“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. Fashioned from the perceptions of an uncomprehending animal, Vladimov’s insistently ironic indictment of the gulag spirals to encompass all of Man’s inexplicable cruelty.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. The novel circulated in samizdat for more than a decade, often attributed to Solzhenitsyn, before its publication in the West led to Vladimov’s harassment and exile.Ī starving stray, tortured and abandoned by the godlike “Master” whom he has unconditionally loved, Ruslan and his cadre of fellow guard dogs dutifully wait for the arrival of new prisoners-but the unexpected arrival of a work party provokes a climactic bloodletting. Dissident, he said, is a word that “they force on you.” His mother, a victim of Stalin’s anti-Semitic policy, had been interred for two years in one of the camps from which Vladimov derived the wrenching detail of Faithful Ruslan.

“Every writer who writes anything in this country is made to feel he has committed a crime,” Georgi Vladimov said. Set in a remote Siberian depot immediately following the demolition of one of the gulag’s notorious camps and the emancipation of its prisoners, Faithful Ruslan is an embittered cri de coeur from a writer whose circumstances obliged him to resist the violence of arbitrary power. Unavailable for twenty years, this harrowing allegory of obedience to authority is esteemed as “one of the defining literary texts of the post-Stalin period.” ( The Guardian)

Faithful Ruslan by Georgi Vladimov