Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag (29 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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Sveta spent the summer accompanying her mother to various surgeries and hospitals. In August, Anastasia was diagnosed with spinal osteoarthritis. She cried constantly and could not sleep at night. Then, in September, it was said she had TB. Anastasia took to what she believed was her death-bed, leaving Sveta to look after both her mother and her father, Aleksandr, who was sick with an undiagnosed liver ailment. ‘Papa has lost a lot of weight (4 kilograms this summer),’ Sveta wrote on 28 September, ‘and has pains in his side.’ From July to October, Sveta was run off her feet, coming home from work to attend to her parents, dashing between home and the hospital, where her father had gone for tests, shopping for the family and writing to Lev late at night, by which time she was exhausted and in tears. Her letters read like medical reports.
Even in October she was still hoping to find time to visit Lev. But he again dissuaded her. ‘I think it will be hard for you to take a holiday, ’ he wrote on 20 October, ‘if you are not sure about your mother … It would be best to wait until she’s better and then take a proper holiday and do something like skiing, which will help you to relax. In any case, don’t use it to come here. Everything this year is against us – your health and your mother’s and the time of year.’ Four days later he wrote to his Aunt Katya to tell her his concern: ‘Sveta wrote that you had promised to visit her on Sunday, but you
didn’t come. She was worried that you may be ill, but she could not come herself, because her mother’s sick. Things are very difficult for them at home.’
In November, Sveta at last took time off: she spent all of it at home, looking after her mother. ‘My holiday is going very quickly,’ she wrote to Lev on 8 November. ‘A week has gone by, a quarter of my time already. That is bad. Mama is getting used to having me around. Yesterday she complained that I had forgotten her, because I was away for a while. And today, when she woke up, she asked me not to go anywhere. She is just like a small child.’
The longer Lev went without Sveta, the more he saw her in his dreams. ‘I miscalculated, Sveta,’ he wrote on 24 December. ‘There was no letter from you today. I’ve started dreaming about you again, frequently, but my dreams don’t bring me any joy, because the feelings that come with them are so depressing and I can’t rid myself of them after I wake up.’ Three days later, he wrote again:
When I put aside my books and papers and, having closed my eyes, expel from my head all thoughts of electric fields, centrifugal regulators and coherent rotations, I see you. I see you so clearly that my throat gets dry and I want to take your hands and weep, burying my face in them and lamenting that you are so far away. I see your red knitted jacket (which you don’t even have any more), a strand of hair struggling free by your cheek, the speckles in your eyes and your moist eyelids. I see every detail of the lines on your palms resting in your lap. I want to tell you again and again that there is nobody better than you, that one thought of you eclipses everything for me, makes everything else seem trivial and insignificant.
Lev spent another New Year’s Eve with the usual group of friends in Strelkov’s laboratory. He wrote to Sveta about it on 2 January:
The frosts have been unmerciful here all week, from minus 42 down to minus 47 degrees, and the workshops aren’t in operation. Being outside without mittens is impossible for more than a minute or
two. The sparrows are freezing. One of them has warmed himself up in our barrack and has been living here for two days now. He’s a jolly little thing. We saw the New Year in with G. Y. [Strelkov], just the three of us, since Tall N. [Litvinenko] is still in the hospital and K. [Tkachenko] was fearful of the cold and didn’t come. Valya sent G. Y. a fine pipe, tobacco and a cap. I was just as pleased for him as he was for himself. It really cheered him up.
Lev had not received a letter from Sveta for three weeks. His dreams were becoming more anxious. ‘Svetloe, it’s so dreary without your letters,’ he wrote on 6 January.
I’ve seen you in my dreams for three nights in a row. I dreamed that we were delivering some equipment to your institute and you’d arrived to receive it but I wasn’t able to say anything to you, and then I couldn’t find you, you’d already gone, apparently; and all that was left behind was your signature on the delivery receipt. But then it turned out that the signature wasn’t even yours.
