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Authors: Orlando Figes

Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag (15 page)

BOOK: Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag
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Sveta had a good birthday, as she wrote to tell him on 12 September:
At the institute they gave me two enormous bouquets of flowers (gladioli, dahlias and asters) and Mama gave me a third one (carnations). They say that flowers are a good omen. I left some of the asters in a flask at the laboratory for myself and some in a beaker for Mikh[ail] Al[eksandrovich]. The rest are at home. Irina and Shura gave me a special article of clothing I had requested for the northern expedition. Shura wasn’t there on my birthday … but Irina was and Lida from the institute … Mama baked a divine cabbage pie and we had two cakes (obtained with ration coupons in place of sugar).
The bad news was that Sveta would not be ready to leave for Kirov on the 15th, as she had told Lev she would be. There were delays at the institute. ‘I have the details of the work trip in my briefcase but the payroll office is empty and they’re not promising any money before the 20th,’ Sveta wrote to Lev. Friends and relatives began collecting money and raised about 1,000 roubles for Sveta, more than her monthly salary. Meanwhile Sveta received ‘another 300 or 400 roubles’ from her institute (money owed to her for taking charge of the laboratory during Tsydzik’s absence) by writing a report ‘about wages and discrepancies in the rates of pay’ and putting it into a pile of papers which the director signed without
checking properly. If she had asked for the money herself, she would have been refused (the institute was short of cash and always looking for excuses not to pay its staff) and possibly accused of lacking the requisite public spirit of a research team leader. There might even have been some awkward questions about why she suddenly needed the money. Sveta was uncomfortable about tricking the director in this way: it added to her general anxiety about the greater risks she would have to take on her journey. ‘I’m very nervous about the preparations,’ she wrote to Lev. ‘It’s all down to the same superstitious feeling that if I get everything ready then I won’t end up going (or I will, but something bad will happen).’
Lev had still not been in touch with his namesake to finalize the plans for Sveta’s arrival. He had heard nothing from Lev Izrailevich since 5 September and had not even seen him then, he explained to Sveta, ‘so I wasn’t able to let him know what your letter said, give him advance notice, or ask him anything.’ There were still important preparations to be made for her visit, which he now planned to communicate by sending a telegram to her in Kirov once he had made contact with Izrailevich. ‘All in all,’ he wrote to Sveta on 17 Steptember, ‘nothing’s really gone that well in the last ten days or so.’ A major complication that had recently arisen was that Lev was being confined more frequently to the barracks – there had been a security alert in the 2nd Colony – making it harder for him to meet Sveta in the industrial zone.
Five days later, on 22 September, Lev still had not heard from his namesake. He thought Izrailevich must be ill. Nor had he had a letter from Sveta since the 5th. Presuming she had left Moscow already, one of the free workers sent a telegram to the Kirov poste restante on Lev’s behalf with the address of Lev Izrailevich in Kozhva where she should go when she arrived to wait for further instructions.
The details of Sveta’s journey are not entirely clear; she became confused about them in later years. It seems that she set off from Moscow some time shortly after 20 September. Her father and brother took her to the Yaroslavl station and put her on a train to Kirov, where she must have spent at least three days carrying out
her duties at the tyre factory. As planned, Sveta sent a telegram from Kirov to Tsydzik (who was in on the plot) to let him know that she would be ‘delayed for a few days’. She then took a train to Kozhva, using a ticket bought illegally by her father from a military officer who agreed to take her with him as his ‘personal assistant’ on condition that she give it back to him on her arrival in Kozhva. Sveta had the upper berth in a sleeping carriage, an ‘unheard-of luxury’ for her, as she recalled.
What did Sveta feel as she travelled north, changing trains at Kotlas to continue on her journey to Kozhva? Was she afraid when she saw the first watch-towers and barbed-wire fences alongside the railway track? Did she even think about the risks she was taking by venturing illegally into the Gulag zone? Reflecting on the journey a few months afterwards, in April 1948, Sveta thought she had not been afraid, because she was ‘prepared for an unsuccessful outcome, and I was a bit emotionless’. Half expecting failure, she had not invested her emotions in the promise of success, and this had helped her keep her nerve. But as time passed she looked back on her journey with ever more amazement at her own audacity. Sitting in her kitchen more than seventy years later, Sveta would recall that at the time it had seemed ‘natural’ for her to make the trip. But then she added: ‘How could I have gone there without even thinking of the dangers involved? I don’t know. It was a foolish thing to do. A devil must have got into my head!’
For the illegal part of the journey, when she was in danger of arrest, Sveta had been given a dress to wear by her friend Shura, who had made it from the khaki wool material of her old army uniform. ‘The dress saved me,’ Sveta later wrote.
I was trying to avoid the inspectors, who were coming through the carriage checking everybody’s tickets and documents, and had managed to keep my head down and put on the uniform, all the while trying not to catch their eye. But one of them came up to me and said there was something wrong with my ticket, it wasn’t legal, and he wanted to remove me from the train and take me off for
questioning. How would I explain the false ticket? I had no idea whom it belonged to – a man’s name was probably on it, but I was a woman and I did not even know where I was supposedly travelling. Nor could I afford to say where I was actually going. Moreover, I was meant to give the ticket back to the army officer. But then the other passengers, who were all without exception military types and saw me as one of them, came to my defence and started arguing in a friendly manner with the inspector: if there is something wrong, it’s not her fault, they said! And the inspector let me stay.
