A few years ago, I was in St. Petersburg and on a tour to the Hermitage. The guide was a big man, over six feet tall, impressively built with a scar on one cheek. I was able to ask him a few questions about his life and I found that he had been a Colonel in the Soviet nuclear missile forces stationed in Siberia. When asked why he left such a responsible position to end up on a bus loaded with tourists, he explained that when the Soviet Union collapsed, he was deactivated and yet he preferred his new job. Why? As he explained, his base was in the middle of a great forest, snowed in for most of the year, surrounded by vicious bears and all there was to eat was gruel. The look on his face and the way he said the word “gruel” brought home to me more than any book what his life, which was relatively privileged must have been like for those who were imprisoned in the Gulag.
There are many histories of the Gulag and even some memoirs of those who survived, but this is the first memoir that I have found written by a guard. There are several reasons why histories like this are so rare; most of the guards were poorly educated, many were they themselves either killed during the purges or imprisoned and of course, they were often shunned when they assigned to other duties or were afraid of running into former inmates. For once, we see a camp from the other side of the wire; chaotic, poorly managed, wasteful and degrading.
Chistyakov was drafted into the interior troops who were used to run the Gulag. He served for one year at the BAM, the Baikal-Amur Mainline railway which being constructed. He somehow managed to keep a daily diary, recording his misery at the service, his longing to return to Moscow and for much of the time, his sympathy for the prisoners. He was not an ordinary guard in the Gulag for he had some education and could see the waste and futility of the work. For much of the year the prisoners had to work in freezing conditions and in their effort to find warmth, they stole the rail ties which were to be used for the rail beds, chopped them up and used them for their miserable stoves. Of course, the ties were a finished product and Chistyakov understood the waste as those ties were produced elsewhere and transported to the camps for use. Wouldn’t it be simpler to allow the prisoners to go out and gather wood from the immense forests rather than use the ties? Of course, but the camp senior officers, who were chosen for the Party standing (who had little or no education and had replaced the Czarist management who were shot) could not see the logic as all they wanted was for the prisoners to fulfill their work quotas.
Fortunately for Chistyakov, he was released from that service before the reforms which were brought in by the new head of the NKVD, Beria and the infamous ex-prisoner and overlord of the camps, Naftaliy Frenkel. A much more brutal regime with stricter discipline was introduced with the introduction of the 1937 terror program and Chistyakov would not have fared well; he was too soft, too educated and consequently mistrusted by his men and his superiors. Unfortunately, as he expected, Chistyakov was arrested in 1937-we do not know on what charges- but he survived only to die in battle near Tula in 1941. His diary was anonymously donated to the Memorial Human Right Center in Moscow many years later.
This is a gloomy book, filled with entries longing for release, filled with pain and fear. How many guards felt like him we shall never know, but the pages reveal how one mans soul can be terrorized in a system where the individual is minimized, and the State uses freely uses it naked force.
