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

by Figes, Orlando

  I told him I had applied for holiday leave in August and had also put my name down for a scheduled inspection of the tyre factory in Kirov that month. But he said: ‘Go in July, when it’s warmer, and “sit”31 there for a while so that you won’t have to do everything the same way as last year.’ So there we are. But this time I’m frightened, much more so than before. Somehow I was more prepared then for an unsuccessful outcome, and I was a bit emotionless. But now I cannot even think.

  At the end of May, Sveta’s plans to travel north at the end of a work trip to Kirov were jeopardized. The institute was threatening to postpone factory inspections by scientists because payments due from partner organizations had not yet come in. ‘If the work trips fall through for the whole summer,’ Sveta wrote to Lev, ‘I’ll take my holiday in July and that will be that. It’s not what I want. I’m too conspicuous at the institute for my absence not to be noticed, so people will start asking where I’ve been and what I saw.’ Lev disagreed. He felt that Sveta should heed Tsydzik’s advice, since she was relying on his help to conceal her journey. He also feared that travelling later than July ‘might turn out to be difficult’. On 8 June, he had written to Sveta to say that she should write with the details of her journey to Tamara Aleksandrovich, who had offered to meet her when she came to Pechora.

  But now came those rumours of a convoy to Siberia, and Lev, thinking he was about to be transferred to the 3rd Colony, sent word to Sveta on 25 June to abort all plans. As it turned out, the day after he sent that message, on 27 June, the situation changed again. ‘The latest decision by those fickle local (or not so local) powers that be is for everything to remain as it was, or almost as it was, for the next month at least, because the fulfilment of the plan could seriously suffer if the proposed reform (remember my letter of 25 June?) is put into effect,’ Lev wrote. A convoy of prisoners had just arrived in the 2nd Colony from Siberia, ‘the place where they had planned to move us after the 3rd Colony’, Lev explained, and he thought this gave ‘some credibility’ to the decision to delay sending prisoners away. ‘It’s possible,’ thought Lev, ‘that they will make this the place to concentrate the “unreliables” with the most serious articles. Sveta, the advice in my letter of the 25th holds. This piece of paper is only for immediate reading. I’ll write again soon, but I have to send this off at once.’

  On 1 July, Lev confirmed that the 2nd Colony was going to become a ‘reinforced regime’ for the politicals, and that those with lighter sentences, the so-called ‘common articles’ (theft, murder, hooliganism, labour desertion and so on) were going to be kept in the 3rd Colony, where conditions would be easier. ‘Apparently, it’s not going to add any particular restrictions for us [the politicals in the 2nd Colony], ’ Lev added, ‘but the free workers who are currently living inside the industrial zone are going to be removed, along with the small production units where free workers and the special exiles are employed.’ The departure of the free workers from the industrial zone would rule out a repeat of the previous year’s arrangements, when Sveta had met Lev at the Aleksandrovskys.

  Lev was right about the tightening of security inside the industrial zone, though rumours about the imminent removal of the free workers were not entirely accurate. The Gulag bosses of the wood-combine had indeed resolved to be more vigilant in stamping out contact between the free workers and the prisoners. At a closed Party meeting on 12 May they had agreed that such contact was to blame for many breaches of security, including the smuggling of letters, the black market in vodka and the illegal entry of unauthorized visitors into the prison camp. They had considered moving the free workers out of the industrial zone, but in the end dropped that option as impractical, because it would require building new housing outside the zone. Instead the bosses decided to increase the separation between the settlement where the free workers lived and the rest of the industrial zone by putting up a new barbed-wire fence with a guard-house.

  Sveta was proceeding with her plans to travel to Pechora that summer. ‘The matter is resolved,’ she wrote to Lev on 25 June, just as he was writing to her not to come. ‘I will go to Kirov and then immediately, as last year, I’ll extend my leave and spend as long as possible where I really want to be.’ Four days later, the chief accountant of the institute informed her that there was no money for work trips until the end of August at the earliest, so she applied to change the dates of her holiday to July; she would travel to Pechora then. She expected to leave by 10 July and had already written to Lev Izrailevich to warn him of her arrival. Tsydzik consented to the holiday but advised Sveta to go to Kirov anyway – advice she agreed with –as a way to conceal her actual plans.

