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

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Authors: Orlando Figes

BOOK: Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag
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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)
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.
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.
Later, Lev and Sveta would go out in a group of friends to the theatre or the cinema; and then he would walk her home, taking the romantic route along the garden boulevards from Pushkin Square to the Pokrovsky Barracks near Sveta’s house, where couples promenaded in the evening. In the student circles of the 1930s the conventions of courtship continued to be ruled by notions of romantic chivalry, notwithstanding the liberalization of sexual behaviour in some quarters after 1917. At Moscow University romances were serious and chaste, usually beginning when a couple separated
from their wider group of friends and he started to walk her home in the evenings. It was a chance to talk more intimately together, perhaps exchanging favourite lines of poetry, the accepted medium for conversations about love, a chance for them to kiss before they parted at her house.
Lev knew that he was not alone in liking Sveta. He often saw her walking with Georgii Liakhov (the friend who had introduced him to Sveta) in the Aleksandr Gardens by the Kremlin Wall. Lev was too reserved to ask Georgii about his relations with Sveta, but one day Georgii said, ‘Svetlana’s such a lovely girl, but she’s so intelligent, so terribly intelligent.’ He said it in a way that made it clear to Lev that Georgii was intimidated by her intellect. As Lev would soon find out, Sveta could be moody, critical of others and impatient with people not as clever as herself.
Slowly, Lev and Sveta drew closer. They were brought together by a ‘profound sympathy’, recalls Lev. Sitting in his living room more than seventy years later, he smiles at the memory of that first emotional connection. He thinks carefully before choosing his next words: ‘It was not that we fell madly in love with each other, but there was a deep and permanent affinity.’
Eventually they came to see themselves as a couple: ‘Everybody knew that Svetlana was my girl because I didn’t visit anybody else.’
There was a moment when it became obvious to both of them. One afternoon, as they were walking in the quiet residential streets near Sveta’s house on Kazarmennyi Pereulok (Barracks Lane), she took his hand and said, ‘Let’s go that way, I’ll introduce you to my friends.’ They went to see her closest friends from school, Irina Krauze, who was studying French at the Institute of Foreign Languages, and Aleksandra (‘Shura’ or ‘Shurka’) Chernomordik, who was studying medicine. Lev recognized this as a mark of Sveta’s trust in him, as a sign of her affection, that she let him meet her childhood friends.
Soon Lev was invited to Sveta’s home. The Ivanov family had a private apartment with two large rooms and a kitchen – an almost unknown luxury in Stalin’s Moscow, where communal apartments housing a family per room with one shared kitchen and toilet were the norm. Sveta and her younger sister, Tanya, lived in one room with their parents, the girls sleeping on a sofa that unfolded into a bed. Their brother, Yaroslav (‘Yara’), lived with his wife, Elena, in the other room, where there was a large wardrobe, a glass-fronted cabinet for books and a grand piano used by the whole family. With its high ceilings and antique furniture, the Ivanov home was a tiny island of the intelligentsia in the proletarian capital.
Sveta’s father, Aleksandr Alekseevich, was a tall, bearded man in his mid-fifties with sad, attentive eyes and salt-and-pepper hair. A veteran Bolshevik, he had joined the revolutionary movement as a student at Kazan University in 1902, had been expelled and imprisoned, and then had re-enrolled in the Physics Faculty of St Petersburg University, where he had worked with the great Russian chemist Sergei Lebedev in the development of synthetic rubber before the First World War. After the October Revolution of 1917, Aleksandr had played a leading part in organizing the Soviet production of rubber. But he left the Party in 1921, officially for reasons of ill-health, although in reality he had become disillusioned with the Bolshevik dictatorship. During the next decade he went on two extended work trips to the West, before moving with his family to Moscow in 1930. This was the height of the Five Year Plan to industrialize the Soviet
Union and the first great wave of Stalin’s terror against ‘bourgeois specialists’, when many of Aleksandr’s oldest friends and colleagues were rounded up as ‘spies’ or ‘saboteurs’ and shot or sent to labour camps. Aleksandr’s foreign trips made him politically vulnerable, but somehow he survived and went on working for the cause of Soviet industry, rising to become the deputy director of the Resin Research Institute. In a household dominated by the ethos of the technical intelligentsia, all the children were brought up to study engineering or science: Yara went to the Moscow Machine-Building Institute, Tanya studied meteorology, and Sveta attended the Physics Faculty.
