The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard

Informationen zum Autor 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. Klappentext 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 1937, 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. Zusammenfassung A unique piece of testimony from the Soviet Gulag - a prison guard's private diary, written between 1935-36.

Product details

• Authors: Ivan Chistyakov, Chistyakov Ivan
• Assisted by: Arch Tait (Translation), Tait Arch (Translation)
• Publisher: Granta Books
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 30.11.2017
• EAN: 9781783782574
• ISBN: 978-1-78378-257-4
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies; Diaries, letters & journals, LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Diaries & Journals, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Penology, LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Letters, c 1938 to c 1946 (World War Two period), Nobel prize, Diaries, letters and journals, c 1919 to c 1939 (Inter-war period), Penology and punishment, Prisons, c 1939 to c 1945 (including WW2), c 1918 to c 1939 (Inter-war period), Former Soviet Union, USSR (Europe), USSR, Soviet Union