Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag (36 page)

Read Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag Online

Authors: Orlando Figes

BOOK: Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag
7.71Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
This book really belongs to the Mishchenkos. It is their story, and without their help it could not have been written. Lev Glebovich and Svetlana Aleksandrovna were supportive from the start of this project. I am only sorry that they did not live to see its fruition, but hope their family will accept this book as a token of my debt of gratitude to them. Nikita L’vovich read the drafts in Russian, added valuable insights and commentaries, and made criticisms with touching gentleness and tact. I am also grateful to his children, Ilia, Lida and Vera Mishchenko, all three rightly proud of their grandparents.
In terms of the research and writing of this book my greatest debt is to Irina Ostrovskaya, Senior Researcher at Memorial, who knew and worked with Lev Glebovich and Svetlana Aleksandrovna for many years before the discovery of their letters. Irina persuaded them to give me access to their archive, conducted most of the filmed interviews, supervised the transcription of the letters, provided biographical notes, answered endless queries and read my drafts in Russian, correcting my mistakes with tireless patience and challenging my views on many things.
At Memorial in Moscow I would also like to thank Alyona Kozlova, Elena Zhemkova and the members of the academic council, who read sections of the draft.
In Pechora I would like to thank Tatiana Afanas’eva, the director of Memorial, who gave up a great deal of her time to help my research, and Boris Ivanov, who provided invaluable information about the town and wood-combine. Special thanks are owed to him for his extraordinary drawing of the convoy outside the 1st Colony.
In Syktykvar I would like to say a special thanks to Anton Niskovsky, a researcher in the People’s Archive of the Republic of Komi,
who helped me find, among many other valuable documents, the Gulag files of the wood-combine and the Pechora labour camp.
I owe a debt of gratitude to the BBC for two visits to Moscow: the first with Mark Burman, the radio producer, who was with me when we discovered the trunks at Memorial; the second with Ben Lewis and Paul Cox to film the interviews. I would like to thank Nick Fraser for investing in the project, and Ben Lewis for his efforts to raise interest in a documentary film. Thanks are also due to the UK Film Council for financing the copying of the dvds for the Mishchenkos and Memorial. I am particularly grateful to Tanya Seghatchian, whose support has helped me far more than she knows.
The Leverhulme Trust financed the transcription of the letters by Memorial. I am grateful to the Trust for its generous support.
Special thanks are also due to my friend Emmanuel Roman, who has been a keen supporter of this project and helped to finance it.
With the translation of the letters into English I was helped by Nicky Brown, who did the groundwork for my own translations of the letters in this book. I am very grateful to Nicky, a talented translator, who gave some precious insights into the letters. I am also grateful to Polina Haynes, who translated my draft chapters into Russian (so that they could then be checked by the Mishchenkos and Memorial) with tremendous care to detail and efficiency.
I would like to thank David Khmelnitsky for his gudiance in the world of Soviet physics; Emily Johnson for sharing her research on Gulag letters; Anna Rotkirch for her advice on matters of courtship; and Deborah Kaple for sending me an early copy of her
Gulag Boss
. Special thanks are also due to Rodric Braithwaite and Hiroaki Kuromiya, who read the draft in its entirety and provided valuable commentary.
I would like to thank my family – Stephanie, Eva, Lydia, Alice, Kate and Stoph – who read or listened to the early drafts and made helpful suggestions.
As ever, I owe a debt of gratitude to my agent, Deborah Rogers, who always believed in this book, a new departure for my work, and
fought hard for me to write it in this form. At RCW Mohsen Shah, Stephen Edwards and Laurence Laluyaux have been fantastic over many years.
At Penguin I would like to thank Simon Winder, my ever supportive editor, Stefan McGrath, Jenny Fry, Marina Kemp, Penelope Vogler and David Watson, the copy-editor; at Metropolitan, the copy-editor Roslyn Schloss. But my greatest editorial debt is to Sara Bershtel at Metropolitan, whose wise guidance and rigorous attention to detail have made this a better book.
 
