Daily life of Baikal Amur Corrective Labor Camp (BAMLAG) inhabitants in the 1930s (according to the diary entries of a prisoner and a guard)

The present study attempts to characterize the features of a daily life of people who built the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway in the 1930s. In 1932, in order to finish the building of the railway as soon as possible, a special corrective labor camp was organized in the system of Stalin's GULag (Main Directorate of Camps and Places of Incarceration) which was called Bamlag. In the camp there were many extraordinary people, some of them managed to keep diary entries even in such inhumane conditions. This epistolary heritage allows us to recreate to some extent the features of daily life of Bamlag inhabitants. The two main categories of any penitentiary institution are warders (guards) and prisoners. Just few of them are prone to sentimentality and desire to documentation of their own and surrounding life. However, even among these people there were the ones who sought to depict their daily lives. The study analyzes the diary entries of the guard I. Chistyakov and the prisoner N. Gapanovich.