Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag (26 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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‘My darling Sveta, the New Year has started as a continuation of the old,’ Lev wrote on 4 January 1951. ‘We spent New Year’s Eve quietly and modestly in the barrack, where thanks to Lyosha [Anisimov] there was a bushy Christmas tree, which was decorated fairly respectably by a collective effort.’ As they counted 1950 out, Lev was thinking there was one year less until the date of his release.
For the moment, as he struggled with the minus-40 temperatures of January, Lev could think of little else except Sveta. ‘My darling,’ he wrote on the 13th,
I still haven’t sent you the letter from yesterday but once again I’m drawn towards paper – for no particular reason, just to find a place to write your name: there’s no room left for it inside my head, where I’ve been repeating it incessantly in every intonation and in every permissible and impermissible grammatical form … I’ve tried to busy myself more with work so as not to think so much about Your Ladyship, and I’ve managed fairly well – so there you go.
There was a lot of work for Lev to do at the power station. Two German ‘reparation generators’
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had turned up in Pechora unexpectedly, ‘probably en route for somewhere else’, Lev supposed, and he was involved in fitting one of them to supplement the output of the power station at the wood-combine. The second generator was being fitted at the power station in the town. The rapidly developing industries of Pechora urgently required more electricity.
Before 1951, the wood-combine had provided much of the town’s needs, even though it was itself buying in supplies of electricity from Cheliabinsk, because the power station in Pechora was too small to meet demand. There were frequent struggles over energy between the town (where the Gulag bosses wanted constant heat and light for the comfort of their homes) and the wood-combine (where fuel was needed to fulfil the production plan). The arrival of the German generators would relieve the wood-combine ‘of the need to feed the town,’ as Lev explained to Sveta on 7 April, ‘so there will be fewer conflicts, because without the new engines power-cuts would become unavoidable’.
Meanwhile the power station was closed down for three weeks of repairs following an accident in January. The wood-combine fell behind the plan for the first quarter of the year. In heated arguments the bosses of the labour camp sought to blame one another for the failures, which could bring the wrath of the MVD in Moscow down upon them all. When energy supplies were finally restored, production was ramped up in a desperate attempt to make up for lost time, but this only led to further accidents and stoppages. On 9 May, the ‘safety officer’ of the wood-combine reported no fewer than twenty-nine ‘serious accidents’ – with thirty-six fatalities –since the beginning of the year: safety regulations were ignored and there was ‘chaos’ everywhere, he said. A dozen men were killed in the 5th Colony when a lorry carrying seventy men to work skidded on ice and overturned. Two men in the 3rd were crushed to death by timbers falling from a railway truck. ‘We’re living and functioning just the same as always,’ Lev wrote sarcastically on 10 June.
For many of our uncles [MVD bosses], the construction project is a kind of game. The managers energe from their offices once a week or so and arrive in their cars (a journey of 1 km), have a walk around and shout: why the hell is it going so slowly?! Nothing is getting done! – something along those lines but in more pungent language. Nobody gives any practical instructions, such as how exactly to
speed things up. The uncles of a slightly lower rank stand around looking interested, now and then making helpful comments that are too imprecise to apply and so are pointless. None of the engineering managers take the trouble to think about the cause of the problems (the main one – unfortunately unfixable – being that they didn’t think the project through when they should have), and all of them apparently consider that the very fact of their visit has given us the necessary supervision and assistance. Ah, those good-for-nothings!
Seven of these ‘good-for-nothings’ were sacked in April and later arrested after being found guilty of mass theft and fraud by a special MVD inquiry. They had stolen and sold off privately 8,000 metres of rigging gear, 200 kilograms of tomatoes, seven boxes of butter, six of sausage and fifty-seven mattresses. Responding to the scandal,  the Party leaders of the wood-combine resolved to be more vigilant.
One of the first victims of the new campaign was Boris Arvanitopulo, the head of the power station, with whom Sveta had stayed on her visits in 1948 and 1949. Arvanitopulo had a history of trouble with the authorities. In March 1950, he had been hauled before the Party leaders of the wood-combine and given a ‘severe reprimand’ (
strogii vygovor
) for ‘distancing himself from the responsibilities of management’, that is, for fraternizing with the prisoners and sometimes getting drunk with them. Arvanitopulo was reprimanded six more times the next year, once for ‘accommodating unauthorized persons’ in his home (possibly a reference to Sveta), and in January 1951 he was blamed for the accident at the power station. Now he was charged with the ‘theft of socialist property’. He had paid for a wardrobe to be made for his wife, Vera, in the furniture workshop and had tried to smuggle it out of the industrial zone by bribing one of the guards with 300 roubles. There were calls for him to be sacked and sent before the People’s Court. The Party chairman and deputy director of the wood-combine, Zotikov Serditov, wrote a formal denunciation to the MVD in Moscow, and Arvanitopulo was dismissed. He continued to live with his family in Pechora but went in
search of work in other towns, where he was unwanted, because of the black mark against his name. Lev felt bad about it all. ‘It is a catastrophe,’ he wrote to Sveta. ‘Vera cannot feed and bring up their two children as she should. It’s true she has a trade – she is a cook –but how she is to manage is not clear (though it is too early to talk about that yet) … Boris is holding up but Vera (whose greed caused all this) cries all the time.’