London, January 2012
Letters have a special value for the historian of daily life. Kept in private family archives, they offer direct evidence of a lived reality, written at the time, and letting us into the interior world of the people writing them. Through letters we can follow the stories of individuals, families and even whole generations against the background of historical events. They are particularly valuable when they are written during periods of turmoil in the lives of their authors.
Memorial has a large archive of correspondence from the time of the Gulag – letters to the camps and letters from the camps. Most of the letters are to the camps. For prisoners, a letter was the only thread connecting them to ‘normal’ life. They tried not to lose the letters they received, and after their release they preserved them as precious things. By contrast, few letters from the camp survive. It was dangerous to hold on to ‘evidence’ of contact with a prisoner.
The Memorial archive contains various collections of such letters. Sometimes just a single page – or only a torn fragment – has survived. In other cases there may be a few letters, rarely more, usually written within a few months or a year. To find both sides of a correspondence is extremely rare indeed: that is an enormous stroke of luck for a researcher.
All of which is to underline the extraordinary significance of the eight-and-a-half year correspondence between Lev Mishchenko and Svetlana Ivanova. Preserved in its entirety in the Moscow archive of Memorial, it is the biggest known collection of private letters relating to the history of the Gulag. From the period of Mishchenko’s imprisonment in the Pechora labour camp there are 1,246 letters: 647 from Lev to Svetlana; and 599 from her to him.
Memorial’s acquaintance with the Mishchenko family began in
2000, when Lev Glebovich was working on his memoirs. There were lots of questions our researchers wanted to ask him about his reminiscences, and in the course of many conversations he told us the story of his life. In these interviews Lev often mentioned the letters, but he gave them no importance, thinking they were simply private documents of little general interest. But as he wrote his memoirs and reflected on the past, Lev began to see himself from another perspective, as a witness of twentieth-century history. It was only in 2007, after overcoming many doubts, that he and Svetlana Aleksandrovna decided to give their family archive, including the letters to and from the camp, to Memorial.
The correspondence is unique in its size and quality. Remarkably, it is a complete run of letters – from the first written by Lev from the camp on 12 July 1946 to the last he sent from Kalinin on 23 November 1954. All the letters were carefully dated and numbered by their authors, and at the start of every year the numbering began again. Lev and Svetlana kept a strict account of the correspondence and told each other about the receipt of each letter.
It is no longer possible to tell which letters were sent by the normal post and which through official channels: there are no censors’ marks or stamps. Most of the letters did not pass through the censors but even these cannot be thought of as entirely free: their authors understood and always bore in mind that they could be intercepted by the authorities, so in the letters there are many silences, hinted meanings and allusions.
To store the letters he received Lev made a small hiding place underneath the floorboards of his barrack. When he had collected a large number of letters, he sent them in a parcel back to Svetlana in Moscow with the help of the voluntary workers who had delivered them to him.
The letters written from the labour camp by Mishchenko contain:
1.
Information about life inside the camp: the relations between the prisoners; their work; conditions in the
barracks; their relations with the administration of the camp; details about feuds, intrigues, denunciations and slander.
2.
Information about his fellow prisoners, their life-stories, misfortunes, joys.
3.
The thoughts and feelings of Mishchenko: what interests or disturbs him; his ideas on science and his work; his opinions on the books sent to him by Svetlana; his reaction to events outside the camp.
The letters from Svetlana Ivanova tell about:
1.
Her daily life – her work and studies, her professional, material, intellectual and emotional concerns, her relatives and friends.
2.
Events in her life and in the lives of people close to her during the war.
3.
Muscovites in the post-war years – their return to the capital from evacuation, their material problems, working conditions and leisure pursuits.
4.
Post-war Moscow – new buildings, shops, urban transportation, holidays, theatrical premières, new films, etc.
5.
Public events and her participation in them.
Svetlana responds not only to Lev’s needs but also to the needs of his fellow prisoners. From her letters it is clear that many of her friends and relatives were involved in helping Lev. Svetlana lists the contents of the parcels she has sent to the labour camp. She worries that the parcels may have gone missing. From the contents of these parcels we can learn a lot about conditions in the camp. Foot-wraps, underwear, combs, toothbrushes, pillows, clothes, medicines and bandages, needles and thread, pens and pencils, books and newspapers – all these were sent to prisoners. Svetlana sent spectacles, scientific textbooks, cereals and vitamins. Her letters often came with blank sheets of paper, envelopes, postage stamps – and apologies that she had been unable to send a parcel because she didn’t have a box.
Svetlana’s letters also give us a remarkable account of post-war daily life in the Soviet capital. Their intimate descriptions of everyday reality – from Komsomol activities to the long queues at shops and railway offices – allow us to understand the lives of Muscovites and to sense the atmosphere of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Svetlana’s letters were written in the conviction that everything that took place in Moscow was of direct concern and importance to Lev and his fellow prisoners. She asks Lev for his advice, shares her doubts with him and actively involves him in the daily routines of her life, in order to help him feel less isolated from the normal world. It is as if she is living life for the two of them. She tells him her impressions of the latest films and plays, recounts meetings with her friends and writes to him about events in Moscow so that Lev might escape, if only mentally, from the barbed-wire confines of the prison camp and find some diversion from the monotony of his labour.
At the same time the events in the camp become part of her own life. Morally she tries to support Lev, to counteract his pessimism and despair, to stop him from sinking into hopelessness.
The Mishchenko–Ivanova correspondence is thousands of pages, and every page is filled with love, though the word itself is hard to find in the letters. Both Lev and Svetlana wrote sparingly about their romantic emotions. Neither wanted to burden the other by ‘opening up their hearts’. But at times these feelings burst on to the page, and then it becomes clear that these are the letters of a man and woman who love each other passionately.
In 1947 Svetlana decided to travel to Pechora without official permission. She did not think how such a journey – by a member of the Komsomol to visit a convicted ‘enemy of the people’ – might destroy her career and bring her to the attention of the political police. She was not Lev’s wife, nor his relative. She had already been questioned by the police and threatened by them. A journey to the camp was difficult and dangerous: she risked severe punishment and even arrest, and she had no certainty that she would be able to see Lev. Yet she went to Pechora, and an illegal meeting with Lev
did take place with the help of those same friends who had smuggled the couple’s letters.
The Mishchenko–Ivanova correspondence spans a decade in the lives of two people who kept their love intact despite the repressive grip of the Stalinist system. They lived apart with only hope in their future together to sustain them. Their letters should be read as a historical drama, as a dialogue between protagonists who listened to each other lovingly and understood each other’s slightest hint. They tell the story of two people who were both extraordinary and yet typical of Soviet society. For a historian the content of those trunks is a unique archival treasure revealing a hidden world of emotions and connections few documents can match.
 
