Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag (7 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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The other colonies at the wood-combine were populated by different categories of prisoner. The 1st Colony (located in a separate sector outside the industrial zone) was made up of ‘special exiles’ (
spetspereselentsy
), workers sent by administrative order to the Gulag, of which there were about 500 in the camp in 1946. The 3rd Colony (by the river) was made up of criminals and other prisoners who had been singled out for punishment. ‘It is next to us but much stricter,’ Lev would write. ‘Prisoners are sent there if they break the rules, and the next step is a penal convoy.’ Conditions in the 3rd were ‘appalling’, according to a report by the camp administration looking into riots in the colony in 1947. The prisoners had no bedding, the basins were broken, and there were rats.
spetspereselentsy
), workers sent by administrative order to the Gulag, of which there were about 500 in the camp in 1946. The 3rd Colony (by the river) was made up of criminals and other prisoners who had been singled out for punishment. ‘It is next to us but much stricter,’ Lev would write. ‘Prisoners are sent there if they break the rules, and the next step is a penal convoy.’ Conditions in the 3rd were ‘appalling’, according to a report by the camp administration looking into riots in the colony in 1947. The prisoners had no bedding, the basins were broken, and there were rats.
Lev was assigned to a general labour team, hauling wood from the riverbank to the wood-combine. The work meant dragging heavy timbers up a hill to the log-conveyor, where, with the help of capstans, winches and cables, they were hauled up to the saw-mill.
It was back-breaking work which involved standing in freezing water for hours at a time. In the summer, when it was light all night, the mosquitoes were unbearable. Before the prisoners went to work they would cover up their hands and faces with bits of cloth.
It was back-breaking work which involved standing in freezing water for hours at a time. In the summer, when it was light all night, the mosquitoes were unbearable. Before the prisoners went to work they would cover up their hands and faces with bits of cloth.
Like the rest of his team, Lev received the standard uniform: a cap with ear-flaps, a wadded pea-jacket, heavy cotton trousers, gloves and winter shoes made of the same material as the jackets. There was no fur or lining in the shoes and no way of drying them in the damp and airless barracks, so his feet were always wet.
The twelve-hour shifts started before dawn; prisoners received rations of 600 grams of bread a day if they fulfilled the quota, but only 400 grams if they did not. To fulfil his daily quota Lev had to haul a minimum of 60 cubic metres of timber (enough to fill a small garage) from the river to the wood-combine. If he exceeded his quota, he got 800 grams and, as a bonus, ‘a rye-flour pie with a filling that had no particular taste or with no filling at all’, as he recalled. Every morning the prisoners were given a bowl of thin porridge, a cup of tea, a lump of sugar weighing 15 grams (it was measured carefully) and a piece of herring; for lunch, they normally received a bowl of cabbage soup with a bit of meat or fish in it; and for dinner, another bowl of porridge with more tea. It was not enough to sustain someone in the hauling teams for long. Sickness and death-rates were very high. In 1945–6, more than one-third of the camp’s 1,600 prisoners were ill in the infirmary, a compound made up of isolation barracks outside the main prison zone of the wood-combine, in which at that time there was only one doctor. According to a prisoner who was then working in a grave-digging team, they were burying a dozen prisoners every day in the cemetery behind the infirmary. The working conditions of the hauling teams were so inhumane that even some of the guards became uneasy. ‘We don’t seem to care if they live or not,’ complained one at a meeting of the Party in the wood-combine. ‘We let them stand in freezing water until they get ill, and then we let them die in the infirmary if they can’t work any more.’
Hauling team at the wood-combine
.
.
After three months in the hauling teams, Lev himself was close to exhaustion. He was broken psychologically. Terletsky later said that, when he first saw him, Lev ‘looked like a peasant who had been run over by a tractor.’ There was no trace left of the energetic boy who had dived into the Istra River ten years earlier.
Encouraged by Terletsky, Lev would go to the wood-drying unit to warm himself after his shift. There were no guarded convoys inside the industrial zone – prisoners were left to find their own way to their jobs – so if Lev was working on the log-conveyor or near the saw-mill he had some time at the end of every day to stop by at the drying unit on his way back to the barracks of the 2nd Colony, where the prisoners were counted in through the guard-house. It was on a visit to the drying unit that Lev was rescued from work that was likely to kill him.
