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

by Figes, Orlando

  I was trying to avoid the inspectors, who were coming through the carriage checking everybody’s tickets and documents, and had managed to keep my head down and put on the uniform, all the while trying not to catch their eye. But one of them came up to me and said there was something wrong with my ticket, it wasn’t legal, and he wanted to remove me from the train and take me off for questioning. How would I explain the false ticket? I had no idea whom it belonged to – a man’s name was probably on it, but I was a woman and I did not even know where I was supposedly travelling. Nor could I afford to say where I was actually going. Moreover, I was meant to give the ticket back to the army officer. But then the other passengers, who were all without exception military types and saw me as one of them, came to my defence and started arguing in a friendly manner with the inspector: if there is something wrong, it’s not her fault, they said! And the inspector let me stay.

  Sveta travelled as far as Kozhva, a few kilometres from Pechora, where she found the house of Lev Izrailevich, a dug-out in the ground, in which he occupied a ‘tiny room’. His father, from Leningrad, was staying with him – probably the reason he had not been to see Lev at the wood-combine – so sleeping arrangements were cramped. The next day, Izrailevich and Sveta went together to the wood-combine. From the station at Pechora they walked the length of Soviet Street, a dirt-track avenue flanked on either side by eight-apartment wooden houses and ‘sidewalks’ made of planks laid on the ground. They turned into Moscow Street, passing a large white neo-classical structure, the first stone building in the town, which had just been erected for the administration of the North Pechora Railway Labour Camp, recently relocated from Abez. There were guards outside the building but none stopped Sveta or asked to see her papers, even though she must have stuck out as a stranger. From Moscow Street, Izrailevich and Sveta walked past the barracks of the 1st Colony and the motor garage on Garazhnaia (Garage) Street on their way to the main gate of the wood-combine, where they planned to tell the guards that Sveta was the wife of a voluntary worker living in the settlement.

  The station at Kozhva, late 1940s.

  Security at the wood-combine was in a chaotic state. There were about a hundred guards to patrol the prison zone. Most of them were peasants who, having served in the army, had signed up as guards to avoid going home to their collective farms at the end of the war. Many were illiterate, most were heavy drinkers, and they nearly all took bribes or stole from the prisoners. They also robbed the stores of the wood-combine, especially the stables in the industrial zone and the windmill outside it near the 1st Colony, where at least a dozen guards were involved in a major racket to steal oats and turn them into vodka for sale to the prisoners and free workers. Several tons of oats went missing this way during 1946.

  Almost constant drunkenness was the main problem with the guards. The Party archives of the wood-combine are filled with the reports of disciplinary hearings in which guards are reprimanded for ‘being drunk in working hours’, ‘passing out from drunkenness while on duty in the guard-house’, ‘getting drunk and vanishing from work for several days’ and so on. Party leaders all agreed that drunkenness among the guards was the biggest danger to security. Prisoners had walked out of the camp while drunken guards slept in the main guard-house. Others had bribed the guards to let them visit women in the town, offering further bribes to be let back into the barracks zone and counted ‘present’ at lights out. The remote-ness of Pechora – a thousand kilometres from anywhere but other labour camps – was a prison in itself.

  Guards at the wood-combine, late 1940s.

  There were also cases of guards taking bribes to let outsiders into the prison zone. A Party meeting at the wood-combine in 1947 reported on several incidents of ‘strangers’ being allowed in without a pass to visit the free workers in the settlement. Once inside the industrial zone, the intruders could escape detection: what little street lighting there was – some seven electric lamps – was meant for production purposes rather than security. There were eight watch-towers with searchlights located around the barbed-wire perimeter fences but three of them were missing bulbs.

  Lev Izrailevich and Sveta reached the main gate of the wood-combine without interference. It was a ramshackle affair, barely more secure than the wood and barbed-wire fence on either side of it, with a square frame of plywood boards covered with propaganda slogans and topped by the sign of the labour camp, a hammer and sickle. On the right of the gateway was the guard-house, where everybody entering or leaving the wood-combine was meant to show their pass to the armed guard on duty. Convoys of prisoners were counted in and out.