Irina Ostrovskaya
International Memorial
Archives
The Mishchenko–Ivanova correspondence is housed in the archive of the Memorial Society in Moscow. The letters of Lev (LM) and Svetlana (SI) between 1946 and 1954 are identified by year and number (for example, SI46-20, the first letter cited in the book, is by Svetlana to Lev, her twentieth to him in 1946). Lev and Svetlana numbered all their letters very carefully, and their numbering has been retained. Letters between them from the period before 1941 are identified by their author and date (e.g. LM39-28.10). Other documents from the Mishchenko–Ivanova archive are cited individually. The Mishchenko–Ivanova correspondence will be opened to researchers in 2013.
APIKM
Archive of the Pechora Historical-Regional Museum (Memorial), Pechora
GU RK NARK
People’s Archive of the Republic of Komi, Syktykvar
MSP
Archive of the Memorial Society, St Petersburg
Interviews
Aleksandrova, Irina Vladimirovna (Moscow, 2008)
Aleksandrovsky, Igor Aleksandrovich (Pechora, 2010)
Ivanov, Boris Borisovich (Pechora, 2010)
Lileev, Nikolai Ivanovich (St Petersburg, 2004)
Mishchenko, Il’ia Nikitich (Moscow, 2008)
Mishchenko, Lev Glebovich (Moscow, 2006, 2008)
Mishchenko, Lida Nikitovna (Moscow, 2008)
Mishchenko, Nikita L’vovich (Moscow, 2008)
Mishchenko, Svetlana Aleksandrovna (Moscow, 2008)
Mishchenko, Vera Nikitovna (Moscow, 2008)
Serditov, Iurii Zotikovich (Pechora, 2010)
Yakhovich, Alla Stepanovna (Pechora, 2010)
Published Works and Dissertations
Applebaum, A.,
Gulag: A History
(London, 2003)
Azarov, O., ‘Po tundre, po zheleznoi doroge’,
Martirolog: Pokaianie
, 2 vols. (Syktykvar, 1999)
——‘Zheleznodorozhnye lageria NKVD (MVD) na territorii Komi ASSR (1938–1959 gg.)’, Kand. diss. (Syktykvar, 2005)
Begin, M.,
White Nights: The Story of a Prisoner in Russia
(London, 1977)
Braithwaite, R.,
Moscow 1941: A City and Its People at War
(London, 2006)
Chivanov, V., ‘Pechora glazami Priezzhego’, in
Vygliadyvaias’ v proshloe
(Pechora, 2009)
Fizicheskii fakul’tet MGU v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny
(Moscow, 1975)
Gregory, P., ‘An Introduction to the Economics of the Gulag’, in P. Gregory and V. Lazarev (eds.),
The Economics of Forced Labour: The Soviet Gulag
(Stanford, 2003)
Herling, G.,
A World Apart
, trans. J. Marek (London, 1986)
Ivanova, G.,
Labour Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System
(Armonk, NY, 2000)
Khochu byt’ liubimoi: Russkaia zhenskaia poeziia ot Zolotogo i Serebriannogo veka do nashikh dnei
(Moscow, 2008)
Mayakovsky, V., ‘Unfinished Poems’, trans. Bernard Meares, in
Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry
, selected with an Introduction by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (London, 1993)
Mishchenko, L.,
Poka ia pomniu
(Moscow, 2006)
——‘Poka ia pomniu’, in
Vygliadyvaias’ v proshloe
(Pechora, 2009)
Mochulsky, F. V.,
Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir
, trans. and ed. D. Kaple (Oxford, 2011)
Morozov, N.,
Gulag na Komi krae 1929
–
1956
(Syktykvar, 1997)
Moskva voennaia, 1941–1945: memuary i arkhivnye dokumenty
(Moscow, 1995)
Pechorstroi: Istoriia sozdaniia
(Pechora, 2000)
Rossii, J.,
Spravochnik po GULAGu
, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1991)
Sakharov, A.,
Memoirs
, trans. R. Lourie (London, 1990)
Serov, B., ‘V Pechoru pod konvoem’, in
Vygliadyvaias’ v proshloe
(Pechora, 2009)
Sokolov, A., ‘Forced Labour in Soviet Industry’, in P. Gregory and V. Lazarev (eds.),
The Economics of Forced Labour: The Soviet Gulag
(Stanford, 2003)
Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1939 goda: Osnovnye itogi
(Moscow, 1992)
Vygliadyvaias’ v proshloe
(Pechora, 2009)

Other books

Scream of Eagles by William W. Johnstone
Amethyst Rapture by Suarez, Fey
Dead Man's Rain by Frank Tuttle
She, Myself & I by Whitney Gaskell
Contract for Marriage by Barbara Deleo
Helion by Olivia March