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THE DIARY OF A GULAG PRISON GUARD by Ivan Chistyakov (1934-1936, NF)
Rights sold: Czech Republic – EUROMEDIA, Estonia - ARGO, France – DeNoël, Germany - MSB Matthes & Seitz, Italy - Pearson Paravia (Bruno Mondadori), Netherlands - Ambo | Anthos Uitgevers, Poland - BELLONA, Russia - CORPUS, World English - GRANTA, US - PEGASUS
Ivan Chistyakov’s diary is unique historical testimony. He commanded an armed guard unit on a section of BAM, the Baikal-Amur Railway which was built by forced labour.
We have few memoirs written even by people on the outside of the barbed wire. This diary, written inside the Gulag, gives a day by day account of life there over several months in 1935-36 and is probably unique.
The original diary is in the safekeeping of the Memorial human rights centre in Moscow which, since the late 1980s, has been collecting documents, testimony, memoirs, and letters relevant to the history of political repression in the USSR. It was passed to them by people who had come upon it among the papers left by a distant female relative.
The diary consists of two medium-sized exercise books. One describes three days in August 1934 which Chistyakov spent hunting, before being conscripted into the interior troops and sent to BAM. His notes are reminiscent of Ivan Turgenev’s classic A Hunter’s Sketches, illustrated by the author. They suggest nostalgia for the old, pre-revolutionary Russia and are in total contrast to the other notebook, which was written in 1935-36 when Chistyakov was working in the Gulag.
We do not know where Ivan Chistyakov was in 1939 when, along the railway built by the labour of prisoners he had guarded in 1935-36, long echelons of wagons passed bearing new prisoners to BAM. Among them was one of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets, Nikolai Zabolotsky.
It is a miracle that Chistyakov’s diary, whose entries break off, probably, with his arrest, somehow survived, that it did not fall into the hands of NKVD officials, that it was not discarded and destroyed, and that somebody managed to send it to Moscow.
Thanks to this miracle, one more voice of a lonely man who lived in a fearful era has come down to us.
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My Father's Letters (NF)
Letters of 16 Russian scientists to their children from the depths of Stalinist GULAG published by Memorial Human Rights Society, Moscow
Rights sold Germany - MSB Matthes & Seitz, Portugal - Relógio D’Água, World English - GRANTA BOOKS
Dr. Alexei Wangenheim, prisoner at the Solovki prison camp who before the arrest was the organizer and head of the Meteorological Service of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, in 168 letters sent to his daughter Eleanora from GULAG managed to create an entertaining herbarium of local plants.
Prof. Gavriil Gordon, prisoner at the Dmitlag prison camp who before the arrest was Academic Secretary of the Institute of Educational Research, sent to his children two notebooks containing his own hand-written account of world history and philosophy.
Vladimir Levitsky, prisoner at the Siblag prison camp who before his arrest was a President of Philatelic Society of Kursk, composed a series of short ethnographical essays in letters and postcards sent for his son. All his letters were illuminated by a hand-drawn postal stamps.All of them – and thousands more – cherished a hope to see their children again. All of them died in GULAG, but their "distance learning courses" wasn't a waste of time and energy in deadly conditions of detention: their children later became scientists, researchers, teachers, philatelists...
Technical details: approx. 50.000 words including preface, comments, and glossary; approx. 260 color and b/w drawings and photos.
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