Nazino Island: The Very Hungry Games

What happens when thousands of people are dumped onto a remote Siberian island with almost no food, shelter, supplies, or hope of survival?

In this episode of Torture: A Dark History, Kevin Young and Dan Hourigan travel back to Stalin’s Soviet Union and the horrifying story of Nazino Island, a failed resettlement experiment that quickly became a nightmare of starvation, disease, violence, cannibalism, and death.

We’ll follow the people swept up in Stalin’s campaign of mass deportation, their brutal journey through Siberia, and their arrival on an isolated island that was never prepared to support human life. With almost nothing to survive on, conditions deteriorated rapidly as hunger, disease, violence, and desperation took hold.

We’ll look at the guards, criminals, and deportees trapped together on the island, the attempts to escape, the horrifying reports of cannibalism, and the enormous death toll that followed. We’ll also meet Vasily Velichko, the investigator sent to uncover what had really happened, and the report he eventually delivered to Moscow describing the disaster.

But Nazino didn’t simply disappear. The Soviet government buried the story, and the truth remained hidden for decades until the era of glasnost finally opened the door to the archives.

And because this is Torture: A Dark History, Kevin and Dan bring their own dark and twisted humor to one of the most horrifying examples of what can happen when human beings are treated as disposable pieces of a much bigger plan.

If you’re interested in Nazino Island, the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, Siberian deportations, special settlements, the Gulag, Vasily Velichko, cannibalism, Stalinist repression, Soviet history, and some of the darkest chapters of the 20th century, this episode is going to take you somewhere you definitely don’t want to visit.

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