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... 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... Perhaps the most chilling psychological insight offered by the diary is the portrait of a humane man conforming to an inhuman system... There is no redemption in The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard - only a portrait of the banality of evil, and the part that the daily compromises made by a single broken man, play in a vast machine of terror -- Owen Matthews * Spectator * Written in a beautiful, educated hand [ ...] these notebooks are, so far, unique in confirming the insight of the gulag inmate Varlam Shalamov: that the system dehumanised the guards as much as the prisoners -- Donald Rayfield * Literary Review * A record of this sensitive man's rapid dehumanisation -- Robert Eustace * Sunday Telegraph * A rare and fascinating insight into the Soviet camp system, and a reminder that the imprisoned weren't its only victims -- Anna Reid, author * Leningrad *
