The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard by Ivan Chistyakov

The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard by Ivan Chistyakov

In the archives of the Memorial International Human Rights Centre in Moscow is an extraordinary diary, a rare first-person testimony of a commander of guards in a Soviet labour camp. Ivan Chistyakov was sent to the Gulag in 1935, where he worked at the Baikal-Amur Corrective Labour Camp for over a year. Life at the Gulag was anathema to Chistyakov, a cultured Muscovite with a nostalgia for pre-revolutionary Russia, and an amateur painter and poet. He recorded its horrors with an unmatchable immediacy, documenting a world where petty rivalries put lives at risk, prisoners hacked off their fingers to bet in card games, railway sleepers were burned for firewood and Siberian winds froze the lather on the soap. From his stumbling poetic musings on the bitter landscape to his matter-of-fact grumbles about his stove, from accounts of the conditions of the camp to reflections on the cruelty of loneliness, this diary is unique - a visceral and immediate description of a place and time whose repercussions still affect the shape of modern Russia.

IVAN CHISTYAKOV was a Muscovite who was expelled from the Communist Party during on the the purges of the late 1920s and early 1930s. He commanded an armed guard unit on a section of BAM, the Baikal-Amur Railway, which was built by forced labour. He was killed in 1941. ARCH TAIT was awarded the PEN Literature in Translation prize in 2010 for his translation of Anna Politkovskaya's Putin's Russia. To date he has translated another 27 books from Russian, most recently the memoirs of Akhmed Zakayev.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781783782567
ISBN 10	1783782560
Title	The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard
Author	Ivan Chistyakov
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Granta Books
Year published	2016-12-01
Number of pages	288
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.