Another week passed without a letter from Sveta. On 10 January, Lev wrote:
Svetka, why aren’t you writing to me? There are so many things I start to think when your letters stop coming – oh, so many – and the most rational logic, which in rare moments I still seem to be capable of, is unable to disprove the most illogical assumptions, especially as not everything in life is logical. It doesn’t need to be much – just two lines.
And three days later:
The post comes tomorrow; I now wait for these days with something like a low dose of despair whereas before, after every one of those days I used to think – well that’s all right, today’s drawing to a close but perhaps there’ll be a letter tomorrow.
Lev’s worst fear was that Sveta had abandoned him. In fact, she had been away on a work trip to Sverdlovsk and Omsk that had lasted longer than she had anticipated because of problems at the tyre factories. She had been so busy that she had not found the time to write even a short note. Finally, she wrote to Lev on her return to Moscow on 18 January:
I don’t know why, but I don’t find it easy at all to write 2 lines. In fact it’s easier for me to write a long letter, although it takes me longer. My work trip was meant to last 7 days (of which 5 were purely travel) but I think I wrote to tell you that. And even though I thought that a week was nothing to worry about, I still took envelopes and paper with me and carried them around with the aim of writing, but somehow I didn’t get around to it … As so often happens, you make up your mind to do something the next day, but then when ‘tomorrow’ comes, you find yourself working even harder, and you tell yourself you’ll do it in 3 or 4 days … The only thing I took comfort from was that you wouldn’t be angry with me as long as you love me. That’s one of the privileges of love, that you can do stupid things. All the same, I’m sorry. I was trying so hard to be good … When I got home and read your letters, I just wanted to cry, but I had nowhere and no time to cry.
Lev replied on 27 January:
My dear darling Svetloe, forgive me – again. I know myself that the business with the letters is all down to my foolishness. My dear Svet, my love, I lost my head, I just didn’t know what to do with myself or what to do in general; I just knew that I shouldn’t howl or get angry, but there was still everything else – anxiety for you, the fear that you might not love me any more, my longing for you, more anxiety, then jealousy, anger at myself for my stupidity, the desire to complain to you about it all. None of it would submit to my self-control, until I almost reached the point of despair … I’m ashamed to write it, Sveta, but I thought – forgive me, my dear Svet – that maybe it
wasn’t because of lack of time that you were finding it difficult to write. But Svetka, Svetinka, I still didn’t know anything: I didn’t know how long you planned to be away – you probably forgot to mention your schedule to me and I was only able to work out that your trip should end in December, since that had been the plan back in 1952; and I didn’t know about the problems in Sverdlovsk or about the situation in O[msk]. Obviously in principle I could have guessed all that, and I did, in fact, in my more sensible moments. But what can I do when these are so few?
Sveta, my darling, it pains me that I almost reduced you to tears, but that can’t be altered now, as much as I want to have behaved better.
I got your letter dated the 18th an hour ago just as I was leaving work. Sveta, I’ll write to you about everything else later on, although there’s not much at the moment. My darling Sveta. We’ll try to make sure that everything will be all right with us, won’t we?
Stalin died on 5 March 1953. He had suffered a stroke and lay unconscious for five days before he died. His illness was reported in the Soviet press only on 4 March. ‘How unexpected the news report was,’ Lev wrote to Sveta two days later. ‘On such occasions the impotence of modern medicine becomes tragically clear. It’s only when important people are affected that the impossibility of preserving human health a little longer than nature will allow becomes fully evident.’
Stalin’s death was announced to the public on 6 March. Until the funeral, three days later, his body lay in state in the Hall of Columns near Red Square. Huge crowds came to pay their respects. The centre of the capital was mobbed by tearful mourners, who had travelled to Moscow from all corners of the Soviet Union. Hundreds were killed in the crush. The loss of Stalin was an emotional shock for the Soviet people. For nearly thirty years – the most traumatic in their country’s history – they had lived in his shadow. Stalin was their moral reference point – their teacher, guide, paternal protector, their national leader and saviour against the enemy, their guarantor of justice and order (‘There is always Stalin,’ Lev’s Aunt Olga used to say when some injustice had occurred). The people’s grief was a natural reaction to the disorientation they were bound to feel upon his death, almost regardless of their experience under his regime. Even Stalin’s victims felt sorrow.
