Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag (13 page)

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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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People are crowding on to trains for Siberia or Belarus, but there’s nothing other than potatoes there. Trains are being stopped from coming into Moscow, but there are masses of beggars in the city nonetheless. At least half of Moscow’s population is now living in worse conditions than even during the war. It is painful to see all this, Levi. Everyone is counting the days until autumn and asking themselves how the harvest will turn out. For the moment, everything is all right at home … We have six ration cards for the three of us and can do entirely without going to the private market (the only thing we buy from a private seller is milk every other day) … True, we don’t see any meat, but there are such things as vegetarians, and it is said that they often live to be a hundred years old. Matters are worse as far as our income is concerned: Papa gets 1,300 roubles, and my salary is 930 roubles, but all this money disappears very quickly.
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From the beginning of their correspondence Lev and Sveta had discussed what they had called in code their ‘Minimum’ and ‘Maximum’ programmes – the ‘minimaxes’ for short. The first referred to a request for transfer to a different part of the Gulag, where Lev could do scientific work; the second was more ambitious: an appeal to get Lev’s sentence reduced or even to obtain his release. Sveta had been optimistic from the start. ‘Both are completely possible,’ she had written on 28 August 1946. ‘You know about the Stalin Prize winners Tupolev and Ramzin,
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but there are many other examples that are not so well known.’ It was true that the MVD had a policy of identifying scientists in the labour camps and redirecting them to specialist branches of the Soviet economy, especially to military research institutes under the control of the Gulag. The problem was that the bosses of the camps were usually reluctant to release their scientists, whom they relied on to run power stations, production laboratories, lighting systems and so on. Lev did not think that he could hope to achieve any more than he had done already by getting transferred to the Electrical Group. As for the Maximum, he didn’t believe in it at all: ‘I don’t want you to waste your energy petitioning for the Maximum,’ he had written to Sveta. But she continued on both fronts. ‘You don’t have faith, and I don’t have much faith either, probably no more than you do,’ she had written in December. ‘But, Lev, if there’s any kind of chance, isn’t it worth a try? I know there’d be more unnecessary pain if nothing comes of it. So we need to be level-headed and not deceive ourselves with hope – but still act. Nothing will happen by itself.’
By February 1947, Lev had concluded that it was too late to think of an appeal of any kind. He thought his scientific research at the Physics Institute was too much ‘like student work’ to warrant any
hope of a transfer, though he promised Sveta that he would find out through Strelkov if anybody from the Gulag’s scientific programme was due to visit Pechora; if so, he would ask them. An appeal of his sentence would entail a review of his investigation by the military tribunal in Frankfurt an der Oder. Since he knew that it had all been fixed, he saw no point in reliving the experience, and perhaps making his situation worse. In a long and candid letter of 1 March, Lev tried to rule out any further talk of ‘Minimums’ and ‘Maximums’.
I won’t think about the Maximum because witnesses are needed for an appeal to have any chance of success and they’re never summoned, and it would be difficult to find them anyway. I’m not even sure that new lies wouldn’t crop up between the time of their testimony and … the announcement of the verdict. It’s true that a person is more experienced the second time around … but the chances of success are still slim. Every action can always be attributed to at least two different motives – ‘good’, which is the natural explanation, and ‘evil’, which in their conspiratorial way of thinking disguises ‘dirty deeds’. The biggest problem is that many of the facts that could stand in my favour have no witnesses, and nobody is going to believe me. The gentlemen professors [procurators] are convinced that anybody brought before them is incapable of possessing sincere motives such as patriotism or adherence to the principles of common decency …
With regard to the Minimum, the secret military significance of nuclear and space research rules out any possibility of a person charged under article 58-1b working in these areas, especially someone not particularly distinguished. The fact that a person who has served his time is not allowed to work in a major economic-industrial centre even in remote provincial towns – with the exception of Yakutia, Komi, Kolyma and some others – is a good indication of how the political articles, even the less serious ones, are regarded by the authorities. No testimony on a prisoner’s behalf can mitigate these articles. In two months’ time someone here is going to be released who was convicted in the ‘Tukhachevsky era’ [1937]. This
person is a former member of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League, a military pilot and – he’s remained so in the camps – a genuine enthusiast. He worked here as a saddler and took on all the problems of the wood-combine as if they were his own … More than once, he sold his own bread and denied himself tobacco so that he could buy the leather straps we need in the workshops. And nobody ever thanked him for anything he did or remembered it when deciding where he was allowed to live on his release. You cannot change the terms of your sentence.
