The Nazino tragedy () was the mass murder and mass deportation of around 6,700 prisoners to Nazino Island, located on the Ob River in West Siberian Krai, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Soviet Union (now Tomsk Oblast, Russia), in May 1933. Sent to construct a "special settlement" and to cultivate the island, the deportees were abandoned with only scant supplies of flour for food, little to no tools, and virtually none of the clothing or shelter necessary to survive the harsh Siberian climate. Conditions on Nazino Island deteriorated quickly and resulted in widespread disease, violence, and cannibalism. Within 13 weeks, over 4,000 of the deportees had died or disappeared, and the majority of the survivors were in ill health. Those who attempted to leave were killed by armed guards.
The original report on the incident was made by Vasily A. Velichko, a Soviet propaganda worker, and passed to Joseph Stalin and to other members of the Politburo. The report remained classified until the human rights organisation Memorial conducted an investigation in 1988, five decades after the events. The tragedy was popularized in 2002, when reports from a September 1933 special commission by the Communist Party were published by Memorial.
Background
In February 1933, Genrikh Yagoda, head of the OGPU (a secret police), and Matvei Berman, head of the GULAG labor camp system, proposed to Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Soviet Union, to resettle up to two million people to Siberia and the Kazakh Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic in "special settlements". The deportees, or "settlers", were to bring over a million hectares () of virgin land in the sparsely populated regions into production and become self-sufficient within two years. Yagoda and Berman's plan was based on the experience of deporting two million kulaks and other agricultural workers to the same areas that had occurred in the previous three years as part of the dekulakization policy. However, unlike the previous plan, resources available to support the new plan were severely limited by an ongoing famine in the Soviet Union. Despite this, the new plan was approved by the Council of People's Commissars on 11 March 1933. Shortly after the plan's approval, the number of prospective deportees was reduced to one million.
Deportees
The original plan targeted several types of kulaks, peasants, people living in the agricultural areas of Soviet Union's western territories such as the Ukrainian SSR and the Lower Volga, North Caucasus and Black Earth regions of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Instead, many of the deportees were people from Moscow, Leningrad and other cities who had been unable to obtain internal passports. The Soviet passportization campaign began with a decision by the Politburo on 27 December 1932 to issue internal passports to all residents of major cities, with one of their objectives being to "cleanse Moscow, Leningrad and the other great urban centers of the USSR of superfluous elements not connected with production or administrative work, as well as kulaks, criminals, and other antisocial and socially dangerous elements."
Deportees were primarily "lumpenproletariat and socially harmful elements", meaning former merchants and traders, peasants who had fled the ongoing famine in the countryside, petty criminals or anybody who did not fit into the idealized worker class structure. Their backgrounds meant they were not issued passports, and they could be arrested and deported from the cities after a summary administrative procedure. Most of the arrestees were deported within two days. Between March and July 1933, 85,937 people living in Moscow were arrested and deported because they lacked passports, while 4,776 people living in Leningrad were also deported. Those arrested in connection with the cleansing of Moscow prior to 1 May 1933 (International Workers' Day) were assigned to a transit camp in the city of Tomsk.
Transportation
According to the plan proposed by Yagoda and Berman, the deportees would pass through transit camps at Tomsk, Omsk and Achinsk. The largest camp was at Tomsk that held 15,000 deportees. Over 25,000 deportees arrived in April even though the camp was not scheduled to be completed until 1 May. River transport to the final labor camps was closed until the start of May until ice on the Ob and Tom Rivers cleared. Most of the first arrivals were people without any papers on hand, alleged kulaks, other agricultural workers and people from southern Russian cities. The arrival of so many deportees panicked Tomsk authorities, who viewed them as "starving and contagious".