Like everybody else, Lev and Sveta heard the news on the radio on 6 March. In a state of fearful shock and excitement, neither could say what they really felt. ‘The death of Stalin was so unexpected,’ Lev wrote on 8 March, ‘that it was hard at first to believe that it could be true. The feeling was the same as in the first days of the war.’ He had nothing more to add about the momentous news,
although he must have hoped that it might lead to a change in policy towards the labour camps and possibly to his early release. Sveta, too, was guarded, although she could not conceal her joy that they had been united by the radio at this possibly life-changing moment. ‘There has never been anything like there was in Moscow this past week,’ she wrote to Lev on 11 March. ‘And many times I thought how good it is that the radio was invented so people can hear the same things at the same time. And it’s also good that there are newspapers. I’ll try to tell you more sometime, but not now because I need to think about how to say what I feel in a few clear words.’
The one place where the death of Stalin was welcomed with undisguised rejoicing was in the Gulag’s labour camps and colonies. There were, of course, exceptions, camps where the vigilance of the authorities or the presence of informers prevented prisoners from showing their happiness, but generally the news of Stalin’s end was greeted with spontaneous outbursts of joy. ‘No one cried for Stalin,’ Lev recalled. The prisoners had no doubt that Stalin was to blame for their misery, and were not afraid to express their contempt for him when it was safe to do so. Lev recalled an incident from October 1952 when the prisoners in his barracks were listening to a radio broadcast of the results of the election to the Presidium of the Central Committee. The votes received by the candidates were read out in turn, and after each the announcer said: ‘Za Stalina! Za Stalina!’ (‘Long Live Stalin!’). Some of the prisoners began to chant instead ‘Zastavili! Zastavili!’ (‘They were forced!’), meaning that the vote was rigged. Everyone joined in and enjoyed the joke.
Among the prisoners it was commonly assumed that they would be freed on Stalin’s death. On 27 March, the government announced an amnesty for prisoners serving sentences of up to five years, those convicted of economic crimes, men over fifty-five, women over fifty, and convicts with incurable diseases – a dispensation that would lead to the release of about one million prisoners in the next few months. At the wood-combine the amnesty halved the prison population (from 1,263 to 627) during 1953. Most of those released were criminals. They went on a rampage, looting stores, robbing
houses, raping women and spreading terror throughout the town. ‘Some of our people are already out and wandering at will in Pechora,’ Lev wrote to Sveta on 10 April.
They are taking every chance to rob and steal. The worst types are going free. Makarov, a fine-looking fellow with a beard … He has served 8 years for armed robbery. Kolya Nezhinsky is also leaving –he got ten years when he was already here in 1947 for stealing 6 kg of kasha. Then last year he stole 300 roubles from one of the men and pilfered bit by bit what he could from N. and his other neighbours. Despite all that, one can only pity him for the stupidity and injustice of his original sentence, without which he might not have become a thief.
Lev was hopeful that the amnesty would be extended to ‘politicals’. Some of the technicians at the power station had been encouraged by the MVD to apply for their release. They had all been sentenced under Article 58-11 (belonging to an anti-Soviet organization), a clause not as serious as Lev’s, though close enough in kind to give him hope that if they were covered by the amnesty he might be freed as well. He was soon disappointed. ‘It turned out,’ he wrote to Sveta on 14 April, ‘that it was all a mistake by the local guards. There’ll be no widening of the amnesty … Such a cruel mistake! People already had their hopes up, and their families were expecting their release.’