Sveta was reluctant to accept Lev’s reasoning. She wrote to him on 8 June:
I just don’t know what to say. I cannot argue with you, because I know that everything you write is true, and this nasty truth constitutes 99.99 per cent of your situation, and the little that remains is up to chance. Yet it does exist and that, too, is a fact. You should train yourself not to take disappointments to heart too much, but keep trying all the same. I know this is easier said than done. In your place I would not stick my head out either, and that is why I am not urging or insisting now, just trying to persuade you gently. Can putting in applications really make things worse? If not, Lyova, perhaps you would be willing to endure again what you had to go through once?
Sveta’s preference was to go on hoping for the ‘Maximum’ and actively petition for the ‘Minimum’ – a policy supported by the director of FIAN, who promised he would write on Lev’s behalf. ‘Perhaps I am wrong,’ she wrote to Lev, ‘but hasn’t it been the case over these five years that it’s been easier for you to live with hopes and dreams than without them?’
But Lev had the final word. ‘I wrote to you in passing once about a certain Boris German, a chemist from the Kharkov Institute, a galvanizer by profession, who asked to be employed in his speciality, ’ he wrote on 28 June.
Not long afterwards they called him to the transit camp (not far from us, close to Pechora station). He sat marinating there for several weeks until finally they sent him ‘by mistake’ to Vorkuta. After several weeks of general work (coal mining in the Arctic Circle) he came back to the transit camp, from which he was once again sent ‘by mistake’ to Khalmer-Yu (a railway-building camp by the coast [of the Arctic Ocean]), a place where there’s no hint of a galvanizer anywhere. On each convoy he was robbed, according to the custom, and the last time he was seen was at the transit camp by an acquaintance, who thought that physically he was half the man he’d been before. No one knows where he is now. He promised to write as soon as he could, but up to now nobody has received anything from him. It seems that a friend of Anisimov, someone called Kuzmich, met a similar fate. He was also called for ‘special duty’ and vanished. The veterans say that’s routine and that the quickest way of ‘making it’ [to the final stages of exhaustion] is to ask for a transfer to work in your speciality. Hearing this, I tore up the application to the GULAG MVD which I’d written in a fit of optimism … Well, let’s drop it now.
Resigned to Lev’s remaining at the wood-combine, Sveta began to plan for something far more daring than any ‘Maximum’ or ‘Minimum’: a secret trip to visit him in Pechora.
Sveta had brought up the idea of a meeting in her very first letter. ‘I know you will do all you can so that we can meet before another five years pass,’ she had written on 12 July 1946. Lev was pessimistic from the start. ‘You ask about a meeting … ’ he had replied. ‘Svetka, it’s almost impossible. 58-1(b) is a terrible figure.’
Lev was right. It was rare indeed for a prisoner to receive permission for a visitor; and if it was given, it was for a family member or a spouse. Meetings were allowed in exceptional circumstances as a reward for ‘good, conscientious, and high-tempo work’. The promise of a visit was a powerful incentive for good behaviour by the prisoners. Yet when a meeting did take place, it was often disappointing, limited to a few minutes in the presence of a guard. It was difficult to have an intimate conversation, and physical affection was prohibited. After visits from their wives, prisoners were ‘invariably silent and irritable’, noted a memoirist of the northern camps.