  When Sveta told the guard that she was the wife of a voluntary worker living in the settlement, he refused to let her in, declaring that her husband had to come for her. Izrailevich, who had a pass, said he would find her ‘husband’ in the zone and bring him to the guard-house. He was gone for a long time. The guard began to talk rudely to Sveta, cursing ‘northern wives’ (women with husbands who were prisoners in the Gulag) in a way that suggested he had guessed her subterfuge. Finally, Izrailevich appeared with the ‘husband’ – dripping wet and clearly drunk – a free worker from the settlement who had been cast in the role of Sveta’s spouse but, when the moment came for his walk-on, had fallen into a drunken sleep and had to be refreshed with a bucket of cold water by Izrailevich. ‘The man looked embarrassed,’ recalled Sveta. ‘To avoid kissing him, I threw myself at him and started cursing: “I wrote to you! And you didn’t even bother to meet me!” And, acting ashamed, he just said: “Let’s go, let’s go!” ’ Before the guard had time to question them, Sveta and her ‘husband’ had passed into the prison zone.

  They got to the house where the ‘husband’ lived. It turned out he had a wife, who had not been told about his promise to let Lev meet Sveta there. There was a furious scene as the wife shouted at her man, whose breath smelt heavily of alcohol. ‘It was not jealousy,’ recalled Sveta, ‘but fear that they might be found out and put into prison’ for aiding and abetting Lev and Sveta’s crime. Lev had arrived at the house earlier and hidden outside, waiting for Sveta to arrive. He now appeared in the middle of this scene, anxious to protect Sveta from the angry wife. This cannot have been how they imagined their reunion – in this squalid house with a shouting woman and a drunken man – but that is how it had turned out. For six years they had longed for this moment, yet it was so different from the way they must have pictured it, the two of them together without anything to disturb them. It was a tense and dangerous situation – the wife was so frightened and irate that she might call the guards in an attempt to prove her own innocence – and for the moment they could only exchange looks across the room. ‘We had to restrain our feelings,’ Lev recalled. ‘It was not the sort of situation where we could throw ourselves at each other. What we were doing was highly illegal and we had to be on guard.’

  The couple lived in two rooms on the upper floor of one of the wooden houses in the settlement: one room was furnished, the other completely bare. ‘They brought two chairs for us,’ recalled Sveta, ‘and we sat together in the empty room while friends of Lev went off in search of another place for us to hide.’ Eventually a message came that they could stay at the Aleksandrovskys’.

  The Aleksandrovskys lived in a nearby house in the settlement, but Maria, the telephonist, was living on her own there with her two small sons. Her husband, Aleksandr, was in the Pechora jail (he had got into a fight with somebody who had tried to steal from him in the railway station cafeteria and he had been charged with ‘hooliganism’). Maria was due to work the night shift at the telephone exchange on Soviet Street. In the afternoon she was expecting a visit from a guard and his wife, but once they had gone, Maria would turn off all the lights to signal that it was safe for Lev and Sveta to come to her house.

  As soon as darkness fell, Lev and Sveta crept outside and moved as quickly as they could towards Maria’s house. Hiding behind a pile of logs opposite her windows, they waited for the guard to leave.
While they were hiding, another guard came up to where they were. They thought he had discovered them, and feared the worst: Sveta would be arrested and charged with a crime against the state; Lev would be given extra years and sent north on a convoy. But then they heard the sound of the guard urinating on the other side of the log-pile. When he had finished he went away.

