Children - Victims of Cannibalism

(based on the materials of the Chelyabinsk governorate of the early 20s of the XX century)

Abstract

Under the extreme conditions of famine in the early 20s of the twentieth century, there appeared a new criminal wrongdoing, which had never existed in the Urals before - not just murder, but depriving somebody of life in order to eat the body of the murdered, including children. In the Verkhneuralsky County, cannibalism had become almost a commonplace, there were 13 such facts registered in the Chernigov Cossack village, 11 such facts registered in Velikopetrovskaya, 5 in Magnitnaya, 5 in the Polotsk village, and “mass corpse-eating”was registered in Kizelskaya. Cannibalism also spread to other parts of the governorate. One of the egregious facts of child cannibalism was recorded in the Nasledninskaya Cossack village of the Troitsky County. In the province, there was the following number of cases of cannibalism registered in the three most hunger-bitten counties: Verkhneuralsky - 84, Troitsk - 5, Miass - 7. There are 98 facts in total in the governorate. The scope of cannibalism frightened and forced the executive committee on March 7, 1922 to consider the issue “On the fight in the Chelyabgubernia against cases of cannibalism, corpse-eating, selling the flesh of human beings and selling products from it in the form of pies, etc. on the market” Speaking about the role of the court in suppressing this wrongdoing, we note that the competence of the special session included the issue of considering cannibalism cases. Hunger, and as a result cannibalism, spread throughout the country, and caused a certain brutality of the population. The recurrence of cannibalism in the Chelyabinsk region arose during the hunger-bitten war years, for the first time such facts were recorded in 1943.