Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag (24 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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At the heart of these developments was the notion that the Gulag should function as a parallel civilization to Soviet society, that it should re-educate the prisoners, ‘reforge’ them as Soviet citizens by means of propaganda and cultural activities. The idea of reforming prisoners through work had been central to the founding ideology of the Gulag in the early 1930s. Later in that decade it was largely forgotten, as the focus of the camps became the maximum exploitation and punishment of ‘enemies of the people’. But from the end of the 1940s, as the Gulag bosses looked for ways to motivate the prisoners, they returned to the original idea. In the wood-combine the Party leaders introduced a scheme for teaching prisoners industrial skills. In 1950, they organized a ‘training complex’ on the site of the recently decommissioned 1st Colony on 8 March Street where ‘deserving’ prisoners were trained in geodesy, topography, railway construction and engineering during working hours. The teachers were all former prisoners.
Lev was not chosen for the training, but he had started giving informal lessons to a small group of workers at the power station, including a twenty-three-year-old stoker who came to him for maths and a thirty-year-old fitter, whom he taught a sort of engineering course. The role of teacher suited him. He was kind, approachable and generally liked, so people often came to him for practical advice. And helping others satisfied his need to find a higher purpose in the camp.
Lev was acutely aware of his privileged position in the camp and felt strongly that he ought to use it to help prisoners worse off than himself. For eighteen months he had written to the MVD authorities asking for an address for his poor friend Terletsky. Finally, in July, he learned that Terletsky had been released from the Inta special regime camp and was living in exile in a small village in the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia. Lev wrote to him and sent him money by transfer, but the money came back with a short note stating that ‘financial aid is not needed’. Lev saw this refusal to accept his help as typical of Terletsky’s pride. ‘So he’s undoubtedly still alive, probably healthy and as obstinate as ever,’ he wrote to Sveta. ‘I feel really sorry for him and don’t resent at all that he does not reply. If I could be certain that my letters wouldn’t cause him pain, I would continue writing without his replies. Ah, Liubka, you foolish man! Despite his outstanding intellect he acts like a child sometimes.’
Terletsky in exile in Siberia with Irina Evgenevna Preobrazhenskaya, daughter of the Bolshevik economist Evgenii Preobrazhensky.
Lev was equally concerned about Oleg Popov, the young half-Latvian in the Electrical Group. In February 1948, Popov had been moved to the 3rd Colony, returning two months later clearly traumatized by his experience in the harsh regime of the penal colony, where he had worked in a hauling team. ‘His hands are covered in frostbite, he has lost a lot of weight, and his eyes have a strange look,’ Lev remarked. He was disturbed by the change in his friend’s appearance. ‘After Oleg came to see me, I could think of nothing else,’ he wrote to Sveta. ‘My conscience has been troubled for two reasons: that somehow I may have been partly to blame for his fate,
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and because my own position is incomparably better than his.’
In April 1948, Oleg was sent to a nearby transit camp, where prisoners were being collected for a convoy. Before it left, Lev wrote to him and gave him Sveta’s address. For ten months they heard nothing, but then Oleg wrote to Sveta. He was in a special regime camp in Kos’iu, 100 kilometres north-east of Pechora on the railway line to Vorkuta, breaking stones in a quarry. Conditions in the camp were very bad, he had hurt his hand, but he wanted her to send him books. Worried about him, Lev began to collect money from the other prisoners and sent parcels to Oleg. Sveta also sent him things. Then she started getting letters with requests for the same items she had already sent; some were written in a strange English with mistakes in her address. It turned out that the other prisoners were forcing him to write to her with requests for parcels they would
keep. He had been trying to prevent the fraud by muddling the address.