  On 8 July, Sveta received Lev’s letters about the tightening of security and the inadvisability of her coming. She said she would do nothing until she had further news from him. Someone needed to remain in charge of the laboratory during the summer months, so she would stay in Moscow through August, while Tsydzik went on holiday, and in September she would leave, either for Pechora or, if that was still not possible, for Pereslavl’-Zalessky, 100 kilometres north-east of Moscow, where she would stay with her brother, Yaroslav, in his rented dacha for a week or two.

  By this time, Lev was feeling the effects of the tightening of security. ‘Slowly they are introducing all sorts of strict new rules here,’ he wrote to Sveta on 7 July, ‘though so far they have not brought any serious unpleasantness.’ He had not received any letters from Sveta for ten days and did not know whether this was a result of the new regime. ‘Everything is changeable, one shake and the colours change, like a kaleidoscope.’

  The next day, Lev made contact with Lev Izrailevich. He phoned him from the power station, where there was a telephone in case of fires at the plant, and found out from him that Sveta was still planning on a trip. The security measures were proceeding apace. In mid-July the ‘special exiles’ were moved out of the industrial zone in preparation for the arrival of a new convoy of political prisoners, reinforcing Lev’s belief that the wood-combine would become a special regime camp. On 21 July he again warned Sveta that it was too difficult to plan a meeting for that summer. ‘Maybe 1949 will be a better year,’ he wrote. ‘It seems that the so-called reinforced regime is going to come into effect here no later than next week.’

  Despite her decision to put off her holiday, Sveta was persuaded by her mother to take a break and join her brother’s family in Pereslavl’-Zalessky from mid-July. Their wooden summer-house had an orchard garden and overlooked a peaceful lake surrounded by pine forest. It was beautiful and quiet. They went boating on the lake and hunted for mushrooms. She slept a lot. But without Lev she felt she could find no spiritual rest. ‘My darling Lev,’ she wrote on 23 July,

  a week has already passed and I haven’t written anything. I caught up on sleep, sunbathed; everybody says I’ve lightened up a little. I’m behaving myself, sensibly, I’m not crying. I’m trying not to think about you, but I have dreams where I see you in a haze. I’m keeping myself on a tight leash so that I don’t think about your letters, about what’s in them, about what’s possible and what’s impossible. I’m not doing too badly here, but that’s my head speaking, not my heart. I’m unable to enjoy the lake, the forest, or the air with the whole of my being. My body is relaxing but not my soul.

  On 31 July, Sveta’s mother arrived from Moscow, bringing three letters. Sveta could hardly contain her excitement as she opened them. But hope turned to disappointment when she read the short last letter of the three, the one in which Lev ruled out any meeting for that year and observed sensibly but almost casually that ‘Maybe 1949 will be a better year’. Sveta was furious – with everything and everyone – and she took it out on Lev. She could not understand how he could be so willing to wait a whole year when she was so desperate to visit him. In despair, she scolded him for thinking that she could be kept on hold without any certainty of seeing him. ‘I’m interested, Levi,’ she wrote on 2 August, ‘how do you see it? That it would be better for me if
there hadn’t been so many “if onlys”. You can’t answer that – it’s not a question but a reprimand.’ Not until 9 August could she write to Lev in more collected terms:

  I haven’t written for a week because my soul hasn’t had (and still doesn’t have) any peace and quiet. When Mama came to see us in Pereslavl’ and brought your letters I fell apart again, completely. (This is not to say that you shouldn’t have written.) I got angry at all those sensible adult people who discouraged me from going to Pechora earlier, and at Mama, who forced me to take holiday leave (although she was completely right), but most of all at myself, of course, because at 30 years of age I should be deciding things for myself. I was angry that I hadn’t hurried to see you earlier, that I hadn’t immediately rushed home and gone to the institute to formalize my work trip when it was still possible to do so. Now it’s too late. And I’m seething and don’t know what to do.