Aleksandr welcomed Lev into his home. He enjoyed the presence of another scientist. Sveta’s mother was more distant and reserved. A plump, slow-moving woman in her mid-fifties who wore mittens to cover up a hand disease, Anastasia Erofeevna was a Russian-language teacher in the Moscow Institute of the Economy, and had the stern demeanour of a pedagogue. She would screw up her eyes and peer at Lev through her thick-rimmed spectacles. For a long time he was scared of her, but towards the end of Sveta’s and his first year at the university an incident occurred that altered everything. Sveta had borrowed Lev’s notes for a lecture she had missed. When he came to pick them up before the first exam, Anastasia told him that she thought his notes were very good. It was not much – a small, unexpected compliment – but the softness of her voice was understood by Lev as a signal of acceptance by Anastasia, the gatekeeper of Sveta’s family. ‘I took it as a lawful pass into their home,’ recalled Lev. ‘I began to visit them more frequently, without feeling shy.’ After their exams, in the long, hot summer of 1936, Lev would come for Sveta every evening and take her to Sokolniki Park to teach her how to ride a bicycle.
For Lev acceptance by Sveta’s family was always an important part of their relationship. He had no immediate family of his own. Lev was born in Moscow on 21 January 1917 – days before the cataclysm of the February Revolution changed the world for ever. His mother, Valentina Alekseevna, the daughter of a minor provincial
official, had been brought up by two aunts in Moscow following the loss of both her parents at an early age. She was a teacher in one of the city’s schools when she met Lev’s father, Gleb Fedorovich Mishchenko, a graduate of the Physics Faculty of Moscow University who was then studying at the Railway Institute to become an engineer. Mishchenko was a Ukrainian name. Gleb’s father, Fedor, had been a prominent figure in the nationalist Ukrainian intelligentsia, a professor of philology at Kiev University and a translator of ancient Greek texts into Russian. After the October Revolution, Lev’s parents moved to a small Siberian town in the Tobolsk region called Beryozovo, which Gleb had got to know from surveying expeditions as a railway engineer. A place of exile since the eighteenth century, Beryozovo was far away from the Bolshevik regime and in a relatively wealthy agricultural area, so it seemed a good location to sit out the Civil War (1917–21), which brought terror and economic ruin to Moscow. The family lived with Valentina’s aunt in a rented room in the house of a large peasant family. Gleb found a job as a schoolteacher and meteorologist, Valentina worked as a teacher too, and Lev was brought up by her aunt, Lydia Konstantinovna, whom he called his ‘grandmother’. She told him fairy tales and taught him the Lord’s Prayer, which he remembered all his life.
The Bolsheviks arrived in Beryozovo in the autumn of 1919. They began arresting ‘bourgeois’ hostages deemed to have collaborated with the Whites, the counter-revolutionary forces that had occupied the region during the Civil War. One day they took Lev’s parents. Lev, four, went with his grandmother to see them in the local jail. Gleb had been placed in a large cell with nine other prisoners. Lev was allowed to go into the cell and sit with his father while the guard stood with his rifle by the door. ‘Is that uncle a hunter?’ Lev asked his father, who replied: ‘The uncle is protecting us.’ Lev and his grandmother found his mother in an isolation cell. He went to see her twice. On the last occasion she gave him a bowl of sour cream and sugar which she had bought with her prisoner’s allowance to make his visit memorable.
Not long afterwards, Lev was taken to the hospital, where his
mother was dying. She had been shot in the chest, probably by a prison guard. Lev was in the doorway of the ward when a nurse passed him with a strange red and palpitating object in her hands. Frightened by the sight, Lev refused to go into the ward when his grandmother told him to say goodbye, but from the doorway he watched her go up to the bed and kiss his mother on the head.
The funeral took place in the town’s main church. Lev went with his grandmother. Sitting on a stool in front of the open coffin, he was too low down to look inside and see his mother’s face. But behind the coffin he could see the painted faces of the colourful iconostasis, and in the candlelight he recognized the icon of the Mother of God directly above the coffin’s head. He remembers thinking that the face of the Mother of God looked like his own mother’s. Lev’s father, released from prison for the funeral and accompanied by a guard, appeared by his side. ‘He’s come to say goodbye,’ Lev heard a woman say. After standing by the coffin for a while, Lev’s father was led away. Lev later visited his mother’s grave in the cemetery outside the church. The mound of freshly dug earth was black against the snow and on top of it somebody had placed a wooden cross.
A few days later, Lev’s grandmother took him to a second funeral in the same church. This time there were ten coffins lined up in a row in front of the iconostasis, each containing a murdered victim of the Bolsheviks. One of them was Lev’s father. The prisoners in his cell must have all been shot at the same time. Where they were buried is unknown.

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