The Day Will Pass Away - The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard: 1935-1936 (Hardcover)

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.

General

Imprint:	Pegasusbooks
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	August 2017
Authors:	Ivan Chistyakov
Translators:	Arch Tait
Dimensions:	236 x 163 x 28mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	288
ISBN-13:	978-1-68177-460-2
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: texts > Essays, journals, letters & other prose works > General Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > Political control & influence > Political oppression & persecution > General
LSN:	1-68177-460-7
Barcode:	9781681774602

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