AN EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY FROM THE HEART OF A BRUTAL REGIME
In 1935, Ivan Chistyakov was sent to the Gulag, where he commanded an armed guard unit for over a year. A cultured Muscovite with a nostalgia for pre-revolutionary Russia, he recorded the Gulag's horrors with an unmatchable immediacy, documenting a world where prisoners hacked off their fingers to bet in card games, railway sleepers were burned for firewood and Siberian winds froze the lather on the soap. This diary is unprecedented - a visceral and immediate description of a place and time whose repercussions still affect the shape of modern Russia.