Title: The Day Will Pass Away
Author: Ivan Chistyakov
Published: 2017
Language: English
ISBN: 9781681777610
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Extension: EPUB
Size: 12 MB
Subjects: Biography & Autobiography, History, Multi-Cultural, Nonfiction
A rare first-person testimony of the hardships of a Soviet labor camp-long suppressed-that will become a cornerstone of understanding the Soviet Union.
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.
Download Ivan Chistyakov - The Day Will Pass Away- The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard 1935-1936