As soon as Lev began to earn his own money, he saved as much as he could for Oleg. In February, he sent 150 roubles, which Oleg ‘spent on bread’. Sveta was troubled by the news: it was possible, though odd, she thought, that ‘he was allowed to spend such a lot on bread’. Suspecting that he was still being bullied by the other prisoners, she held off on parcels and sent him only small sums of money for the next few months. But Lev found out from another prisoner who had seen Oleg that he was in fact obsessed by bread: having fallen ill from hunger and exhaustion at the quarry, he was spending every rouble that he could on food from the kiosk at Kos’iu. On learning this, Sveta began to send him parcels again, as well as money to buy bread. ‘I received three letters from Oleg,’ she wrote to Lev on 19 July.
He’s feeling a bit more cheerful and has got my parcel, though he’s not allowed to receive any money until the kiosk is restocked – it’s empty at the moment … I can see I’ve planned his parcels badly. Following the path of least resistance, I sent him kasha (he asked for either black bread crusts or the cheapest kasha), but it’s not remotely clear how he’ll cook it. I should have dried some crusts. I sent him another parcel on Sunday with fine-ground barley as well as noodles and cornflakes. I also put a note in the parcel along with 25 roubles. I never thought that was possible but those who send parcels regularly say it is (up to almost 100 roubles) and Oleg wrote that it’s a more reliable method.
Lev continued to worry about Rykalov, still in the infirmary for TB sufferers. ‘It’s not good,’ he told Sveta. ‘He’s feeling dispirited … and is weak. It’s very difficult to get into the infirmary at the moment but I’m going to try to visit him. One more case and I’ll become a fatalist – it’s simply amazing how all the people I like are so unfortunate.’ In 1949, after a number of escapes, the infirmary had been enclosed by a barbed-wire fence, and access was restricted.
Lev told the guards that he needed to check the electrical wiring in the ward – a lie that would have landed him in serious trouble if it had been exposed – and in this way he was able to visit Rykalov on several occasions. The former boxer was extremely ill. ‘I thought it was the end,’ he later wrote to Lev, ‘the illness had broken me and I thought that no one needed me.’ But Lev’s visits lifted his spirits.
Lev contacted Rykalov’s sister in Moscow, and she sent parcels of fresh food and medicine, which Lev brought to him in the infirmary. Rykalov had become so despondent that he thought his nine-year-old son would not want to see him any more. His face had turned yellow from jaundice and he was afraid to return home looking so weak. But Lev persuaded him not to think like that. ‘I’ve stubbornly been making him – and have made him – realize that his son needs him no matter what condition he’s in,’ he explained to Sveta. ‘This means that he must hold out at whatever cost. (Incidentally, I would never be able to convince myself of the same thing.)’
Lev was also doing all he could to help Strelkov. In January, Strelkov suddenly took a turn for the worse, with ‘sharp pains in his bladder’, as Lev explained to Sveta in a letter that revealed much about the treatment of the sick in the Gulag:
His condition is really quite bad. It’s practically impossible to get any kind of effective help here under the current system of medical care. ‘Surgery’ hours, available to everyone, are as a rule handled by somebody who has been educated to a level no higher than that of a feldsher [rural doctor’s assistant] – his methods and treatments are on a par with those in Chekhov’s stories. The so-called medical board – which carries out ‘general supervision’ – is a joke. A couple of doctors see about 200 people an hour on a first-come, first-served basis, assessing them mostly by how they look; the board has no incentive to do anything different and most of the locals have probably never experienced anything else … People are saved only by their body’s defence mechanisms. One detail of G. Y. [Strelkov]’s ‘examination’ shows how attentive the general board is: after he complained of heart problems, a woman began to ‘listen’ to his
heart, having forgotten to ask him not to breathe, while she carried on a conversation with a colleague; after 15 seconds of this she suddenly remembered something and suggested that he get dressed and leave.
