During
the height of Soviet oppression, in Russia, where they were sending millions of
their own people and soldiers to the Gulag concentration camps (in the case of
the troopers it was usually for the crime of being captured by the enemy),
while simultaneously fighting the Nazis, an interesting person was captured by
some collective labor peasants. During the October of 1941, outside of Buinaksk
in what is modern day Dagestan, A Red Army lieutenant colonel by the name of V.
S. Karapetyan was summoned to inspect the prisoner, to determine whether he was
a spy, and if his strange appearance was a disguise.
His
official translated report (declassified in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet
Union) reads as follows:
“I
can still see the creature as it stood before me, naked and bare-footed. And it
was doubtlessly a man, because its entire shape was human. The chest back, and
shoulders, however were covered with shaggy hair of a dark brown color….
“The
man stood absolutely straight with his arms hanging, and his height was above
average 180 centimeters [roughly six foot, above average for the people native
to this region]. He stood before me like a giant, his mighty chest thrust
forward. His fingers were thick, strong, and exceptionally large. On the whole,
he was considerably bigger than any of the local inhabitants. His eyes told me
nothing. They were dull and empty – the eyes of an animal…
“When
kept in a warm room he sweated profusely. While I was there, some water and
then some food was brought up to his mouth; and someone offered him a hand, but
there was no reaction. I gave the verbal conclusion that this was no disguised
person, but a wild creature of some kind.”
The
report then follows that while Karapetyan suggested that the creature be
returned to the wild, his superior, at the insistence of the political officer
attached to the unit, ordered it shot, in case it might be a spy. This also would allow the commander to claim a
victory, however hollow, to those who might accuse him of slackness and send him
off on a trumped up charge to one of the numerous death camps so popular in
Communist Russia. For more fun try books by Rex Hurst
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