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- The day will pass away : the diary of a Gulag prison guard, 1935-1936 / by Chistyakov, Ivan,author.(CARDINAL)633602; Tait, A. L.,translator.(CARDINAL)762232; Shcherbakova, I. I.(Irina I.),writer of supplementary textual content.(CARDINAL)465452;
"Originally written in a couple of humble exercise books, which were anonymously donated to the Memorial Human Rights Centre in Moscow, this remarkable diary is one of the few first-person accounts to survive the sprawling Soviet prison system. At the back of these exercise 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." This is all that remains of Ivan Chistyakov, a senior guard at the Baikal Amur Corrective Labour Camp. Who was this lost man? How did he end up in the gulag? Though a guard, he is a type of prisoner, too. We learn that he is a cultured and urbane ex-city dweller with a secret nostalgia for pre-Revolutionary Russia. In this diary, Chistyakov does not just record his life in the camp, he 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"--Google Books.(WorldCAT)- Subjects: Diaries.; Chistyakov, Ivan; Internment camp guards; Internment camps; Nazi concentration camps; Political prisoners;
- Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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