Free Stalin's Genocides by Norman M. Naimark Page A

elements”)—and put them to supposedly productive work clearing forests, building canals, and plowing hith-erto virgin farmland. They would labor in mines and settle regions inhabited by native peoples who were deemed by Soviet administrators as unfit for disciplined work. There was even the mantra that the kulaks, engaged in productive labor, might become respectable Soviet citizens again, despite their inherently rapacious character.
    At the same time, the reality of the special settlements, which did not change much over the course of the 1930s and early 1940s, was that very few of the minimal re-dekulakization 61
    quirements for existence, called for in the directives setting them up, were present on the ground. We know this from the numerous reports of shocked OGPU doctors and settlement administrators, who describe hunger, disease, filth, privation, fierce cold, and inadequate shelter and food in virtually all of the special settlements. The timber for building barracks never appeared; the machinery for clearing land was absent; food rations, minimal to begin with, were misdirected, stolen, or never sent in the first place. The January 1932 report of one frustrated and angry lower-level official in western Siberia by the name of Shpek tells a familiar story about the general indifference to the suffering of the exiles.
    I was made responsible for setting up this camp. I set out in search of clothing and footwear for these elements, who lacked everything. I made the rounds of all the economic organs, obtained the necessary information, and then went to the District Committee of the Party to inform Comrade Perepelitsin.
    Furious, he told me: “Comrade Shpek, you don’t
    understand anything about the policies of our government! Do you really think that these elements have been sent here to be reeducated? No, Comrade, we have to see to it that by spring they’re all dead, even if we have to be clever about it: dress them in such a way that they’ll at least cut down a little wood before they die. You can see for yourself in what condition they send them to us here, disembarking them 62
    chapter 3
    on the riverbank in rags, naked—if the government really want to reeducate them, it would clothe them without our help!”
    . . . After this conversation, I refused to organize the camp, for I had understood that they were going to send people out there and that I was supposed to see to it that they all died.15
    In his appropriately entitled Cannibal Island, Nicolas Werth describes the makeshift construction of one of these special settlements for contingents of so-called asocials or socially harmful elements. Transported from Tomsk to Nazino Island in the middle of the Ob River, some 6,600
    to 6,800 people determined by the authorities to be “de-classe” and “socially harmful” sought to stay alive in a frozen landscape without food, supplies, or decent shelter. The case was a particularly harsh one since the prisoners had no opportunity to escape, given the location, and no chance to seek help from neighboring settlements.
    Typically, the local authorities were completely unprepared to house and feed them. Barely 2,200 survived in these circumstances, but not before dozens of the exiles turned to cannibalism and necrophagy. Here and elsewhere in the Gulag and special settlements, the process of “decivilization” was noteworthy. Men and women were turned into animals by the Soviet state, represented by its warders, police, and settlement administration, but with full cognizance of its chief administrators in Moscow. This made it easier to shoot the prisoners—even hunt them as animals—and see them die. As was so often the dekulakization 63
    case, the NKVD wrote a thorough report on the horrors of the Nazino camp’s history, known to Stalin, and which Werth found more than seven decades later in the Russian archives.16
    Certainly at the middle level of Soviet officialdom, conscientious observers understood