The reduction of the prison population resulted in a chronic shortage of labour at the wood-combine. Without enough prisoners to cut and haul the timber, the supply of fuel and raw materials declined dramatically. The administration of the labour camp, transferred from the Gulag to the Ministry of Transport in May 1953, tried to make up for the loss of manpower by keeping newly freed prisoners in Pechora. The MVD officials who oversaw the release of prisoners employed various strategies: they denied them exit papers, refused to give them money for train tickets or warned they would not be able to find work elsewhere and instead proposed
incentives for them to stay on as hired labourers. Some were offered training to replace the skilled workers, craftsmen and technicians released by the amnesty. By the end of the year, 224 former prisoners were being trained as drivers, carpenters, machine-operators, mechanics and electricians (Lev was involved in preparing some of them to take over shift work at the power station). But despite these efforts there was a sharp decline in productivity at the wood-combine. The plan was not fulfilled, wages and rations were reduced, and free workers disappeared in search of better conditions at other labour camps (which were experiencing similar problems). ‘Here in Pechora there are general cut-backs,’ Lev wrote, ‘and people don’t know what to do with themselves, especially those who have a mackintosh in their baggage [i.e., former prisoners].’
50
The newly released prisoners who returned home did indeed have a difficult time finding work. Soviet officials were generally mistrustful of former prisoners, and many employers continued to regard them with suspicion as potential troublemakers and ‘enemies of the people’. The problem of unemployment was so acute that some ex-prisoners ended up returning to the labour camps. Without family or friends to help them back on their feet, they had little choice. The camp was the only place they could be sure of getting work, as free or semi-free workers (who were paid a wage but not allowed to leave the settlement). By July 1953, there were more than 100 former prisoners employed as semi-free workers in the wood-combine; by the end of 1954, that number had risen to 459. Many lived in the barracks of the former 1st Colony just outside the fence of the industrial zone. They were paid about 200 roubles a month, a minimum wage without the ‘northern bonus’ to attract free workers to the Arctic zone, but they received it only if they reported twice a week to the administration of the labour camp. One such worker was Pavel Bannikov, a prisoner from Lev’s barrack who returned to the wood-combine after he failed to find a job in
the Moscow area. ‘[Bannikov] has been back with us for four days now,’ Lev wrote to Sveta. ‘He sees it as a temporary stopping point and plans to leave again in the autumn in search of something better. He told me his impressions of Moscow, which were interesting, both as a reminder of details sanctified by memory and as a portrait of the new.’
Bannikov had been to see Sveta. She put up many prisoners who came to Moscow after their release from Pechora. Lev would give them her address and alert her with a request to help them in the capital. ‘Darling Svetloe,’ he wrote on 12 June, ‘Konon Sidorovich [Tkachenko] perhaps told you – but if not, then I surely did – that Vitaly Ivanovich Kuzora would visit you. So here he is. He is very orderly, and modest too. I don’t know how things in Moscow will work out. He might need putting up for a night or two. It is inconvenient, I know, especially at the moment: but this won’t go on for much longer, another year and a half at the most.’ It must have been frustrating for Sveta to receive these strangers from the camp when Lev still had eighteen months of his sentence left to serve. She had not seen him for two years, their longest separation since their reunion in 1946.
It was not just prisoners who slept on the Ivanovs’ floor. Many of the free workers who had helped Lev and Sveta stayed with her when they came to Moscow. In the more relaxed conditions after Stalin’s death, travel was generally easier and these workers’ wages had increased significantly with the addition of ‘northern bonuses’ to keep them at the labour camp. Stanislav Yakhovich, the Polish mechanic at the power station who had smuggled letters in and out of the industrial zone for Lev, was planning to pass through Moscow on his way back to Pechora from a holiday in the Crimea. ‘He’d like to take advantage of a mattress and a couple of square metres of floor space for 8 hours of the day,’ Lev wrote. ‘He’ll let you know by postcard what day he’s going to arrive. If you’ve forgotten him, he’s easy to recognize by his squinty eye and his Polish pronunciation of the letter “l” (“wouse” instead of “louse”).’