Sveta travelled as far as Kozhva, a few kilometres from Pechora, where she found the house of Lev Izrailevich, a dug-out in the ground, in which he occupied a ‘tiny room’. His father, from Leningrad, was staying with him – probably the reason he had not been to see Lev at the wood-combine – so sleeping arrangements were cramped. The next day, Izrailevich and Sveta went together to the wood-combine. From the station at Pechora they walked the length of Soviet Street, a dirt-track avenue flanked on either side by eight-apartment wooden houses and ‘sidewalks’ made of planks laid on the ground. They turned into Moscow Street, passing a large white neo-classical structure, the first stone building in the town, which had just been erected for the administration of the North Pechora Railway Labour Camp, recently relocated from Abez. There were guards outside the building but none stopped Sveta or asked to see her papers, even though she must have stuck out as a stranger. From Moscow Street, Izrailevich and Sveta walked past the barracks of the 1st Colony and the motor garage on Garazhnaia (Garage) Street on their way to the main gate of the wood-combine, where they planned to tell the guards that Sveta was the wife of a voluntary worker living in the settlement.
The station at Kozhva, late 1940s.
Security at the wood-combine was in a chaotic state. There were about a hundred guards to patrol the prison zone. Most of them were peasants who, having served in the army, had signed up as guards to avoid going home to their collective farms at the end of the war. Many were illiterate, most were heavy drinkers, and they nearly all took bribes or stole from the prisoners. They also robbed the stores of the wood-combine, especially the stables in the industrial zone and the windmill outside it near the 1st Colony, where at least a dozen guards were involved in a major racket to steal oats and turn them into vodka for sale to the prisoners and free workers. Several tons of oats went missing this way during 1946.
Almost constant drunkenness was the main problem with the guards. The Party archives of the wood-combine are filled with the reports of disciplinary hearings in which guards are reprimanded for ‘being drunk in working hours’, ‘passing out from drunkenness while on duty in the guard-house’, ‘getting drunk and vanishing from work for several days’ and so on. Party leaders all agreed that drunkenness among the guards was the biggest danger to security. Prisoners had walked out of the camp while drunken guards slept in the main guard-house. Others had bribed the guards to let them visit women in the town, offering further bribes to be let back into the barracks zone and counted ‘present’ at lights out. The remote-ness
of Pechora – a thousand kilometres from anywhere but other labour camps – was a prison in itself.
Guards at the wood-combine, late 1940s.
There were also cases of guards taking bribes to let outsiders into the prison zone. A Party meeting at the wood-combine in 1947 reported on several incidents of ‘strangers’ being allowed in without a pass to visit the free workers in the settlement. Once inside the industrial zone, the intruders could escape detection: what little street lighting there was – some seven electric lamps – was meant for production purposes rather than security. There were eight watch-towers with searchlights located around the barbed-wire perimeter fences but three of them were missing bulbs.
Lev Izrailevich and Sveta reached the main gate of the wood-combine without interference. It was a ramshackle affair, barely more secure than the wood and barbed-wire fence on either side of it, with a square frame of plywood boards covered with propaganda slogans and topped by the sign of the labour camp, a hammer and sickle. On the right of the gateway was the guard-house, where everybody entering or leaving the wood-combine was meant to
show their pass to the armed guard on duty. Convoys of prisoners were counted in and out.
When Sveta told the guard that she was the wife of a voluntary worker living in the settlement, he refused to let her in, declaring that her husband had to come for her. Izrailevich, who had a pass, said he would find her ‘husband’ in the zone and bring him to the guard-house. He was gone for a long time. The guard began to talk rudely to Sveta, cursing ‘northern wives’ (women with husbands who were prisoners in the Gulag) in a way that suggested he had guessed her subterfuge. Finally, Izrailevich appeared with the ‘husband’ – dripping wet and clearly drunk – a free worker from the settlement who had been cast in the role of Sveta’s spouse but, when the moment came for his walk-on, had fallen into a drunken sleep and had to be refreshed with a bucket of cold water by Izrailevich. ‘The man looked embarrassed,’ recalled Sveta. ‘To avoid kissing him, I threw myself at him and started cursing: “I wrote to you! And you didn’t even bother to meet me!” And, acting ashamed, he just said: “Let’s go, let’s go!” ’ Before the guard had time to question them, Sveta and her ‘husband’ had passed into the prison zone.
They got to the house where the ‘husband’ lived. It turned out he had a wife, who had not been told about his promise to let Lev meet Sveta there. There was a furious scene as the wife shouted at her man, whose breath smelt heavily of alcohol. ‘It was not jealousy,’ recalled Sveta, ‘but fear that they might be found out and put into prison’ for aiding and abetting Lev and Sveta’s crime. Lev had arrived at the house earlier and hidden outside, waiting for Sveta to arrive. He now appeared in the middle of this scene, anxious to protect Sveta from the angry wife. This cannot have been how they imagined their reunion – in this squalid house with a shouting woman and a drunken man – but that is how it had turned out. For six years they had longed for this moment, yet it was so different from the way they must have pictured it, the two of them together without anything to disturb them. It was a tense and dangerous situation – the wife was so frightened and irate that she might call the guards in an attempt to prove her own innocence – and for the
moment they could only exchange looks across the room. ‘We had to restrain our feelings,’ Lev recalled. ‘It was not the sort of situation where we could throw ourselves at each other. What we were doing was highly illegal and we had to be on guard.’
BOOK: Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag
4.03Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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