Visits by a wife or relative were difficult enough, but Sveta was neither of these things. She was just a friend, a class-mate from university, and that was no basis on which to apply for permission to see Lev. But Sveta was determined not to be put off. Encouraged by the news she received from Lev that it was ‘possible in principle’ for relatives to visit Pechora, she set out ‘to find out whether it is personally possible for you and me’, as she explained to him. Perhaps the Gulag authorities would agree to count her as a common-law wife. ‘Lev,’ she had written in the autumn of 1946, when she had been hopeful of making such a trip,
even if it’s only a possibility, I beg you to do everything you can to make it happen more quickly. I’m not expecting any leave but I can
always get ten days in place of study days or even take an unpaid holiday. Mik. Al. [Tsydzik] will support me.
Not wanting Sveta to take any risks until he found out more about her chances of success, Lev discouraged her from coming that autumn. She would need two weeks to make the journey, he warned her, far too long for her to be away from work without a scheduled holiday, which required organizing months ahead. It had taken Gleb Vasil’ev’s mother a fortnight to return to Moscow after seeing her son in August, the only visit Lev knew of, although he must have known that her trip back was exceptionally long (the 2,170 kilometre journey to Moscow normally took two or three days by train). Lev was trying to put Sveta off. Perhaps he was afraid of disappointment, or felt he did not merit so much effort on her part. But there is no doubt that he was afraid of the immense dangers she would face if she went through with her plans to visit him. Sveta was involved in research that had been deemed a ‘state secret’; yet here she was, planning to apply to the MVD for permission to travel to a labour camp to visit a convicted ‘spy’. Simply by making such an application she ran the risk of expulsion from her institute, or perhaps even worse.
Sveta was not to be dissuaded by estimates of how long it would take her to make the trip or by the dangers that it might involve. Sceptical of the information she received from Lev, she needed to know more. ‘I didn’t expect a two-week journey,’ she wrote on 15 October.
I thought that it was only letters that took that long to travel, what with their not having legs. If it’s true (I’ll check somehow) then there’s no point even talking about my coming in the winter, unless it’s during holiday leave. But once again I’m counting my chickens before they’ve hatched. You’ve written to me more than once asking if we need special permission or not, and if we do, from whom? I’ve been told that it depends solely on the authorities at your end (and on how they regard your behaviour), but I’ve got sufficient grounds not to believe what I’m told. My status doesn’t give me any privileges, of course.
The main uncertainty was whether she would be allowed to visit Lev at all, given that she was not yet his wife. Lev could obtain no reliable information. ‘They say it’s possible to get permission at the Gulag [administration] in Moscow,’ he wrote on 9 February 1947.
It seems there is a better chance there than at the North Pechora Railway Labour Camp administration in Abez, where as a rule they grant between 15 minutes and a couple of hours. Apparently, the higher authorities sometimes give authorization to relatives, brothers, wives (both legal and common-law), sisters and cousins for a few hours at a time over the course of several days. Unfortunately, this information isn’t from official sources. It’s all I was able to find out for the moment.
By 1 March, Lev knew more. It was not encouraging:
As for meetings, Sveta, I don’t know how they’ve been described to you, but in reality they are very difficult and perhaps even humiliating, though not if we sing ‘The Slender Rowan Tree’
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at
such moments, my glorious Sveta. More often than not people are allowed only a few minutes in the guard-house by the gates in the presence of a guard … Sometimes – and this happened recently with Boris German and his mother – the guard may decide at the last moment to deny a meeting already sanctioned by the authorities … It’s true that occasionally meetings of several hours over consecutive days have been allowed within the industrial zone, and some of these have been practically unmonitored (which is what happened with Gleb [Vasil’ev] and his mother) but these are rare and as a rule aren’t granted to 58-1 (b) political prisoners. A positive testimonial from the camp administration’s cultural and educational department may help, although it’s not easy to get one. However, that’s not the main problem … When I think about the likely nature of our meeting, should such a thing ever take place, I immediately wonder whether it will bring you satisfaction or just reawaken the unbearable pain that has eased off a little as we’ve got used to the new but already well-established conditions of our current relationship. Won’t it make you feel even more acutely the impossible distance separating us? Won’t it make it even harder for you to be happy there, where others are happy?