Lev Izrailevich, who had smuggled Sveta into the prison zone on
her first trip to Pechora, was one of several visitors in June 1953. That month, Sveta also put up the Bashuns. Ivan Bashun, a senior mechanic at the power station, had carried letters for Lev. The couple’s provincial ways got on Sveta’s nerves – she made no effort to conceal her disdain – but she did her best to entertain them nevertheless. ‘Nina and Iv[an] have been staying with me for a week,’ she wrote to Lev on 3 July.
I told them I’m giving them a mark of 3 out of 5 (slightly below average) for their conduct in Moscow, but in all fairness it should’ve been a 1. They haven’t been anywhere except shops. If I hadn’t insisted on taking them to the [Lenin] Mausoleum and the University, they wouldn’t have bothered to see them at all. Nothing has made an impression on them – not the Metro, or the tall buildings, or the view of the city from the Lenin Hills, or the Bolshoi Theatre. I was at a complete loss, exhausted by my efforts to find something to interest them. They didn’t buy anything, except for a couple of shopping bags and something for Slavik, since they’re convinced that everything you can get in Moscow you can also get in Kotlas and anything they don’t have there can’t be found here either.
For the prisoners who remained in Pechora, Stalin’s death brought some improvements. As the population of the prison zone declined, the barracks became less cramped. In 1953, new barracks were built with individual beds instead of the double-row bunk beds that had been standard when Lev arrived in 1946. There were more cultural activities for the prisoners – regular films, plays and concerts in the club-house, even bands for dancing – and more outings to the Palace of Culture and the football stadium in the civilian sector of Pechora (which was itself becoming much more of a town, with a population of 25,000 inhabitants, shops and market stalls, a restaurant, a bus service provided by lorries and a radio station broadcasting through loudspeakers on the streets). In the wood-combine the separate radio station for the prisoners was improved as well: for the first time national broadcasts could be
heard in the barracks. Prisoners were allowed more letters, and the censors paid them less attention than before.
In January 1954, the authorities of the wood-combine posted a new law by the Supreme Soviet prohibiting guards from using violence against prisoners and promising court hearings to judge complaints about such behaviour: guards found guilty would be punished with prison sentences and even, in extreme cases, with death. In the past there had been instances of prisoners being killed or beaten by guards – sometimes in revenge for a perceived insult or challenge to their power, more often just for sport – but no guard had ever received more than a ‘severe reprimand’ or a cut in wages. The new decree brought about a dramatic improvement in the treatment of prisoners. The number of guards was decreasing in any case as labour camps were closed or transformed into special economic zones employing nominally free labour.
This more humane atmosphere did nothing to resolve Lev’s long-running problems with his boss, the head of the power station. A brutish, barely literate man, Ilia Sherman had risen to the rank of engineer-lieutenant in the MVD despite his minimal understanding of engineering. Lev described him as a ‘small-minded person who finds fault with everything … and is suspicious of everyone’. Sherman saw every setback at the power station as sabotage. He usually tried to pin the blame on Lev, to whom he had taken an instant dislike. He bullied Lev, gave him orders that could not be fulfilled and threatened several times to send him on a convoy to another camp to work as a general labourer. It was Lev’s worst fear.
Strelkov intervened to rescue Lev. In June 1953, his laboratory assistant Tkachenko was due to be released and would need to be replaced. An engineer and chemist, Tkachenko was in charge of monitoring the water quality in the boiler system of the power station, a position of great responsibility since wrong calculations could lead to serious accidents. Lev had worked as a chemistry assistant in his student days and so could do the job, which had the added benefit of putting him under the authority of the Department of Technical Control (OTK), a higher body outside Sherman’s
domain. With Strelkov’s assent, Tkachenko started training Lev. ‘Before he leaves,’ Lev wrote to Sveta on 13 April, ‘K. S. [Tkachenko] is planning to pass on to me some of his wisdom on the control of feed water. Starting this very night, I’m going to be reading his notes and any literature that he has. Then he’s promising to teach me some of the more practical aspects.’ On 1 June, Lev took over the new job. Although he went on working at the power station, where Sherman was in command, his new position as a water chemist under Strelkov and the OTK protected him from being sent away on a convoy. Lev wrote to Sveta on 9 June:

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