The head of the research laboratory attached to the drying unit was Georgii Strelkov, a veteran Siberian Bolshevik of the Civil War and senior Soviet industrialist who had been the head of the Minusazoloto
Gold-Mining Trust in Krasnoyarsk, part of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, until his arrest in 1937. Concerned by reports of starving prisoners at the Kolyma gold mines in the far north-east of Siberia, he had sent two ships with food supplies which had been intercepted by the NKVD, emptied of all food and loaded up with new prisoners instead. The NKVD did not care how many people died and accused Strelkov of wasting food. He was charged with ‘counter-revolutionary activity’. Sentenced to be shot, Strelkov was given a reprieve: twenty-five years without rights of correspondence in the Pechora labour camp. His expertise was so highly valued by the Gulag authorities in Pechora that they let him lead experimental work at the wood-combine, although, as a prisoner with a twenty-five-year sentence, he should have been engaged in heavy manual labour. They permitted Strelkov to live on his own in the laboratory, rather than in the barracks, because his presence was so frequently required to resolve some technical problem or other inside the industrial zone. He was even allowed to wear a suit instead of a uniform.
Gold-Mining Trust in Krasnoyarsk, part of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, until his arrest in 1937. Concerned by reports of starving prisoners at the Kolyma gold mines in the far north-east of Siberia, he had sent two ships with food supplies which had been intercepted by the NKVD, emptied of all food and loaded up with new prisoners instead. The NKVD did not care how many people died and accused Strelkov of wasting food. He was charged with ‘counter-revolutionary activity’. Sentenced to be shot, Strelkov was given a reprieve: twenty-five years without rights of correspondence in the Pechora labour camp. His expertise was so highly valued by the Gulag authorities in Pechora that they let him lead experimental work at the wood-combine, although, as a prisoner with a twenty-five-year sentence, he should have been engaged in heavy manual labour. They permitted Strelkov to live on his own in the laboratory, rather than in the barracks, because his presence was so frequently required to resolve some technical problem or other inside the industrial zone. He was even allowed to wear a suit instead of a uniform.
Strelkov was strict and firm but also kind. Thanks to his authority at the wood-combine, he had been able to save many prisoners from complete exhaustion in the hauling teams by getting them transferred to the drying unit or workshops – even though his interventions often brought him problems with the camp authorities. Strelkov was not afraid. He knew that he was needed by the Gulag bosses, and for years he had managed to work the system to his advantage. In 1942, the wood-combine had received orders from the Gulag administration to find a way of turning sawdust into a yeast-based feed for animals. Strelkov was in charge of the research. After eighteen months of experimental work, the head of the wood workshops, a prisoner called Boris Serov, took two jars of the promised feed to a big meeting of the Gulag bosses in Abez, the administrative centre of the Pechora camps, to mark the anniversary of the Revolution. The jars were received with a thunderous ovation from the delegates. On returning from Abez, Serov was told by one of Strelkov’s assistants that the two jars had been filled with ordinary barley flour.
In 1946, the drying unit was in desperate need of new technicians with engineering expertise. The high-pressure steam heaters were not drying the timbers fast enough to maintain the necessary volume of supply for the workshops to meet their planned targets, and there was growing pressure from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, or MVD (which had taken over the running of the Gulag from the NKVD in March 1946), to improve their performance. Having learned that Lev was a scientist, Strelkov invited him to join the drying unit as a technician, putting him to work in the steam-room. Lev’s job was to turn the timbers to allow the covered parts to dry. The room was kept at a minimum temperature of 70 degrees centigrade, so he had to go in with his hands and face covered and could not stay more than a few minutes at a time. It was hard physical labour but, compared with hauling timbers from the river, a ‘paradise’ for Lev.
For the first time since he had arrived in Pechora, Lev was able to keep his shoes and clothes dry. He was warm all day. He was not bothered by aggressive guards. Perhaps even more important for his morale, when he was not working in the steam-room, Lev could visit Strelkov in his laboratory. There Strelkov had organized a spacious living area, 30 metres square, in which he kept a cat (‘Vasily Trifonych’) and entertained his friends with lively conversation, cards and chess, music from a radio he had built, vodka he had brewed in the scientific flasks and precious vegetables he grew in window-boxes heated by wood-steamers he had specially adapted for the task. There were even flowers growing under heated glass –which so impressed the head of the wood-combine that he gave his imprimatur to Strelkov’s newest fantasy of developing a flower farm.
Moving to the wood-drying unit gave Lev his first opportunity to write letters. That had not been possible before. When he had been working in the hauling teams, he would get back late to the barracks – he would be hungry, dirty, wet and cold, totally exhausted and in no state to write in the short time before lights went out following the evening meal. He had no paper or pen in any case. But
after working at the drying unit, Lev had time to write; he could get what he needed from Strelkov.
after working at the drying unit, Lev had time to write; he could get what he needed from Strelkov.
Strelkov and his cat in the laboratory
.
The picture on the wall is Ilya Repin’s
Volga Barge Haulers,
in Soviet times a symbol of Tsarist oppression
.
