Ivan Chistyakov

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.

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.