Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag (41 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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Epilogue
p. 284 ‘never turn into any kind of scientific researcher’: LM54-21.
p. 285 ‘They did not try to control’: Communication by Nikita Mishchenko.
p. 286 ‘One must be able … to live in this world’: SI47-30.
p. 286 ‘From an early age’, ‘My father did not talk’, ‘He was very charming’: Communication by Nikita Mishchenko.
p. 287 ‘I knew he was my future from the start’: Interview with Svetlana, 2008.
ORLANDO FIGES is the author of
The Crimean War
,
The Whisperers
,
Natasha’s Dance
, and
A People’s Tragedy
, which have been translated into twenty-seven languages. The recipient of the Wolfson History Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, among others, Figes is a professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London.
The Crimean War
,
The Whisperers
,
Natasha’s Dance
, and
A People’s Tragedy
, which have been translated into twenty-seven languages. The recipient of the Wolfson History Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, among others, Figes is a professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London.
1
Russian names have a full and a shorter version (used by friends and relatives) and any number of affectionate diminutives. The short form of Svetlana is Sveta but she was also known as Svetochka, Svetik, Svetlanka, etc. In his letters from the labour camp Lev would often call her ‘Svet’ or ‘Svetloe’ (Russian words for ‘light’ – an association which he liked). From this point in the text we will know her as Sveta.
2
The Mensheviks were a Marxist party opposed to the Bolshevik dictatorship.
3
She was actually the illegitimate daughter of Boris Tolmachev, the first husband of Aunt Katya.
4
Carlo Rossi, the Italian architect who built many buildings and ensembles in St Petersburg in the reign of Nicholas I (1825–55).
5
The rooms were laid out like this:
6
Tanya had been pressured into volunteering by the military authorities, which desperately needed nurses for the front. To refuse would have put not only Tanya but her family in danger of arrest.
7
A punishment technique designed to circumvent the Geneva Convention, which supposedly protected POWs (though not Soviet ones) in German concentration camps.
8
Lev was saved from drowning in the Istra River on 31 July 1936.
9
Formerly the Scientific-Research Institute for the Resin Industry.
10
Lev was sentenced under Article 58-1(b) of the Criminal Code.
11
Isaac Levitan (1860–1900) and Arkhip Kuindzhi (1842–1910), Russian landscape painters.
12
A code word for the Gulag.
13
Russian poet (1880–1972).
14
From ‘How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich’.
15
An opera by Tchaikovsky.
16
The average monthly wage of a factory worker in Moscow was about 750 roubles.
17
Andrei Tupolev (1888–1972), the Soviet aeroplane designer, was arrested in 1937 and worked as a prisoner in a secret NKVD research and development laboratory. He was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1943. Leonid Ramzin (1887–1948) was a Soviet heating engineer imprisoned in the Gulag from 1930 to 1936. He too won the Stalin Prize in 1943.
18
A Russian folk-song (‘Ton’kaya riabina’), sad and beautiful, whose words had a special resonance for Lev and Sveta:
Why do you stand swaying,
Slender rowan tree,
With your head bowed
Down to your very roots?
Slender rowan tree,
With your head bowed
Down to your very roots?
While across the road,
Over the broad river,
Also alone,
An oak tree stands tall.
Over the broad river,
Also alone,
An oak tree stands tall.
How can I, as the rowan tree,
Get closer to the oak?
If I could I would not
Stoop and sway.
Get closer to the oak?
If I could I would not
Stoop and sway.
With my slender branches
I would nestle into the oak
And with its leaves
I would whisper day and night.
I would nestle into the oak
And with its leaves
I would whisper day and night.
But the rowan-tree can never
Get across to that big oak.
It’s condemned forever
To bend and sway alone!
Get across to that big oak.
It’s condemned forever
To bend and sway alone!
19
Article 58-1(a) was treason against the motherland – a sentence similar to Lev’s Article 58-1(b) (treason against the motherland by military personnel).