.
The picture on the wall is Ilya Repin’s
Volga Barge Haulers,
in Soviet times a symbol of Tsarist oppression
.
Lev had resolved that he would not write to Sveta or Olga. On Sveta’s last birthday, he had despaired of seeing her again. The ten-year sentence and the convoy to Pechora must have reinforced his hopelessness. What was the point of writing to a woman he had not heard from for five years? She might be dead. She might have given up on him and married someone else. It might be awkward for her to receive a letter from a prisoner. The last thing he wanted was to put her into danger by contacting her. Lev had chosen not to interfere in Sveta’s life. A victim perhaps of that sense of worthlessness that comes from years of being a prisoner, he felt he did not have the right to claim her love.
Then, for some reason, he changed his mind. Maybe the companionship of Strelkov and his friends lifted Lev’s spirits. Maybe, as he would himself explain it later, he ‘surrendered in a moment of weakness’ to the desire to find out what was happening to her. Lev
did not dare to write to Sveta directly, but wrote instead to Olga (‘Olya’) to ask after her:
did not dare to write to Sveta directly, but wrote instead to Olga (‘Olya’) to ask after her:
2 June 1946
Dear Aunt Olya! You cannot have expected to get a letter like this. I don’t even know if you’re alive and well. So much has happened in the past five years. Forgive me for writing to you, but you were always dear to me – so I now ask your help. I wanted to write to Aunt Katya as well, but I cannot remember the number of her apartment.
I am in a correctional labour camp of the MVD, where I am serving a ten-year sentence. In 1945 I was convicted of treason against the motherland. How, what and why – that would be long and difficult to write in a letter …
Conditions here are good, if you don’t count the northern climate. The only thing that’s hard is that for five years I have not known anything about the people who were close to me, people I have always loved. If you answer me, write to me about Aunt Katya, Vera [Olga’s sister-in-law], Mikh. Iv. [Olga’s husband]; how is Nikita, how is S.’s family? Do not tell them anything about me but write to me what you know about them.
I want to think that you are fine. I wish you all the best with all my heart – you, Aunt Katya, Mikh. Iv. and everyone else. I’ve been thinking constantly about you all during these long years.
All the very best,
L. Mishchenko,
L. Mishchenko,
My address: Komi ASSR , station Pechora, Wood-combine, Postbox 274/11, L. G. Mishchenko.
Lev received a reply from Olga on 31 July. It was his first contact with anybody from the world he had left. The letter was upsetting: Olga told him about the deaths of many of his friends and relatives during the war, including Sveta’s sister, Tanya. But she also
wrote that Sveta was alive and well. The next day he wrote back to Olga:
wrote that Sveta was alive and well. The next day he wrote back to Olga:
No. 2
Pechora, 1.VIII.46
My dear Aunt Olga, yesterday, 31.VII.46, I received your first letter. The 31st has often been a joyful date for me.
8
How that letter stirred my emotions, how much happiness its warmth of feeling brought to me –I cannot find the words to express that. I wasn’t counting on anything from you, I couldn’t hope for a letter such as yours. I’m so happy that you are alive but sad to learn that you’re unwell and lonely. There have been so many bitter losses in our lives … It was very painful to learn about Tanya. It is a blessing that all is well with the rest of S.’s family. I cannot tell you how happy I am that S. is alive, that her life is full and meaningful. From the bottom of my heart I wish her every happiness. I’m glad you’re still in touch with her. Write to me about her, whatever you can find out. Which institute is she working in, and with whom? What is her specialization? Has she passed her doctorate? My feelings towards her remain the same, despite all the time and distance separating us.
8
How that letter stirred my emotions, how much happiness its warmth of feeling brought to me –I cannot find the words to express that. I wasn’t counting on anything from you, I couldn’t hope for a letter such as yours. I’m so happy that you are alive but sad to learn that you’re unwell and lonely. There have been so many bitter losses in our lives … It was very painful to learn about Tanya. It is a blessing that all is well with the rest of S.’s family. I cannot tell you how happy I am that S. is alive, that her life is full and meaningful. From the bottom of my heart I wish her every happiness. I’m glad you’re still in touch with her. Write to me about her, whatever you can find out. Which institute is she working in, and with whom? What is her specialization? Has she passed her doctorate? My feelings towards her remain the same, despite all the time and distance separating us.
I am writing this to
you
and not to her because I do not want to burden her. Let her live her life calmly, without my complicating it, without my overshadowing it with memories of the past and thoughts about my current existence.
you
and not to her because I do not want to burden her. Let her live her life calmly, without my complicating it, without my overshadowing it with memories of the past and thoughts about my current existence.
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