Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag

334 Pages·2013·3.08 MB·English

by  Orlando Figes

Table of Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
Preface
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Epilogue
ALSO BY ORLANDO FIGES
Acknowledgements
A Note from Memorial
Sources
Source Notes
About the Author
Notes
Copyright Page
Photo Insert
Black and enduring separation
I share equally with you.
Why weep? Give me your hand,
Promise me you will come again.
You and I are like high mountains
And we cannot move closer.
Just send me word
At midnight sometime through the stars.

Anna Akhmatova, ‘In Dream’ (1946)
Preface
Three old trunks had just been delivered. They were sitting in a doorway,
blocking people’s way into the busy room where members of the public and
historical researchers were received in the Moscow offices of Memorial. I had
come that autumn of 2007 to visit some colleagues here in the research division
of the human rights organization. Noticing my interest in the trunks, they told
me they contained the biggest private archive given to Memorial in its twenty
years of existence. It belonged to Lev and Svetlana Mishchenko, a couple who
had met as students in the 1930s, only to be separated by the war of 1941–5 and
Lev’s subsequent imprisonment in the Gulag. As everyone kept telling me, their
love story was extraordinary.
We opened up the largest of the trunks. I had never seen anything like it:
several thousand letters tightly stacked in bundles tied with string and rubber
bands, notebooks, diaries, documents and photographs. The most valuable
section of the archive was in the third and smallest of the trunks, a brown
plywood case with leather trim and three metal locks that clicked open easily.
We couldn’t say how many letters it contained – we guessed perhaps 2,000 –
only how much the case weighed (37 kilograms). They were all love letters Lev
and Svetlana had exchanged while he was a prisoner in Pechora, one of Stalin’s
most notorious labour camps in the far north of Russia. The first was by Svetlana
in July 1946, the last by Lev in July 1954. They were writing to each other at
least twice a week. This was by far the largest cache of Gulag letters ever found.
But what made them so remarkable was not just their quantity: it was the fact
that nobody had censored them. They were smuggled in and out of the labour
camp by voluntary workers and officials who sympathized with Lev. Rumours
about the smuggling of letters were part of the Gulag’s rich folklore but nobody
had ever imagined an illegal postbag of this size.
The letters were so tightly packed I had to wedge my fingers between them to
get the first one out. It was from Svetlana to Lev. The short address read:
Komi ASSR
Kozhva Region
Wood-combine
C[orrection] C[amp] 274-11b
To Lev Glebovich Mishchenko
I began to read Svetlana’s small, barely legible handwriting on the yellow paper,
which crumbled in my hands. ‘So here I am, not even knowing what I should
write to you. That I miss you? But you know that. I feel I am living outside time,
that I’m waiting for my life to start, as if this were an intermission. Whatever I
do, it seems like I’m just killing time.’ I took another letter from the same
bundle. It was one of Lev’s. ‘You once asked whether it’s easier to live with or
without hope. I can’t summon any kind of hope, but I feel calm without it …’ I
was listening to a conversation between them.
Svetlana’s first letter (1946).
As I leafed through the letters, my excitement grew. Lev’s were rich in details
of the labour camp. They were possibly the only major contemporary record of
daily life in the Gulag that would ever come to light. Many memoirs of the
labour camps by former prisoners had appeared, but nothing to compare with
these uncensored letters, composed at the time inside the barbed-wire zone.
Written to explain to his sole intended reader what he was going through, Lev’s
letters became, over the years, increasingly revealing about conditions in the
camp. Svetlana’s letters were meant to support him in the camp, to give him
hope, but, as I soon realized, they also told the story of her own struggle to keep
her love for him alive.
Lev’s twenty-fourth (1946).
Perhaps 20 million people, mostly men, endured Stalin’s labour camps.
Prisoners, on average, were allowed to write and receive letters once a month,
but all their correspondence was censored. It was difficult to maintain an
intimate connection when all communication was first read by the police. An
eight-or ten-year sentence almost always meant the breaking of relationships:
girlfriends, wives or husbands, whole families, were lost by prisoners. Lev and
Svetlana were exceptional. Not only did they find a way to write and even meet
illegally – an extraordinary breach of Gulag rules that invited severe
punishment – but they kept every precious letter (putting them at even greater
risk) as a record of their love story.
There turned out to be almost 1,500 letters in that smallest trunk. It took over
two years to transcribe them all. They were hard to decipher, full of code words,
details and initials that needed to be clarified. These letters are the documentary
basis of Just Send Me Word, which also draws from the rich archive in the other
trunks, from extensive interviews with Lev and Svetlana, their relatives and their
friends, from the writings of other prisoners in Pechora, from visits to the town
and interviews with its inhabitants and from the archives of the labour camp
itself.
1
Lev saw Svetlana first. He noticed her at once in the crowd of students waiting
to be called to the entrance exam in the tree-lined courtyard of Moscow
University. She was standing by the doorway to the Physics Faculty with a
friend of Lev’s who waved him over and introduced her as a classmate from his
former school. They exchanged only a few words before the doors of the faculty
were opened and they joined the throng of students on the staircase to the hall
where the exam would be held.
It was not love at first sight: both agree on that. Lev was far too cautious to
fall in love so easily. But Svetlana had already caught his attention. She was of
medium height, slim with thick brown hair, high cheekbones, a pointed chin, and
blue eyes shining with a sad intelligence. She was one of only a half dozen
women to gain admission to the faculty, the best for physics in the Soviet Union,
along with Lev and thirty other men in September 1935. In a dark wool shirt,
short grey skirt and black suede shoes, the same clothes she had worn as a
schoolgirl, Svetlana stood out in this masculine environment. She had a lovely
voice (she would sing in the university choir) which added to her physical
attractiveness. She was popular, vivacious, occasionally flirtatious and known
for her sharp tongue. Svetlana had no shortage of male admirers, but there was
something special about Lev. He was neither tall nor powerfully built – he was
slightly smaller than she was – nor as confident of his good looks as other young
men of his age. He wore the same old shirt – the top button fastened but without
a tie in the Russian style – in all the photos of him at the time. He was still more
of a boy than a man in appearance. But he had a kind and gentle face with soft
blue eyes and a full mouth, like a girl’s.
During that first term, Lev and Sveta (as he began to call her) saw each other
frequently.1 They sat together in lectures, nodded to each other in the library,
and moved in the same circle of budding physicists and engineers who ate
together in the canteen or met in the student club near the entrance to the library
where some would come for a cigarette, others just to stretch their legs and chat.