Sveta would not be deterred. Whatever the risks or consequences for herself, she was determined to travel to Pechora and see Lev, even if for only a few minutes. If the Gulag authorities in Moscow would not let her visit him, she would apply directly to the camp authorities in Pechora. And should they refuse, she would look for
other ways to get into the labour camp, perhaps with the assistance of the free workers who had been helping Lev. If letters could be smuggled in to him, why couldn’t she? It was an extraordinarily bold and daring plan. Nobody had ever thought to break into a labour camp before.
For the moment there was time to plan and to collect more information. It was not safe to travel to Pechora during the winter, which in the Arctic might last until May, because of the long hours of darkness and the possibility of trains breaking down in freezing temperatures. Lev was working the night shift at the power station. At the end of March, he detected signs of the coming spring. Struck though he was by the beauty of the early-morning light, he was characteristically wary of hopes and illusions:
When I leave the station in the mornings it’s no longer in the twilight shadows that I disliked so much but in the brilliance of the rising, warming sun, which is turning the edges of the snowdrifts into half-melted sugar cubes. It’s strange that there are things that don’t have anything objectively bad about them but for some reason you have an aversion towards them. That’s how I feel about false dawns … Once at daybreak I was walking home from work and the moon was already low. I was suddenly dumbfounded by the beauty of the unusual light. The snow’s even surface was light-blue from the early sun and densely grey in the shadows, while the slopes of the snowdrifts were still illuminated by the reflection of the fading moonlight. And the morning sky, lifting up through the delicate silhouettes of the pines, changed from gloomy grey and dark blue-green to a tender rose colour … At the moment the days are spring-like and wonderful, spring is showing itself in every dirty stain in the slowly melting snow, and the sun is sparing no effort. You look at everything in a better light. You want to talk a little (which I rarely feel like) – to speak of some fine person or … just talk nonsense for a while.
With the return of warmer weather there was renewed talk of a visit. During June, Nikolai Litvinenko’s parents came from Kiev to
see him. ‘The meeting was not a cheerful one,’ Lev wrote as a warning to Sveta. The North Pechora Railway Labour Camp administration in Abez, to which the Litvinenkos had applied, had given them permission for three visits of two hours each; but the administration of the wood-combine allowed only one such meeting, in the presence of a guard in the guard-house. ‘That is the most that we could get,’ Lev wrote to Sveta. ‘My article would not warrant any more. Nikolai is here under Article 58-1(a).’
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The Litvinenkos had not been able to get more time ‘despite the abundance of lubrication’, by which Lev meant bribes: ‘it cost them a huge amount’. Lev had nothing positive to draw from the Litvinenko visit for Sveta:
Everything was very expensive for them, especially accommodation. At least they have a lot of money, so it wasn’t such a burden. I saw them when I was walking to the guard-house pretending to be on business. His mother is quite young but thin, although she said that there aren’t a lot of people in Kiev who are as plump as she is, that plumpness is a rare sight there [a reference to the famine]. It’s sad to watch such meetings as an outsider, Sveta. It’s understandable why Anton Frantsevich
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told his wife last year that if she came in spite of his requests to stay away, he wouldn’t even see her. Well, God be with them; let’s drop the subject until better times.
Lev was so despondent, so discouraging of Sveta’s plan to visit him, that it almost seemed he was afraid of seeing her. Perhaps he had been voicing his own fears when he had asked her earlier if a meeting, instead of bringing her satisfaction, might only make the pain of separation worse.
