“I’m beginning to have that mark on my face, the stamp of stupidity, narrowness, a kind of moronic expression,” he writes. the stove warms you on one side while you freeze on the other.” Chistyakov, an educated man, feels powerless to control not only his drunken subordinates but also the exasperatingly violent and lazy (in his estimation) convicts. “Only the moon, with a superior air, glides serenely through the sky. The trains run slowly,” writes Chistyakov on Dec. Its crushingly bleak portrait of casual violence, escape attempts and unfulfillable quotas all play out in the deadly dark and cold of a Siberian winter. His diary covers the period of 1935-36 and fills two neatly written exercise books, donated to the Memorial historical organization by a relative and later published. 1The diary of Ivan Chistyakov, a senior guard at the Baikal-Amur Corrective Labor Camp in eastern Russia, delivers a rare insight into the mind of a Stalin-era rank-and-file secret policeman-a man caught in a world not so much of evil as of senseless stupidity.
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