  Worried that her earlier ‘reprimand’ might be seen as cruel, she made her meaning clearer now: ‘In my last letter I scolded you so that you would never think my life could be better without you. I’m repeating it to be on the safe side, in case you didn’t get that letter.’

  Sveta was desperate to visit Lev. If she heeded his advice, yet another year would pass before she saw him again. She would be thirty-two in 1949. How much longer could she wait for her life to start? How long could it be before she had a child? She knew the cost of being tied to Lev (he had warned her of it many times): the growing possibility that she would never have a child. And at times she found it hard to bear.

  In both her letters of ‘reprimand’ Sveta raised the issue of having children. She wrote to Lev about a conversation she had had with Uncle Nikita in which he insisted that no one had ‘the right to give life’, and that ‘people had children for egotistical reasons, thinking only about themselves’. Sveta had replied that ‘new life brought the possibility of more goodness in a world that needed it’. She thought that Nikita was bitter because ‘he feels guilty towards his son for having given birth to him if he could not ensure that he had an easier and more joyful life.’ The answer was to have more than one child, Sveta concluded. If Nikita had had another child,

  a younger one, or even better, an older one so that by now he would already have some grandchildren to look after and give meaning to his life, then such thoughts would never have entered his head. Maybe gender makes a difference here. For a woman life has already been fulfilled if she has loved and had children. For any (or almost any) woman, that is the central focus of her life, however many different interests she may have in public life, work, etc.

  Back in Moscow, Sveta once again decided to travel to Pechora –and before the summer ended. Natalia Arkadevna was leaving for Pechora on 18 August to see her son Gleb. It was agreed that Sveta would find a way to persuade her institute to release the funds to send her on an inspection trip to Kirov shortly after that. Natalia would send a telegram to the post office in Kirov letting Sveta know if it was feasible for her to attempt a second visit to the labour camp. Time was running out but the risks involved in going without enough preparation were high. ‘On the one hand, chances diminish every day,’ Sveta wrote to Lev on 13 August, ‘but on the other, it’s impossible to travel without having made the necessary arrangements – and making the arrangements is very difficult.’

  So it seems the wisest option is to wait until N. A. arrives – then she can send me a telegram … She’s going to leave on the 18th so it’s unlikely she’ll be able to send it any earlier than the 19th, which means that I need to be in Kirov until the 20th. I’m scared of waiting any longer. I can’t find a happy medium. Maybe it would be better to travel with her, but then there might be a problem getting the tickets. If I don’t hear from her, I’ll just risk it on my own, in which case I’ll arrive on the 22nd or the 23rd. I’ll send a telegram from Kirov, of course, but that may not get to you in time. It would be nice one day to see each other again without all these plans. According to the new timetable (for this year), trains arrive no longer at night but between 10 and 11 in the morning (according to I[van Lileev – Nikolai’s father]) –but maybe that won’t be too difficult. If there’s no one to meet me, I will look for them at work (with light luggage and no obvious signs of having just arrived) rather than go directly to their apartment.32 I think that would be best – I’m so nervous about making a wrong move. My stupid head managed to forget his [Arvanitopulo’s] name and patronymic during the holiday (although I can remember the initials) and I can’t work out the necessary information from the letters either, because I have lost them. I remember I put the letter with the most important details aside somewhere so that it would be to hand, but where is that ‘somewhere’? I’m going to have to look through all the letters yet again. I’m still pinning some hopes on the namesake [Lev Izrailevich]. I’ve also written to him to make sure he doesn’t go anywhere on those days and at those times. He knows how little I know my way around, after all. I’m so afraid that fate will turn against me that I’m not telling anyone about my travel dates and time in case I tempt it. I’m hoping to deceive it and sneak by, despite its being a leap year. Because of that fear I’m absolutely not planning to bring anything with me … I have three requests: 1. send me a telegram immediately, 2. understand mine, 3. meet.

