East European Quarterly, XLI, No. 2 June 2007 CANNIBALISM IN STALIN'S RUSSIA AND MAO'S CHINA* Steven Bela Vdrdy Agnes Huszar Vardy Duquesne University We have already published a number of scholarly studies about the horrors of the slave labor camps in the Soviet Gulag.' We have also written several newspaper articles on this topic for various Hungarian and Hungarian-American publications.^ But we have not as yet explored specifically the presence of cannibalism in these slave labor camps, which appears to have been a rather widespread phenomenon. Development ofthe Soviet Gulag The roots of the Soviet Gulag reach back to the Bolshevik Revolu- tion of 1917, and more specifically to the secret police organization, the Cheka, established and directed until his death by the Polish renegade, Felix Dzerzhinski (1877-1926). The first of such camps was established in 1918 in the Solovesky Monastery on the Solovki Island ofthe White Sea, when that remote monastery and much of that small island was transformed into a slave labor camp. The goal was to collect the repre- sentatives of the old Czarist regime, and either "reeducate" or extermi- nate them as potential opponents to the Soviet regime. In this monastery, and in the scores of temporary shelters established after 1918 on that island, about twenty thousand political prisoners perished during the 1920s under the most gruesome circumstances. The creation of this "death camp" on Solovki Island in 1918 was soon followed by the establishment of many hundreds, and later many thousands of such camps throughout the Soviet Union. In 1934 a special organization, the Glavnoy Upravneliye LAGerey [GULAG] (Chief Ad- ministration of Labor Camps), was established specifically to administer this network of forced labor camps. In common usage, the acronym of This study is a byproduct of research on the Hungarian inmates ofthe Soviet forced labor camps, the Gulag, supported partially by a Faculty Development Grant by Duquesne University. In Hungarian, the first of the two authors publishes under the name "Vdrdy B61" 223 224 EAST EUROPEAN QUARTERLY this organization became the name of the whole system of slave labor camps in the Soviet Empire. These Gulag camps had two goals: to weed out from Soviet society everyone who in any way represented a threat to the Stalinist system of socialist terror, and to utilize the unpaid labor of the prisoners for the rapid industrialization and modernization of the Soviet state. In this sprawling system of forced labor camps, human life meant nothing. In order to achieve the exorbitant goals of the Five Year Plans, everything and everyone was dispensable—both inside and outside the camps. Within these camps, life and work was regulated according a method worked out by the Istanbul-bom Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel (1883-after 1945), which made the prisoner's daily food ration depend- ent upon his work.3 If he was unable to fulfill the norm, his daily ration was reduced. Naturally, this made the inmates even weaker and even less able to fulfill the requirements. This continued for weeks, or perhaps for months, until finally the prisoners were so weak and feeble that they simply dropped out of ranks and died. Some of them fell into latrines, where they suffocated in human excrement. In other instances, the authorities would not even wait for this "natural death" to take place. They took care of the weakened prisoners by shooting those who had fallen behind during the morning muster, or while on the march to the work place. The Great Famine and Cannibalism Outside the camps, in the so-called "free society," many millions fell victim to the artificial famine created by Stalin's decision to export exorbitant amounts of grain and other food stuffs to Western Europe, and thus deprived the villages of all food supplies. This is what hap- pened in Ukraine in the early 1930s, where six to seven million peasants died in consequence of Stalin's mania of forced industrialization and collectivization. To secure the needed machinery and technology neces- sary for the attainment ofthe goals ofthe Five Year Plans, the export of grain was increased beyond reason. Thus, whereas in 1928 less than one metric centner (100,000 metric tons) of grain was exported, by 1930 this sum shot up to 48.4 metric cenmer (4.84 million metric tons), and in 1931 to 51.8 metric centner (5.18 million metric tons)." This mass export denuded the region even from seed grain, leading to hunger, starvation, death, and eventually to incidents of cannibalism. Had Stalin been will- CAhfNIBALISM IN STALIN'S RUSSIA AND MAO'S CHINA 225 ing to slow down this irrational industrialization and collectivization drive, and export only half as much grain as originally planned, the lives of six to seven million Ukrainian peasants could have been saved. In the midst of this unfettered industrialization and collectivization drive. Red Brigades, consisting of misled Komsomol youth, raided the villages and collected all the grain accumulated by the peasants for their own use and for seed grain for the following year. After such raids nothing remained in the villages and famine spread through the whole region like pestilence. Hungry peasants tried to stay alive by eating grass, straw, and their draft animals. Then came the dogs and cats, and finally, in some instances, even the children of the village. Some peas- ants, driven by hunger, fell into temporary insanity and began to feed on the dead bodies of their own and their neighbor's children.