Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag (28 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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Lev, meanwhile, was struggling to survive his sixth winter in Pechora. Once again the labour camp was unprepared for the cold. There were power-cuts. Many of the barracks in Lev’s colony were badly in need of repair. Prisoners were languishing in the infirmary following a flu and scurvy epidemic, for which there were no medicines or necessary vitamins. The doctors could not cope. Between 120 and 130 prisoners (roughly 10 per cent of the prison population of the wood-combine) reported sick each day in January 1952. Lev visited the hospital to see a number of his bunk-mates from the barracks. ‘There isn’t enough food or ascorbic acid,’ he reported to Sveta, ‘so people are quite weak.’ Hepatitis was equally widespread. Konon Tkachenko spent eight months in the infirmary with a severe strain of it. ‘He is barely recognizable – just yellow skin on bones,’ Lev wrote to Sveta, who had brought him the condensed milk. ‘He can hardly move or talk.’ Strelkov too succumbed to hepatitis – a further complication to the gallstones and liver disease that had made him so ill for the past few years – though he gradually got better by eating vegetables grown on the ‘collective farm’. By 1952, Strelkov was living on a diet of green cabbage and vegetable oil.
47
Every year, Lev wrote to Sveta on 8 March to congratulate her on International Women’s Day. In 1952, he sent his greetings late, on 12 March, but his letter was a special one. All the most important people in his life had been women – his grandmother, his aunts, Sveta, to whom he wrote with reverence and gratitude:
Svetlaya, my darling, I haven’t yet sent you my congratulations for the 8th March, though nobody deserves the honour more than you. Actually, modesty probably holds you back from acknowledging that any special reverence is due on this occasion. I, on the other hand, am completely unhindered in this regard and without fear of admonishment can confess how very glad I am that the female sex exists on this earth. I’m full of the highest respect for you all, higher than my respect for mankind in general. It’s difficult to put this feeling into words if one lacks the talent since it inevitably ends up sounding like empty rhetoric, but I would like to try nonetheless, even after Nekrasov.
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Because in my life, from early childhood on, the good people to whom I owe the most have been women. I’m still tortured by the awareness that I will never be able to repay not only those who took care of me without any thought for themselves, like my grandmother, but also those who served as models of humanity, combining kindness with fortitude in all life’s trials, quiet wisdom with lively humour in their perception of reality, tirelessness at work with a constancy of affection.
There have been so many women in my life whose qualities I admire that no number of negative examples, either observed at first hand or reported, could change my views. It’s true that for every good person in the world there are several bad ones, but there is so much that is wonderful in that one person that it makes up for all
the bad in the others. I can’t think of those women – my grandmother Lydia Konstantinovna, her sister, Aunt Liza, Eliz[aveta] Al[eksandrovna] [Uncle Nikita’s wife], Aunt Lelya and many others –without the most profound reverence. How much sadness Lydia Konstantinovna endured, how many misfortunes that could have crushed her and destroyed her spiritual strength. How much fortitude she must have summoned to avoid succumbing to despair, to remain magnanimous and spiritually pure while keeping a clear head and continuing to support those without the strength to withstand such difficulties on their own. How many women there are like that! Women like my grandmother. And how much darkness there would be in the world if they did not exist! Sveta, do I really need to tell you that I see in you the qualities of all the finest women I have ever known.
My darling, dear Sveta.
From the spring of 1952, the population of the wood-combine began to decline. Prisoners were starting to be released in significant numbers as their sentences came to an end, and there were no more mass arrests to replace them. This was a nationwide phenomenon. The Gulag system was slowly shutting down. As a result of these departures the web of friends and relatives connecting the remaining prisoners to supporters in the outside world expanded in size and importance. Once returned to society, newly released prisoners could help those left inside the camps. These informal networks were equally essential to the many prisoners who had no family, no home or no job to which they could return on their release. Former prisoners were usually barred from living in the larger towns, where it was feared they might demoralize the population with their disaffected views, so they needed help from relatives and friends to find places to settle and money until they could find work.
