The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard
By Ivan Chistyakov (2016)
1The diary of Ivan Chistyakov, a senior guard at the Baikal-Amur Corrective Labor Camp in eastern Russia, delivers a rare insight into the mind of a Stalin -era rank-and-file secret policeman—a man caught in a world not so much of evil as of senseless stupidity. His diary covers the period of 1935-36 and fills two neatly written exercise books, donated to the Memorial historical organization by a relative and later published. Its crushingly bleak portrait of casual violence, escape attempts and unfulfillable quotas all play out in the deadly dark and cold of a Siberian winter. “Minus 45 degrees. The trains run slowly,” writes Chistyakov on Dec. 10, 1935. “Only the moon, with a superior air, glides serenely through the sky . . . the stove warms you on one side while you freeze on the other.” Chistyakov, an educated man, feels powerless to control not only his drunken subordinates but also the exasperatingly violent and lazy (in his estimation) convicts. “I’m beginning to have that mark on my face, the stamp of stupidity, narrowness, a kind of moronic expression,” he writes. “My heart is so desolate, it alarms me.” Chistyakov may be standing in the freezing wind on the outside of the wire, but he is almost as much a prisoner as the prisoners he’s guarding.
