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The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard

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The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard

NB: This is a secondhand book in very good condition. See our FAQs for more information. Please note that the jacket image is indicative only. A description of our secondhand books is not always available. Please contact us if you have a question about this title.
Author: Ivan Chistyakov

Format: Hardback

Number of Pages: 288


This is a rare first-person testimony of the hardships of a Soviet labour camp, written up in a couple of exercise books which were anonymously donated to the Memorial Human Rights Centre in Moscow. At the back of the books there is a blurred snapshot and a note, 'Chistyakov, Ivan Petrovich, repressed in 1937-38. Killed at the front in Tula Province in 1941'. They are all that remains of Ivan Chistyakov, a senior guard at the Baikal Amur Corrective Labour Camp (Bamlag) and a cultured and urbane ex-city dweller with a secret nostalgia for pre- Revolutionary Russia. Chistyakov does not just record his life in the camp, but narrates it; he is a sharp-eyed witness and a sympathetic, humane and broken man. From stumblingly poetic musings on the bitter landscape of the taiga to matter-of-fact grumbles about the inefficiency of his stove, from accounts of the brutal conditions of the camp to reflections on the cruelty of loneliness, this diary is an astonishing record - a visceral and immediate description of a place and time whose repercussions still affect the shape of modern Russia, and modern Europe.
$3.18

Original: $10.59

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The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard—

$10.59

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NB: This is a secondhand book in very good condition. See our FAQs for more information. Please note that the jacket image is indicative only. A description of our secondhand books is not always available. Please contact us if you have a question about this title.
Author: Ivan Chistyakov

Format: Hardback

Number of Pages: 288


This is a rare first-person testimony of the hardships of a Soviet labour camp, written up in a couple of exercise books which were anonymously donated to the Memorial Human Rights Centre in Moscow. At the back of the books there is a blurred snapshot and a note, 'Chistyakov, Ivan Petrovich, repressed in 1937-38. Killed at the front in Tula Province in 1941'. They are all that remains of Ivan Chistyakov, a senior guard at the Baikal Amur Corrective Labour Camp (Bamlag) and a cultured and urbane ex-city dweller with a secret nostalgia for pre- Revolutionary Russia. Chistyakov does not just record his life in the camp, but narrates it; he is a sharp-eyed witness and a sympathetic, humane and broken man. From stumblingly poetic musings on the bitter landscape of the taiga to matter-of-fact grumbles about the inefficiency of his stove, from accounts of the brutal conditions of the camp to reflections on the cruelty of loneliness, this diary is an astonishing record - a visceral and immediate description of a place and time whose repercussions still affect the shape of modern Russia, and modern Europe.