In March 1952, Rykalov came to the end of his eight-year sentence and left for Moscow, where his sister led a ‘family council’ to decide where and how he ought to live. His health was poor; he had not fully recovered from TB. Lev asked Sveta to help him:
He has only one lung and even then not a whole one. He walks with difficulty, becomes severely out of breath and feels very weak. He’s thinking of moving to Kyrgyzstan (though he’s not sure about the climate) or perhaps to northern Kazakhstan. His personal affairs, aside from his relationship with his mother and sisters, don’t make him very happy. He didn’t tell me the details, there wasn’t time, and a telephone conversation doesn’t lend itself to candour, but he has promised to write. If he has time, he’d like to call and see you. I told him that he shouldn’t make a special effort, since every kilometre costs him dearly; but I promised on your behalf that if you were feeling well enough you would go and visit him yourself.
Ten days later, Sveta had not heard from Rykalov. He had disappeared. ‘Maybe it’s too early,’ she wrote to Lev on 26 March, ‘I’ll try to find him tomorrow or the day after … I think his sister is called Marusia. I’ll have to guess the flat but I definitely remember the building and staircase.’
Anisimov was the next to be released. ‘Lyoshka has received his clearance papers,’ Lev wrote to Sveta on 5 March. ‘It will be boring without him. Of all our contemporaries here, he is the only one –after Liubka [Terletsky] – with whom I can have a really interesting conversation.’ Anisimov was a Muscovite.
If he manages to overcome his shyness he’ll drop in to see you for some tea on his way through [to his place of settlement beyond Moscow]. He’s a fine fellow, as I’ve told you more than once, straightforward and sensible, but when he’s with people he doesn’t know he becomes very shy and reticent. He loves drinking tea with raspberry jam (I’m telling you that in confidence).
Anisimov departed on 12 March. Lev was worried that he would be too embarrassed to visit Sveta in the shabby clothes of a newly released prisoner. Anisimov arrived in Moscow on 16 March and wrote to Sveta from the Yaroslavl station to say that he was unable
to see her as he had the flu and a stomach ache. Sveta had made jam for him. ‘If I’d known he was sitting at the station, I could have gone there myself. Ifs and buts,’ she wrote. ‘Maybe he’ll manage to come when the weather is a bit warmer.’ She kept the jam on the sideboard, but Anisimov did not appear. Five months later he wrote to Lev with an explanation: ‘I got to the station, sat down on a bench for an hour and a half, said farewell [to Moscow] and went on my way.’ Anisimov was a qualified engineer but his status as a former prisoner made it hard for him to find a job, except as a fitter in a factory, so instead he looked for casual work as a repairman.
As the exodus of prisoners increased, the labour camp began to fall into decline. ‘More and more people are leaving,’ Lev wrote. ‘Because of shortages of raw materials the profitability of the wood-combine has dropped and the staff must be reduced. Sadly, it’s those who work badly who are still here.’ Everywhere the story was the same: labour shortages and inefficiencies, falling productivity and mounting expenses, mainly for guarding prisoners, who became more rebellious the harder they had to work. The economics of the Gulag system no longer made sense. By 1953, the MVD was spending twice as much on the upkeep of the Gulag as it received in revenue from the camps’ output. Several senior MVD officials were seriously questioning the effectiveness of forced labour. There was even talk of dismantling sections of the Gulag and reclassifying the prisoners as partially civilian workers. But Stalin was a firm supporter of the Gulag system, and none of these ideas was seriously proposed.
The decline of the Gulag system was clearly visible at the wood-combine. The Party archives of 1952 are dominated by discussions of waste and inefficiency, thefts, riots and refusals to work by prisoners who had not been paid. In the first half of 1952, more than 5,000 man-days had been lost, and only 60 per cent of the plan had been fulfilled. The administration responded by pushing the prisoners even harder, extending their shifts to fourteen hours, or forcing them to work when they were ill. The only results were more riots, strikes and slowdowns, and more losses of able-bodied men. Three
group escapes from the wood-combine were attempted (two of them successful) in the first six months of 1952.
