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

369 Pages·2012·3.732 MB·English

by  Orlando Figes

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Table of Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
Preface
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2
3
4
5
6
7
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Epilogue
ALSO BY ORLANDO FIGES
Acknowledgements
A Note from Memorial
Sources
Source Notes
About the Author
Notes
Copyright Page
Photo Insert
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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)
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Preface
ree old trunks had just been delivered. ey 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. e 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). ey 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. e �rst was by
Svetlana in July 1946, the last by Lev in July 1954. ey were writing to each
other at least twice a week. is 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. ey 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.
e letters were so tightly packed I had to wedge my �ngers between them
to get the �rst one out. It was from Svetlana to Lev. e short address read:
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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. at 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 �rst letter (1946).
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As I leafed through the letters, my excitement grew. Lev’s were rich in
details of the labour camp. ey were possibly the only major contemporary
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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).
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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 �rst read by the police. An
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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 �nd 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.
ere turned out to be almost 1,500 letters in that smallest trunk. It took
over two years to transcribe them all. ey were hard to decipher, full of code
words, details and initials that needed to be clari�ed. ese 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.
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