^ This canni- balism reached a point where the Soviet government—instead of stop- ping the mad exportation of grain—began to print posters with the following warning: "To eat your own children is a barbarian act."6 The outrageous and insane acts are amply documented in the vast number of scholarly works, memoirs and documentary films dealing with various aspects of Stalinism. And this is true in spite of the broad effort to cover up Stalin's murderous policies. What is sad about all this is the fact that many well-known contemporary Western intellectuals had a major role in this cover-up. Their ranks include British Nobel Laureate George Bernard Shaw; the noted Asian expert from Johns Hopkins Uni- versity, Owen Lattimore; the American Nobel Laureate Upton Sinclair; the well-known German writer, Emil Ludwig; and scores of others, including even F.D. Roosevelt's Vice President, Henry Wallace.'' Along with hundreds of other left-wing intellectuals who were enamored with the ideology of Marxism, they all visited the Soviet Union, they all were duped by the Soviet secret police, and they call came home praising that land of mass terror as "the best hope for mankind.''^ At the same time, they characterized Stalin—^who had exterminated millions, including even his close collaborators and architects of the Bolshevik Revolu- tion—as a great, unselfish, and humane leader. Just before his return home, George Bernard Shaw wrote in his diary: "Tomorrow I leave this land of hope and return to our Western countries of despair."' A few years later. Vice President Henry Wallace did the same. In 1944 he vis- ited the gold fields of Kolyma in far eastern Siberia, where during the 1930s and 1940s over two million innocent victims died. He was duped 226 EAST EUROPEAN QUARTERLY into believing that the well-fed NKVD guards were the miners, and that the brutal NKVD commander, Ivan Feodorovich Nikishov, was the efficient and humane director of Dalstroi, the Far Northem Construction Trust, which functioned like a grinding machine of human fiesh. Wallace returned home praising the Soviet Union and deified its leader, Joseph Stalin, to high heaven.'o Moreover, while Wallace, Shaw and the other misguided Western intellectuals spoke in superlative terms about Russia and its vicious dictator, they castigated the alleged "rising Ameri- can Fascism." n Manifestations of Cannibalism One of the most disgusting aspects of the system of Soviet slave labor camps, and of the artificially induced mass famine, was the presence of" cannibalism that manifested itself in a number of ways. Anne Appiebaum, the author of the recent major synthesis of the evolution ofthe Soviet Gulag, mentions a number of such phenomena.'2 As an example, in May 1933, 6,114 peasants were being deported to the uninhabited Nazino Island of the Ob River, beyond the Artie Cir le, where they were deposited without any food. On the very first day of their arrival 295 of them died. Three months later, when a party func- tionary visited the island to examine the situation, he was forced to report that of the original six thousand only about one-third were still alive, but only because they lived off the flesh of their deceased comrades. 13 According to one of the Gulag-inmates, who encountered several of the former Nazino-inhabitants in a prison at Tomsk, the for- mer "settlers" of Nazino appeared to him like "walking corpses."''' They were imprisoned at Tomsk for their cannibalistic activities, even though it was cannibalism that had kept them alive while on Nazino. Appiebaum also describes the most common method of escape attempts from the various slave labor camps in Siberia, both in her book and in a relevant documentary film. Those who planned such escapes were generally common criminals, who, prior to their departure, enlisted a willing political prisoner or minor pocket thief, who was to be their "meat" or "food supply" during their journey to freedom. After their escape, they first consumed all the regular food they brought along, after which they killed and dissected the unsuspecting political prisoner. Then, during the remaining portion of their sojourn they ate ^ CANNIBALISM IN STALIN'S RUSSIA AND MAO'S CHINA 227 This was what happened in one of Vorkuta's notorious forced labor camps, when two murderers persuaded a well-fed cook to escape with them.