Before the Russians arrived, Nazino Island was a beautiful, peaceful place.

Or if not beautiful, the swampy Siberian island at least wasn't something out of Dante's nine circles of hell.

The Ostiac ethnic group and indigenous people of Siberia had lived in the harsh climate since at least the 16th century

when the name first started to appear in official Russian records.

They almost certainly had been living there for quite some time to appear in official Russian records. They almost certainly

had been living there for quite some time before appearing in official records, and they would

continue to live there into the 20th century. As one elderly peasant woman would recall in 1989,

we were living in Ergonquina. Every spring, we left for the island of Nazino to harvest the poplar bark that we

sent downstream. It was our only source of income. The whole family went along and we took enough

food to spend the seas in there. In the 1930s, any peaceful harvesting on this island would be interrupted

by a campaign on the part of Russia's communist government, the Soviet Union's

communist government, to send away hundreds of thousands of Kulaks, land-owning peasant farmers

who did not love handing their hard-earned and hard-worked farms over to the communists.

People who didn't fit into Stalin's idea of what an industrial worker-led society should look

like.

To achieve control over Russia's major cities and institute a brutally repressive surveillance state

after tens of thousands of these peasants had fled the countryside into urban areas

following the state's seizure of their farmland, the Soviet government would plan to send

these displaced and disenfranchised peoples to the outer reaches of Russia to sustain the Soviet government would plan to send these displaced and disenfranchised peoples to the outer

reaches of Russia to sustain the Soviet Union's rapidly industrializing economy. Except,

there was no real plan for how to do this. Uh, there was even remotely humane. Everything was

hastily cobbled together. People were quickly kidnapped and arrested, moved, and placed into holding camps, places that had no provisions, no capacity to handle the thousands of people who had no fucking idea why they had been detained and what was going on.

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