  Eventually, Maria’s visitors departed. The lights went out in her house. Lev and Sveta emerged from their hiding place and made their way inside. There were only two small rooms, a single bed in one, where Maria normally slept, and a table, chairs, and bedding on the floor for her sons in the other. When Lev and Sveta came, the two boys were sleeping in Maria’s room, so Lev and Sveta took the other. ‘That night we did not sleep at all,’ Sveta remembered. Lev added: ‘It was only when we were left on our own, the two of us together, when we had nothing more to fear and the two boys were asleep that we could act more freely, kiss and hug each other as much as we liked, and so on. But … more than that I will not say.’ What Lev would not disclose was later revealed by Sveta: ‘I asked him: “Do you want to?” And he thought and answered: “But what would happen afterwards?” ’

  Lev and Sveta spent two nights together in Maria’s house. During the day, while he was working at the power station, she stayed indoors and played with Maria’s boys. On the second evening, Lev and Sveta ventured out to see Strelkov in his laboratory. Several of Lev’s friends came to say hello – they were full of admiration for this young woman who had risked so much to visit them. They all gave her letters to take away and send for them.

  The next day, someone came to smuggle Sveta out; she did not remember who. She walked on her own to the railway station and waited in the hall by the ticket office, which only opened shortly before the arrival of a train. Sitting on her suitcase with her head in her hands, she fell asleep from exhaustion, waking after the train had pulled in and everyone else had boarded. Grabbing her things, she bought a ticket and ran towards the train. The passenger carriage for which she had a ticket was already full, but she was allowed to go into ‘some sort of sanitary wagon that was completely empty’. She lay down on a bench and went back to sleep.

  At Kozhva she awoke. It was late at night. She went to Lev Izrailevich’s house, and slept there until morning. Before she left, Lev Izrailevich took two photographs of her as a souvenir for Lev – one of her sitting in a wicker chair against a blanket hung up as a screen, as in a studio photograph, the other of her with her coat and bags departing from his house.

  From Kozhva Sveta posted this for Lev:

  My darling Lev, I’m still at Kozhva. There was no direct train last night, but today I’ll try to get a ticket for one. L. Ia. [Izrailevich] will tell you tomorrow about my departure. It was absolutely fine … I slept at the station [at Pechora] and on the journey [to Kozhva]. I got to I[zrailevich]’s at midnight and shook him awake ever so gently. And then I slept again until the morning and didn’t wake up once.

  For the time being I’m fine, I’m not shedding any water through the little holes I look through. Maybe because everything is still like a dream. Levenka, I forgot to tell G. Ia. [Strelkov] yesterday that I didn’t find A[leksandov]skaya [Maria] at home – don’t forget to tell him … Lev, thank everyone again for me. I’m unable to express myself in words, but maybe they will understand me all the same.

  All the best, my darling. I’m kissing you farewell one more time.

  L. Ia. [Izrailevich] is preparing a surprise for you – it’s a secret for the time being.

  Lev wrote to Sveta the same day:

  My own sweet Sveta, even the weather is upset today. The wind is fierce and there was hail this morning; everything is so gloomy and miserable. I’m waiting for my namesake to come – maybe he’ll come tomorrow. And I’m worried, of course … This morning I chatted a little with Gleb [Vasil’ev] until 9 o’clock. We drank tea. Everyone was at Strelkov’s and when he left I mounted Autumn Day22 under some glass and hung it over Strelkov’s bed and then sat under it for ‘good luck’ … Nikolai [Lileev] wanted to come this evening, Oleg [Popov] will probably drop by a little later, but I want to be alone.

  Lev was eager to hear that Sveta had got back safely. There was considerable risk of her being caught on her way out. ‘My own sweet, glorious Sveta,’ he wrote two days later, ‘up to today, 3 October, I still haven’t heard anything from you. It’s awful. And I just can’t think about anything else.’

  At last the letter sent from Kotlas came with the two photographs of Sveta – the ‘surprise’ prepared by Lev Izrailevich:

  My sweet, my lovely Sveta … finally! Thank goodness everything is all right. My sincerest thanks to absolutely everyone. When I read your note I guessed straight away exactly what surprise you were talking about, but it didn’t seem any less unexpected or joyful when it came. You will be just the same in 10 years’ time (in an armchair) as you are now. But you are always lovely in every way …

  My truly incredibly lovely Sveta, everyone sends you their greetings but I don’t know what to send. I only want to think of you, to write about you. I’m avoiding any conversations except for a few with Liubka [Terletsky]; and reading doesn’t interest me … I look at Autumn Day constantly and can’t tear myself away … My sweet and gentle one, I’m squeezing your paws.