In principle, specialists (urologists, neuropathologists, etc.) are supposed to see patients at the clinic from time to time, but people here have been waiting to see them for years and are referred to the clinic only in exceptional circumstances. One of our operators has been complaining of stomach pains for more than a year but was prescribed a ‘treats everything’ hot brick until a month ago, when we had to take him to the infirmary, where he’s currently waiting to see whether he’ll die before or after an operation for advanced cancer …
Treatment at the infirmary is useful only in that it allows for a brief rest – as the doctors are well aware – or for isolating infection. The infirmary limits itself to these two functions except when surgery is required. Then patients are sent to the surgical hospital. It is better than the clinic and staffed with experienced personnel. But its benefits are bestowed only after the physical integrity of the body has already been violated.
G. Y.’s best option might be to get sent to this hospital … But it’s almost impossible to get there from here without being referred for an operation. G. Y. doesn’t have much ‘influence’ among the medical people, despite the enormous services he has rendered to them (from providing their pharmacy with distilled water, which otherwise they would have had to travel 5 km to get, to making speculums). But like any decent person, he’s no good at reminding them about these services, and they easily forget, especially as they don’t worry themselves over other people’s misfortunes.
It’s really distressing to look at G. Y. He has aged a lot over the past year. If he receives no treatment this year, and if you see Valya [Strelkov’s daughter], advise her to be more resolute in her intention [to visit him] this summer. Otherwise she may not get a chance to see her father again. And tell her not to pay any attention to his objections (if he makes any). Even though he never mentions it, I
know he’s still secretly hoping that she’ll come, and, if she doesn’t, he’ll be really upset. So try to talk to her about it, Svetka.
Sveta called on Valya to persuade her to visit her father, but Strelkov’s wife and the rest of her family were opposed to the idea. ‘[Valya’s mother] arrived as I was already getting ready to leave,’ Sveta wrote to Lev.
Her face showed no emotion, she didn’t ask a single question, and she replied vaguely to my hello. I think she is hostile towards me because I’m leading Valya astray by advising her not to wait another 12 years [to visit Strelkov] on top of the 13 that have already been lost. G. Y. didn’t agree before, but he should be persuaded that it’s for the best that she visit soon. However, even if G. Y. were to give his consent, and Valya wanted to go, all her relatives are against it (except for some aunt who lives in Siberia).
Valya did not go to Pechora. Without medicines or proper treatment for his gallstones, Strelkov became very sick. The only pain relief came from a blue spectrum therapeutic light (the Minin reflector, widely used in the Soviet Union), though Lev himself was doubtful that it did much good.
Sveta was helping Lev to deal with all this suffering. She was sending money, food and medicines. Perhaps as a consequence of these efforts to help people worse off than herself, she was better able to keep things in perspective in her own life. ‘I’m not crying any more,’ she wrote to Lev on 25 March. ‘I’m not avoiding people and they don’t irritate me as they used to do.’
She was annoyed, however, when she was called by Aunt Olga, who claimed to be gravely ill. When Sveta arrived at Olga’s communal apartment, she found her ‘walking round her room – which means she’s not dying yet’. Perhaps it was the contrast with the genuine suffering of Strelkov and Rykalov that irritated Sveta. ‘I am no Christian,’ she later wrote to Lev, ‘and I can’t bear theatrics in real life.’
I poured it all out to Mama. She understood my irritation but said that Olga’s theatrics are a human weakness. What can I do if I’m such a harsh person? I promised to go to see Olga during the holidays. Then at 6 in the morning, when I was up to my elbows in washing, tidying up and general housework, Serg. Nik. [‘Uncle Seryozha’] arrived suddenly – it turns out that some neighbour [of Olga] had called him. I didn’t rush over there this time but waited till after lunch. It seems that she’d felt quite well the day before and had decided to do a little ironing and sewing, as a result of which she’d started having heart trouble again. But when I got there, I found her quite cheerful (to judge by her talkativeness). At this point I snapped at her a little – if she’s so ill she should lie down and not do things that are unnecessary. And she shouldn’t complain so much and should remember that hers is not the most terrible and awful illness, that thousands die from cancer and goodness knows what other ailments, with far more suffering.

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