During the spring of 1933; Stalin's police rounded up nearly one hundred thousand people as part of the Soviet regime's "cleansing" of Moscow and Leningrad and deported them to Siberia. Many of the victims were sent to labor camps; but ten thousand of them were dumped in a remote wasteland and left to fend for themselves. Cannibal Island reveals the shocking; grisly truth about their fate.These people were abandoned on the island of Nazino without food or shelter. Left there to starve and to die; they eventually began to eat each other. Nicolas Werth; a French historian of the Soviet era; reconstructs their gruesome final days using rare archival material from deep inside the Stalinist vaults. Werth skillfully weaves this episode into a broader story about the Soviet frenzy in the 1930s to purge society of all those deemed to be unfit. For Stalin; these undesirables included criminals; opponents of forced collectivization; vagabonds; gypsies; even entire groups in Soviet society such as the "kulaks" and their families. Werth sets his story within the broader social and political context of the period; giving us for the first time a full picture of how Stalin's system of "special villages" worked; how hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were moved about the country in wholesale mass transportations; and how this savage bureaucratic machinery functioned on the local; regional; and state levels.Cannibal Island challenges us to confront unpleasant facts not only about Stalin's punitive social controls and his failed Soviet utopia; but about every generation's capacity for brutality--including our own.
#1144228 in Books Princeton University Press 2006-07-23Original language:EnglishPDF # 1 9.21 x .50 x 6.14l; .99 #File Name: 0691113939200 pages
Review
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful. An essential work on the psychology of nationalismBy Richard KoenigsbergIn this important book; Emilio Gentile defines political religion as a "more or less developed system of beliefs; myths; rituals and symbols" that creates an aura of sacredness around an entity belonging to the world and "turns it into a cult or object of worship or devotion." "Gods" are one class of entities that human beings worship. However; other objects become sacred within societies. One such entity worshiped in the modern world---inspiring a cult of devotion---is the Nation-State. The state may appear as an "enthralling and awe-inspiring power that invokes a feeling of absolute dependency."Contemporary social theory--focusing on the concept of power---demonstrates how forces "from above" impose themselves upon "the subject." Gentile puts forth a more sophisticated---psychological--paradigm based on recognition that human beings possess a desire to attach to and worship objects greater than the self. This is an essential work toward a psychology of nationalism.
