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Home > Translation > The World Bookshelf > Books > The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard

The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard

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.

Author

Ivan Chistyakov

Ivan Chistyakov

Books

The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard

Ivan Chistyakov was a Muscovite who was expelled from the Communist Party during 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.

Translator

Arch Tait

Arch Tait

Books

Putin's Russia

The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard

Arch Tait studied Russian, German and Swedish at at Cambridge University and wrote his PhD thesis for Cambridge on the plays of Lenin’s Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky.

He has taught Russian language and literature at the Universities of East Anglia, Norwich and Birmingham for many years, and is the UK editor of the translation series Glas New Russian Writing (see www.russianwriting.com).  He has translated novels by Peter Aleshkovsky, Vladimir Makanin, Ludmila Ulitskaya and Andrey Volos, and short stories by many other Russian authors, including Victor Pelevin and Anatoly Kurchatkin.

Published by

Granta Books, 2016
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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.

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