TY  - BOOK
AU  - Chistyakov,Ivan
AU  - Tait,A.L.
AU  - Shcherbakova,I.I.
TI  - The day will pass away: the diary of a Gulag prison guard, 1935-1936 
SN  - 9781681774602
PY  - 2017///
CY  - New York
PB  - Pegasus Books
KW  - Chistyakov, Ivan
KW  - Concentration camp guards
KW  - Soviet Union
KW  - Diaries
KW  - Concentration camps
KW  - Political prisoners
KW  - History
KW  - 1925-1953
KW  - lcgft
N1  - Translation of: Sibirskoĭ dal'neĭ storonoĭ; Original Russian language edition published in 2014
N2  - "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"--Google Books
ER  -