  Five days later, Sveta had not yet left Moscow. There were difficulties getting train tickets (not uncommon in the Soviet Union, where people queued for days at ticket-offices). ‘Goodness knows when I’m going to depart,’ she wrote on 18 August:

  There hasn’t been a separate booking office for people travelling on work trips for three months. If you’re lucky you can get a ticket in a day at the advance booking office, or in a couple of days, because they note down who’s in the queue so that it can start again unchanged the following day … But through my own stupidity we’ve already flushed two days down the drain for nothing. I took my place in the queue, then left for work with Yara and then Mama taking over for me, but the tickets ran out before Mama got to the window, and, not realizing that she had to secure her place in the queue, she went home. She was angry with herself and the following morning she went early to stand in the queue, but when I arrived to replace her it turned out she’d trusted some policeman who had told her that all the tickets for trains in the direction of Gorky were at a different window. To cut it short, she wasn’t standing in the queue I had been in, and I didn’t have time to start all over again since I really had to be at the institute …

  In the end, despite more confusion, Sveta’s mother managed to get her a one-way ticket for the 21st. The ticket was valid for only six days, just enough time for Sveta to do her work at the factory in Kirov and travel to Pechora, though it would be touch and go. She had to make up her mind whether to go to Kirov on her way there or on her return. She decided to stop there first. That would allow her to check at the post office for any telegrams from Natalia Arkadevna and to send a message to Tsydzik postponing her return. It would also mean that she could buy a direct ticket home. ‘It’s a pity to stop in Kirov,’ she wrote to Lev, ‘but I’ll be less anxious when it’s done.’

  Sveta left Moscow on 21 August. When she got to Kirov she sent a telegram, which Lev received the next day. But, contrary to her instructions, he did not reply, thinking it was too late to reach her. Instead he waited to see if she would come. His friend and boss, Boris Arvanitopulo, who had agreed to meet Sveta and put her up, went to the station on the 23rd. He watched the train pull in and looked for a thin young woman with plaits and a rucksack among the passengers who made their way past him towards the station-hall. Sveta was not among them. On the 24th he returned to the station, but she was not on that day’s train either. Each time Boris came back to the camp without Sveta, and each time Lev was driven mad with worry. ‘So, my darling Sveta,’ he wrote on the 24th, ‘I sit here and think, will you come or not? And if not, then it will be all my fault for listening to N. A.33 and not sending a telegram to K[irov]. I can’t think about an
ything else. Perhaps something has happened to you.’

  Sveta had indeed run into trouble. On the stretch between Kirov and Kotlas, some of the carriages at the back of the train had been decoupled after the inspectors found a fault with their wheels. There was a mad rush by the passengers to find places in the forward carriages. Sveta grabbed her things and just managed to make it to the front end of the train before it departed; what happened to the other passengers, who were not as quick, she did not know. Greater danger was to come. At Kotlas she was sitting on her rucksack in the station yard, waiting for the train to Pechora and hoping to avoid attention, when a policeman approached her. As she was in civilian clothes, not in the khaki dress that had helped her on her first journey, she had probably thought it best not to wait inside the station-hall. The policeman could have asked to see her documents and demanded to know where she was travelling, in which case she could have been in serious trouble. But he turned out to be friendly and concerned only for her safety. There were thieves about, he said, and she would be safer if she waited for her train inside the hall.

  On the 25th Sveta finally arrived in Pechora. Arvanitopulo met her at the station and took her to his house just outside the perimeter fence of the wood-combine. The Arvanitopulos had a telephone. Boris had constantly to be on call in case of a fire at the power station, where there was also a telephone, which Lev had access to when he was on his shift. Sveta called Lev. Her call was put through at the telephone exchange by Maria Aleksandrovskaya, the woman who had harboured Lev and Sveta in her house the previous year. Lev told Sveta that someone had informed the guards about her plans to enter the labour camp illegally and that ‘they were eagerly awaiting the opportunity to arrest her’. Not all the guards were that hostile, however, it would seem, since one of them had warned him of the threat. Lev had transformed one of the storerooms in the basement of the power station into a ‘conspiratorial apartment’, where she could stay with him if she made it through.