Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard | Ivan Chistyakov | Granta

Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard

Ivan Chistyakov

Translated by Arch Tait

‘Freedom, even with hunger and cold, is still precious and irreplaceable.’

Ivan Chistyakov

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.

More about the author →

Translated by Arch Tait

Arch Tait (www.russianwriting.com) has translated 30 books from Russian, and short stories and essays by many of today's leading Russian writers. His translation of Anna Politkovskaya's Putin's Russia was awarded the inaugural PEN Literature in Translation prize in 2010. Most recently, he has translated Mikhail Gorbachev's The New Russia (2016).

More about the translator →