A unique piece of testimony from the Soviet Gulag - a prison guard's private diary, written between 1935-36
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.
The diary of Ivan Chistyakov is unique - a narrative of the brutal
conditions in Stalin's Gulag, told from the point of view of one of
the captors... Told with a telling eye for detail, the diary is a
crushingly bleak portrait of casual violence, unfulfillable quotas,
endless fights and escape attempts, inefficiency and injustice -
all played out against the deadly dark and cold of a Siberian
winter... Perhaps the most chilling psychological insight offered
by the diary is the portrait of a humane man conforming to an
inhuman system... There is no redemption in The Diary of a Gulag
Prison Guard - only a portrait of the banality of evil, and the
part that the daily compromises made by a single broken man, play
in a vast machine of terror
*Spectator*
Written in a beautiful, educated hand [...] these notebooks are, so
far, unique in confirming the insight of the gulag inmate Varlam
Shalamov: that the system dehumanised the guards as much as the
prisoners
*Literary Review*
A record of this sensitive man's rapid dehumanisation
*Sunday Telegraph*
A rare and fascinating insight into the Soviet camp system, and a
reminder that the imprisoned weren't its only victims
*Leningrad*
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