20
Anton Frantsevich Gavlovskii, a prisoner in Pechora since 1938, worked as an assistant in Strelkov’s laboratory.
21
Code for the free worker who had agreed to hide her in the industrial zone.
22
A reproduction of a famous landscape painting by Isaac Levitan which Sveta had brought as a gift.
23
The sedimentation rate of red blood cells.
24
The institute near Sverdlovsk where Sveta had worked in 1943.
25
His stomach was ripped open by a piece of iron protruding from the side of a passing lorry.
26
A bride who has lost her groom (
solomennaia nevesta
). In Russian folklore grass was used as a symbolic payment on the agreement of a contract.
solomennaia nevesta
). In Russian folklore grass was used as a symbolic payment on the agreement of a contract.
27
Shows at the Central Children’s Theatre based on tales by the Soviet children’s poet Samuil Marshak.
28
This is one of the main themes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
.
29
In
White Nights
, his account of his imprisonment in the Pechora Gulag from 1940 to 1942, Menachem Begin, later to become Prime Minister of Israel, quotes a fellow prisoner, who claimed the ‘north-flies’ of Pechora were even worse than ordinary mosquitoes: ‘They guard the prisoners better than all the
strelki
[sentries] with their rifles. How? Once a prisoner got out of the camp and ran away. A
strelki
fired after him, chased him, hunted for him with bloodhounds, in vain. The prisoner had vanished … Three days later the escapee returned of his own accord … He was unrecognisable. They took him to “solitary”. But he swore he would never again try to escape. The north-flies had taught him a lesson.’ (Begin,
White Nights
, pp. 160–61).
White Nights
, his account of his imprisonment in the Pechora Gulag from 1940 to 1942, Menachem Begin, later to become Prime Minister of Israel, quotes a fellow prisoner, who claimed the ‘north-flies’ of Pechora were even worse than ordinary mosquitoes: ‘They guard the prisoners better than all the
strelki
[sentries] with their rifles. How? Once a prisoner got out of the camp and ran away. A
strelki
fired after him, chased him, hunted for him with bloodhounds, in vain. The prisoner had vanished … Three days later the escapee returned of his own accord … He was unrecognisable. They took him to “solitary”. But he swore he would never again try to escape. The north-flies had taught him a lesson.’ (Begin,
White Nights
, pp. 160–61).
30
Lev was probably thinking of the ‘special regime’ camps (
osobye lageria
), of which ten were established in the spring of 1948 to isolate the ‘most dangerous’ political prisoners (‘spies, diversionists, terrorists, Trotskyists, right-wingers, Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, Anarchists, nationalists, White emigrants and participants in other anti-Soviet organizations’). The ‘special regime’ camps were located in the harshest regions of the country, including several near or above the Arctic Circle (Inta, Vorkuta, Noril’sk and Kolyma). Prisoners had numbers branded on their skin, wore striped uniforms, and were allowed only ‘minimal contact with the outside world’ (Applebaum,
Gulag
, p. 419).
osobye lageria
), of which ten were established in the spring of 1948 to isolate the ‘most dangerous’ political prisoners (‘spies, diversionists, terrorists, Trotskyists, right-wingers, Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, Anarchists, nationalists, White emigrants and participants in other anti-Soviet organizations’). The ‘special regime’ camps were located in the harshest regions of the country, including several near or above the Arctic Circle (Inta, Vorkuta, Noril’sk and Kolyma). Prisoners had numbers branded on their skin, wore striped uniforms, and were allowed only ‘minimal contact with the outside world’ (Applebaum,
Gulag
, p. 419).
31
Russians spoke of people ‘sitting’ in prison.
32
Sveta is talking about making contact with the unnamed voluntary workers who will put her up in the settlement inside the industrial zone, Boris Arvanitopulo (the head of the electric power station in the wood-combine) and his wife Vera.
