The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard
by Ivan Chistyakov, Granta, £14.99
The value of this diary lies in the fact that although there are numerous memoirs of Gulag prisoners, this is a rare first-person testimony of a guard.
The author, an educated Muscovite, was conscripted into the interior prison administration and sent to work for a year at the remote Far East Baikal-Amur Corrective Labour Camp in 1935. His diary, written between 1936 and 1938, was discovered when the papers of a female relative were being cleared out after her death. Chistyakov later died at the Russian Front in 1941.