  By 5 October, Sveta was back in Moscow. She did not send a telegram to Lev Izrailevich, as had been planned, because an earlier one had been intercepted by someone in the post office in Kozhva and ‘immediately became the property of all the natives’ (meaning that its content may have been communicated to the MVD). But two days later, she wrote to Lev with an account of her journey home:

  For 250 roubles I was able to get a seat on a direct train. Your namesake got me the ticket and put me on the train. I took [a photograph] of your namesake’s little house, where I spent three nights, as a keepsake. At first the conductor put me in a practically empty compartment but I had barely fallen asleep when he suggested I change places with a man who had ended up in female company, and I willingly agreed. There were three sweet girls, photo technicians for an air cartography expedition. They had travelled from the end [Vorkuta] and were going all the way to Moscow. There was absolutely nothing to do – I hadn’t thought to bring a book for the return journey – and so I slept the whole way … I didn’t even wake up when the train arrived.

  I got home on the morning of the 5th (at 4.30), had a little nap, and played with Alik for a while. Then I went to the banya and cooked lunch. Mama’s temperature was 39 again that day …

  Moscow met me gloomily – cold and rainy (but not hopeless) and the daily worries over bread are now over potatoes, which are hard to find in the shops and at the market already cost 7 roubles (they used to be 3). Everyone is stocking up … Sugar has vanished along with pastries and bread rolls. It’s depressing. The trees have almost shed their leaves now and there are no flowers at the market stalls. Well, Levi, my dear, I’ll say goodbye for the time being. Much, much love. Everyone I’ve had time to visit here sends you their regards. Sveta.

  Send my regards and thanks to everybody there.

  7

  Shortly after Sveta’s departure, winter came to Pechora. To Lev the two events seemed connected. ‘The first snow fell tonight,’ he wrote to Sveta on 13 October.

  The ground has been frozen for two days and everything has suddenly become wintry. I haven’t been able to write … It’s not winter itself that’s to blame, of course, but the absence of Svet [‘light’] which comes with the winter. Winter numbs the emotions. Thoughts lose their agility; restlessness and motivation ebb away. Time itself seems to slow down and freeze in the white expanse.

  Lev’s spirit had soared with Sveta’s visit. But her departure had left him sadder than before. It underlined what he had been missing for so long – what he would now have to live without. ‘Svetinka,’ he wrote six days after she left, ‘the more I think about you, the more I forget your face. I cannot picture you in my imagination any more –
I see only little bits of you. I think I want to weep.’ Self-pity was alien to Lev but he was clearly suffering. ‘Well, that’s enough,’ he went on. ‘I’m going to stop whimpering now, although in truth all I want to do is write your name, Sveta, in all its grammatical variations, formal and familiar. I’ll pull myself through somehow.’

  Three weeks later, Lev was still accepting of his fate, having given up all hope of his release:

  You once asked whether it’s easier to live with or without hope. I can’t summon any kind of hope, but I feel calm without it. A little bit of logic and observation do not leave room for fantasy. I don’t know why I just wrote that but, since I did, I’ll leave it. It’s not exactly what and not exactly how I’m feeling, but I can’t convey anything in its entirety at the moment – for that it’s necessary to think, and it’s much better not to think.

  But then he sent another letter with some thoughts on happiness, a feeling he had rediscovered when Sveta was with him. His reflections were prompted by the news that Uncle Nikita and his wife Elizaveta had been disappointed by a visit from their son Andrei on military leave:

  It’s a truism that people are rarely able to make use of what they have and even more rarely able to notice their own happiness. It’s sometimes necessary to look at yourself from the outside and report to yourself – consciously, not intuitively – on what’s what. To say, what I have is happiness – more than I’ve ever had, so that any change will probably be for the worse … I’m grateful to fate and to nature, to you and to myself, for the happiness I was granted, that I was able to see it, at the time and not just when it had passed.