Physically the place was showing signs of degradation. For years, little had been done to clear the labour camp of scraps of wood, bark, sawdust, bricks and rigging that were piled high around the saw-mill and workshops. Some of it was burned in bonfires on the frozen river in winter, but the rest remained as a fire hazard. During his first years in the labour camp, Lev had noticed occasional signs of beauty around him. By 1952, these were gone. ‘Objectively,’ he wrote, ‘little beauty remains in our area. It’s all been built over, ruined by piles of rubbish and hacked down. In summertime there are no flowers or berries as there were three years ago, and you can’t even see the grass. All that’s left is the sky.’
Ever since he had come to Pechora, Lev had looked towards the sky. It was his only escape from the camp. He found beauty in the northern lights and the vast expanse of stars. ‘Nature has blessed this meagre Komi land with a beautiful, not just colourful, and breathtaking sky!’, Lev wrote to Sveta on 12 August.
Lingering sunsets, extending into even longer twilights full of such magical colours and effects that it’s impossible to tear yourself away – you stand, head thrown back, until your teeth begin to chatter from the cold (autumn can already be felt). Today was cloudy and miserably grey. But in the evening the dull eastern clouds suddenly transformed themselves into such an intense, opaque blue that even the serene blue of the Caucasian mountains would probably have been envious. Then, after half an hour, the sun, already retiring over the horizon, suddenly sought out a delicate slit in the middle of the storm clouds and poured through it with such a vivid orange blaze that all the pines in its path suddenly began to glow –not with a red but with a pale yellow-green warmth. I’ve never seen anything like it – they were no longer trees but radiant silhouettes against a brilliant flame; and the smoke from the chimney that whirled among them, awash with the tenderest of tones and the colourless glassy undulation of the air, made them seem alive. The
stars have emerged from their summer hibernation,
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and I am grateful for this too.
The sky was the one aspect of the world that he could look at and imagine that Sveta was looking at as well. He would gaze at it when he longed for her.
In 1952, a new brick chimney was built at the power station. After it was finished, the bosses realized that they had forgotten to record its height, and called for volunteers to climb to the top with a measuring rope. Lev and Sergei Skatov, a stoker at the plant, climbed the stack by the small iron handles sunk into the brick and sat together on the narrow lip of the chimney top. They were almost 40 metres from the ground. Facing south, they looked out over the river and the pine forests, stretching as far as the eye could see towards Moscow. It was the first time in almost seven years that Lev had glimpsed the world beyond the labour camp. He recalled the episode:
I wanted to find out what was outside, around the camp, how the river flowed, where it went, and what lay past it. We sat there for a while and then climbed down. As soon as I put my feet back on the ground, I felt a sharp pain in my back. It was a sciatica attack. I collapsed. If it had struck a few moments earlier, I would have been finished.
However profound their mutual trust and commitment, Lev and Sveta were vulnerable to enormous stresses at any breach of routine or communication. For the first year since 1947, Sveta failed to visit Lev in 1952. She had planned to come at the end of a work trip to Omsk and Kirov in June but had returned to Moscow because she needed treatment for her hives. The trip was rescheduled for September, but her mother Anastasia became ill, and Sveta needed to look after her. ‘Mama still isn’t any better,’ she wrote on 19 July. ‘If there’s no one standing over her, making her eat, she’ll stop eating
and become worse again. It will be difficult for me to get away for a while and Mama should be taken somewhere later on as well.’ Lev replied on 6 August:
I really think you should cancel your trip north this year. Even if you were in full health it would require more effort than usual since you have so many demands on your time and you can’t possibly do everything. You need to look after your mother and go somewhere with her, you need to get better yourself, you need to try to coordinate your holiday leave with Irina [Krauze]’s. And it’s complicated sorting out holidays at work, with yours and M. A. [Tsydzik]’s. Sveta, maybe we can somehow wait out the rest of this year?

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