'Chistyakov, Ivan Petrovich, repressed in 1937-38. Killed at the front in Tula Province in 1941'

A year in the life of Ivan Chistyakov, Gulag guard

by Owen Matthews

There was no redemption for this reluctant functionary of Stalin’s vast machine of terror, which he himself fell victim to




Spare a thought for the poor Gulag guard: the rifleman standing in the freezing wind on the outside of the wire, almost as much a captive of the Stalinist prison machine as the inmates he’s guarding. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniya Ginzburg and Varlaam Shalamov have left the world a rich, searing portrait of the Gulag from the point of view of the prisoner. But the diary of Ivan Chistyakov (*) is unique — a narrative of the brutal conditions in Stalin’s Gulag, told from the point of view of one of the captors.

Chistyakov was a senior guard at the Baikal-Amur Corrective Labour Camp or BAMLag, and he wrote his personal diary in 1935–6, just as Stalin’s henchman Naftaliy Frenkel was putting his scheme for mobilising convict labour into high gear. Told with a telling eye for detail, the diary is a crushingly bleak portrait of casual violence, unfulfillable quotas, endless fights and escape attempts, inefficiency and injustice — all played out against the deadly dark and cold of a Siberian winter. On 10 December Chistyakov writes:

Minus 45 degrees. The trains run slowly. Only the moon, with a superior air, glides serenely through the sky. I stay indoors all day, wearing outer clothing… the stove warms you on one side while you freeze on the other.

His surviving diaries — which fill two neatly written exercise books — were donated by a relative to the Memorial Human Rights Centre in Moscow and published in Moscow in 2014. The timing of this translation could not be more apposite. Last November, Memorial — which is dedicated to chronicling the history of Stalin’s repressions, as well as later human rights abuses — published a list of over 40,000 members of the NKVD, the Stalin-era secret police, painstakingly compiled from the few open sources available to historians. The list proved extremely controversial; in a society where Stalin has been officially rehabilitated to the status of national hero, remembering his millions of victims has become deeply politically incorrect.

‘Until now, if anyone mentions the victims, it’s as though they were killed by a natural disaster, like an earthquake or a tidal wave,’ Yan Rachinsky of Memorial told the Washington Post. ‘They were victims of crimes and those crimes were committed by people.’

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Read more: www.spectator.co.uk

(*) IVAN CHISTYAKOV was a Muscovite who was expelled from the Communist Party during on the the purges of the late 1920s and early 1930s. He commanded an armed guard unit on a section of BAM, the Baikal-Amur Railway, which was built by forced labour. He was killed in 1941.ARCH TAIT was awarded the PEN Literature in Translation prize in 2010 for his translation of Anna Politkovskaya's Putin's Russia. To date he has translated another 27 books from Russian, most recently the memoirs of Akhmed Zakayev.