If Lev was depressed by the Litvinenkos’ experience, Sveta was encouraged by another visitor to Pechora. Gleb Vasil’ev’s mother,
Natalia Arkadevna, was to make a second visit to Pechora in mid-June to see her son. On her earlier trip, in 1946, she had managed to spend several unmonitored hours with her son, Lev told Sveta in his letter of 1 March. Natalia Arkadevna was confident of repeating her success. Before she left for Pechora, she went to see Lev’s aunt Olga, who had been thinking of travelling with her, until, much to Lev’s relief, she was dissuaded by her doctor (a fact she did not want Sveta to communicate to Lev). For several weeks, Olga had been telling Sveta about the plans for the trip. Sveta agreed with Lev that it was crazy for Olga to think she could manage the journey – this was a woman who got into a fuss about crossing Moscow by metro –though she thought she had been wise to attach herself to an ‘experienced traveller’ like Natalia Arkadevna. By the time Gleb’s mother was ready to set out, Sveta had been told so much about the proposed trip by Olga that she had worked herself up into a heightened state of excitement: somebody she knew – if only indirectly –would soon be seeing Lev.
Sveta longed for Lev. On the weekend of 7–8 June, she wrote him a letter that Gleb’s mother would put into his hand. She started it on the Saturday:
Levi, Gleb’s mother visited O. B. [Aunt Olga] and said she would leave [for Pechora] on Wednesday. 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 know this is not good. Wasting time deliberately or carelessly is unworthy of a strong person. It is also a fatal mistake, because you can never bring back lost time. I must live, not simply wait. Otherwise, when the waiting is over I may well find myself incapable of building our life together.
I have always had this fear, the fear that love is not enough. One must be able to love yet also to live together and to live in this world, which will probably always remain cruel. Yet it seems to me that, despite time passing, I have become neither stronger nor more
intelligent. I do at least get less worked up about such things as my own stupidity or about being true to the people I love, however far away they are from me, which in the past caused me to torment myself and others (you, too, had to suffer on this account). I’ve lost a lot of H
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O over silly issues such as these. It seems to me that I’m not strong when I have to wait or when I’m angry. That’s why I don’t now feel that I’m standing firmly on my feet. I need you to lean on –in sorrow and in joy. We have to get through this together, walking arm in arm as we used to do – though I think then I didn’t lean on you. I was not heavy on your arm. Am I right? It is not kind of me to write like this, to ask for something you can’t give, which can only bring you pain. But I am tired, not just today but in general. I need ‘support’, even if only through these letters (which are a conversation between us). But, Levi, you must not get upset. In the end, you and I are happier than many – happier than those who do not know love at all and than those who do not know how to find it. I hope this makes sense.
When I am tired, I become prickly, ‘unshaved inside’, as Irina [Krauze] puts it, and then I don’t know how to find support from people who are close to me. I don’t know what I want from them. It is not that I expect them to understand or do anything but that I don’t know myself what to ask. I remain silent, but actively silent, meaning I withdraw into myself. Even Shurka [Aleksandra Chernomordik] I visit only twice a week these days, and I’ve offended Irina by failing to go and see her this Sunday (she forgave me as I said I was exhausted). The day before yesterday it was even worse, when she asked me about you and I only shook my head. It was no better yesterday, after the concert, when I ran away from everyone. You see, I can also be thoughtless and vicious, and even though I understand and regret this, I don’t know how to make amends for it. That is why I am afraid that one day, if I feel bad (even if only out of tiredness), I won’t tell you but only snap and then withdraw. If that happens, Lyovka, you must know that I am not angry with you. Do not lose heart and torture yourself, just wait till I have had a proper rest. Will you promise me that?
What I’ve written here doesn’t seem particularly clever, but then I don’t want you to have an exaggeratedly good opinion of me (a bit is all right). For now, Levi, I shall go to bed before I write any more nonsense. The good thing is that, having cried a little before writing, I’m now finishing this letter, I swear, with a smile on my face, my darling, sweet Levi.

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