33
Natalia Arkadevna must have advised Lev not to send a telegram.
34
All that remained of Terletsky’s ten-year sentence when he was sent to Inta.
35
The head of the Electrical Group, Semenov was a political prisoner, sentenced to ten years in 1944.
36
Novels by the Russian writer Aleksandr Grin (1880–1932), whose real name was Grinevsky.
37
Sveta is quoting a famous phrase attributed to Catherine the Great (‘pobeditelei ne sudiat’), supposedly said by her in 1773 when General Suvorov was brought before a military tribunal after successfully storming a Turkish fortress on the Danube River against the orders of Field Marshal Rumiantsev.
38
The Russian word for vodka starts with the third letter of the alphabet.
39
He must have helped Sveta in some way during her visit.
40
By comparison, voluntary workers in the wood-combine earned on average about 800 roubles a month, and administrative personnel around 1,200 roubles per month in 1950 (GU RK NARK, f. 173, op. 1, d. 1, l. 2).
41
Small cubes of instant coffee pre-mixed with dried milk and sugar.
42
Lev had no reason to think this but he felt guilty because he had not been sent to the 3rd Colony.
43
Once again, Lev is linking Sveta with the Russian word for ‘light’ (
svet
).
svet
).
44
Part of the seizure of industrial goods by the Soviet occupation force in Germany and agreed to by the Allies at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 as reparation for the damage caused by the German occupation of the Soviet Union.
45
Both lyrics from songs in popular Soviet films of the 1940s.
46
Konon Sidorovich Tkachenko, one of Lev’s fellow prisoners, an engineer and laboratory assistant to Strelkov, who was responsible for maintaining the correct chemical composition of the water in the boiler system of the electric power station.
47
Green cabbage was regarded as a cure for liver disease, hepatitis and ulcers.
48
The Russian poet Nikolai Nekrasov (1821–78). Lev is referring to his poem ‘Russian Women’ in praise of two princesses, Maria Volkonskaya and Ekaterina Trubetskaya, who had followed their husbands into exile in Siberia, where they had been sent for their participation in the Decembrist uprising of 1825. Lev is drawing a comparison between Sveta and these two famous heroines.
49
The white nights of the North made the stars invisible.
50
Lev and Sveta used code words for the Gulag associated with the rain (e.g. ‘umbrella’ and ‘mackintosh’).
51
Lev’s bunk-mate in the barrack. Ivan was a student at the Odessa Shipbuilding Institute in 1950, when he was arrested and sentenced to ten years in Pechora.
52
In 1949, there were six years remaining of Lev’s prison term.
53
Soviet passports defined where a person was allowed to live and work.
Copyright © 2012 Orlando Figes All rights reserved. Published simultaneously in the United Kingdom by Allen Lane, London.
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are registered trademarks of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.“In Dream” from
Selected Poems
, by Anna Akhmatova, translated by D. M. Thomas, published by Vintage Books. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Ltd.
Selected Poems
, by Anna Akhmatova, translated by D. M. Thomas, published by Vintage Books. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Ltd.
eISBN 9780805095234
First eBook Edition : April 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Figes, Orlando.
Just send me word : a true story of love and survival in the Gulag / Orlando Figes. pages ; cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Mishchenko, Lev—Imprisonment. 2. Mishchenko, Lev—Correspondence. 3. Political prisoners—Russia (Federation)—Pechora (Komi) 4. Political prisoners—Russia (Federation)—Pechora (Komi)—Correspondence. 5. Mishchenko, Svetlana. 6. Mishchenko, Svetlana—Correspondence. 7. Fiancées—Soviet Union. 8. Fiancées—Soviet Union—Correspondence. 9. Labor camps—Russia (Federation)—Pechora (Komi) 10. Imprisonment—Soviet Union. I. Title.
DK268.M585F54 2012
365’.45092--dc23
[B]
2011048355
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First U. S. Edition 2012
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