Over time most of them somehow found their ways in "civil" life, but Ruslan cannot forget his duty he perceives the empty camp as one huge prisoners' escape and prefers to starve than to take food from stranger's hands. Many other guard dogs of the camp had the same luck. The story begins from the moment the labor camp is closed and demolished, and includes the dog's best reminiscences of its past.Īfter the labor camp is dismantled, Ruslan's handler chases the dog away, unable to shoot him.
" Ruslan" is a Russian given name, acquired the gist of high style after the poem Ruslan and Ludmila by Alexander Pushkin. It is the story of a guard dog from a Gulag labor camp, told from the point of view of the dog itself.Īccording to the author, the purpose of the novel was "to see the hell through the eyes of a dog who assumes it is a paradise". “My heart is so desolate, it alarms me.” Chistyakov may be standing in the freezing wind on the outside of the wire, but he is almost as much a prisoner as the prisoners he’s guarding.Faithful Ruslan, subtitled The Story of a Guard Dog ( Russian: Верный Руслан. “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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