joseph Stalin, had lots of land the government couldn’t make use of, because it was too remote, too wild, and too damn COLD: Siberia. There also were lots of people living in Russian cities that Stalin didn’t really want there. The homeless, paupers, the mentally handicapped, the insane, criminals, those deemed by the State to be unproductive, political dissidents. Folks like that. The solution: Pack up all those people and send them to Siberia, to cultivate the untamed land and make it useful, getting rid of the hordes of the unwanted at the same time. Two birds with one stone, really.
What is a man when all vestiges of civilization are stripped away, when he is forced into base survival? The story of the prisoners of Nazino Island is an appalling testament of man’s inhumanity, both of the maltreatment committed upon the unfortunate exiles and the depravities the exiles rendered against one another. “People were dying everywhere,” said one survivor. “When you went along the island you saw human flesh wrapped in rags, human flesh that had been cut and hung in the trees. The fields were full of corpses.” Disturbing stuff.
