Communist authorities engineered cannibalism on purpose.
In May 1933 they dumped 6,000 ordinary people on a bare island in Siberia’s Ob River with no food, no tools, and almost no shelter.
Local police had grabbed them off city streets to meet arrest quotas during Stalin’s collectivization drive, many still carrying valid papers, and shipped them east without trial.
Guards left a single sack of flour on the shore and departed. Within days the starving started dying by the hundreds and the living began eating the dead.
A Communist Party inspector documented the mass graves and the cannibalism in a secret report.
4,000 were dead by the time the survivors were pulled off the island 2 months later.
That report stayed locked in a Soviet archive for 60 years until the regime that buried it finally collapsed.
The Bolsheviks declared war on the Russian Orthodox Church as soon as they seized power.
They stripped it of legal status and property, then executed thousands of priests, monks, and believers in the Red Terror.
Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev was dragged from the Monastery of the Caves, tortured, and shot in January 1918.
Patriarch Tikhon publicly excommunicated the Bolshevik leadership and spent his remaining years under arrest until his death in 1925.
In 1922, while the country starved, the Soviets seized church gold and jewels under the pretext of famine relief.
When believers in Shuya tried to stop them, troops opened fire on the crowd.
Lenin then issued a secret memo ordering the most merciless suppression of the clergy possible, arguing conditions would never again be so favorable for crushing the Church’s influence for decades.
By year’s end thousands of clergy had been shot and a 1000 year old institution was driven underground by the regime that claimed to liberate the peasants who built it.