Arvanitopulo was not the only member of the administration to have close associations with the prisoners. Vladimir Novikov, the head of production, was often seen playing dominoes in the barracks, and Ivan Serpunin, the chief economist, counted many prisoners among his friends. A group photograph of the administration’s members at around this time shows a combination of MVD and Party officials, voluntary workers and prisoners. The striking thing about the photograph is how relaxed everyone looks. Despite their different ranks in the Gulag system, there is no real hierarchy in their seating arrangement and little sign of tension among them. The MVD director of the wood-combine appears at ease in the centre of the group with prisoners sitting at his feet and standing in a cluster behind his back.
The administration of the wood-combine, 1950. Novikov (second from right) Serpunin (second from left) and the MVD director of the wood-combine, Boris Popov (third from left), are in the middle row. The three men on the right of the front row and the six in the centre of the back row are all prisoners.
From 1951, the camp’s security began to fall apart. Whether it was because of the growing intermingling between officials and prisoners, the greater opportunities for bribery or the massive increase in the supply of vodka is hard to tell. No doubt all these factors played a role. At a Party meeting on 6 June 1951, the commander of the guards, Ivan Koval’chuk, revealed that there had been twenty-seven individual and group escapes by prisoners in the previous three months. There were even cases where the guards – bribed with a litre of vodka for each man – had helped prisoners to escape. Some prisoners got out by jumping on to railway wagons leaving the industrial zone; others simply walked out the gates while the guards were drunk or got past them by threatening them with knives, saws and blades.
Security was particularly bad in the 2nd Colony, where Lev was a prisoner. Koval’chuk had uncovered a conspiracy of forty prisoners planning a group escape. Although the guards had known about the plan, they had done nothing to punish the conspirators. To complicate matters, a large contingent of the prisoners was on strike. They would not turn out for roll call but stayed in their barracks playing cards. They were not intimidated by the guards, who were mostly peasant boys, lamented Koval’chuk, ‘many of them hostile to the MVD themselves’. If not sympathetic to the prisoners, the guards were nevertheless unopposed to their offers of cash, a drink of vodka or a sexual favour from a female prisoner.
On 25 April, the Party leaders of the wood-combine discussed a planned uprising that had been discovered in the 2nd Colony. A group of prisoners intended to start a fire in the workshops on 1 May to facilitate a mass escape, on the assumption that the guards would all be drunk on the May Day holiday. The Party leaders took
charge of security. They told themselves that the uprising was political, linked to the Cold War. ‘Our enemies in the camp are expecting a new war,’ one of them declared. ‘They are following international events and rejoice that they have allies abroad.’ On 1 May, the entire membership of the Party in the camp (twenty-five full members and twenty members of the Komsomol) was mobilized; given guns, they were posted in the workshops inside the industrial zone. For the prisoners, 1 May was a normal working day, and it passed without incident. They must have been aware of the tightening of security and decided to abort the uprising. But, as they had expected, many of the guards got drunk. In the evening there was a brawl among the guards in the club-house.
Sveta spent May Day marching to Red Square with her colleagues from the institute. ‘We had a lot of fun,’ she wrote to Lev. It had poured and they all ‘got drenched’.
People were singing: ‘Pour cold water over yourself if you want to be healthy’ and ‘Become as hard as steel’.
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I passed through Red Square at 2.30 but there was such a downpour at 2.45, when I was on Maroseika, that the demonstration had to be brought to an end. I walked home in water up to my ankles (my shoes are still not completely dry). People were laughing that the toe holes in their sandals were designed to let the water out. A hailstorm broke over part of the city. Large hailstones covered the ground by the institute and stayed there for 3 or 4 hours.
What was Sveta thinking as she marched past Stalin on Red Square that afternoon? Did she even look towards the Soviet leaders on top of the Lenin Mausoleum waving to the masses marching past? Did she ever think about Stalin? Or about the system that had taken Lev from her? There is very little about politics in Sveta’s letters. It is clear that she does not like bureaucracy or its jargonistic prose. She is scornful about ‘Diamat’ (Dialectical Materialism), which she is
forced to study at the institute; is troubled by the purges in the scientific world and the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign against the Jews; and is very wary of the MVD, whose agents bother her from time to time with questions about Lev (having intercepted at least one of Sveta’s telegrams from her trips to Pechora, they were surely watching her). Yet she takes an active part in politics and public life. She volunteers for election work in the district soviet. She represents her institute at trade union conferences. She is a member of the Communist Party and writes reports for Party meetings in the institute. For someone in her senior position – engaged in a research project with military significance – it was, of course, expected that she demonstrate her loyalty through such political activities. Not to do so would have drawn attention to herself. But, judging from her letters, Sveta carried out these duties to the Party in the same conscientious manner as she did her research work: there was no divorce between them in her professional identity. Despite all her doubts, she believed in the socialist ideal of progress through science and technology, including the propaganda message of the Great Construction Projects of Communism built by Gulag labourers.
Like millions of other Soviet citizens, Sveta lived in a dual world of belief and doubt. In her public life she was a functionary of the Soviet system; her research on tyre production was important to the military-industrial complex, which also rested on the exploitation of prisoners like Lev. But in her private life, emotionally, she identified completely with these prisoners, and tried to ease their suffering by sending money, food and medicines. The tension between these two modes of consciousness must have caused her some anxiety. A week or so before she took part in the May Day celebrations on Red Square, Sveta had dreamed about Lev. The dream disturbed her because it was so exact a picture of his circumstances in the labour camp – conditions that she knew were terrible. ‘Levi,’ she wrote on 23 April, ‘conscience and grief are gnawing away at me.’

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