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

by Figes, Orlando

  Sveta was torn between her duty to look after her parents and her desire to be with Lev. The conflict was making her feel agitated and depressed. All the anxiety about where they would live only partially masked a bigger worry: what would life be like with Lev? She had waited for this moment for fifteen years, but now that it was almost upon them, she was consumed by doubt:

  I’m already falling headlong into a hole and there I am wallowing at the bottom, thinking how I didn’t study well, how I’m a bad daughter, how I work badly – the only thing that’s left is my service to myself and to the one called God (and even then somebody else would have managed to do it better; and if I’m allowed into heaven it will only be because of you). And if it now turns out (as is very probable) that I’m even going to make a poor wife – and will be no better as a mother – then all that’s left for me is to hang myself. I’ll stop eating and sleeping. Perhaps my fear of leaving Mama is covering up the fear that I won’t be fit to be a wife. Honestly, I’m scared.

  Lev, too, felt nervous, but his doubts were not about Sveta:

  Sveta, my darling, there’s not going to be any need for you to hang yourself, you silly creature! And right now there’s no need to stop eating and sleeping. What does ‘bad’ mean in this or any other sense? In every way you’ll be yourself, and what else do I – do we –need? How is it possible that there is something you’re not fit for? No matter what you turn out to be, you’ll be good at it. Do you really think that any set of skills, like being a housewife, can ever be the most important thing – that their absence cancels out the unique, priceless thing that makes us want to wait for each other? … And you mustn’t leave your mother. I’m just as scared as you, if truth be told, Sveta, only I’m scared for myself and not for you; because according to friends and their recollections of me, I’m difficult to live with. But that’s not why I say you should stay with your mother. It’s that I don’t think we’ll ever stop worrying if we leave them. And if I’m already feeling guilty towards her now (and not just this minute but all the time), how could I possibly reconcile your leaving her with my conscience? All I can think of for the time being is to wait and try to set up a situation – in terms of an apartment and location – that would be acceptable to your mother and where we could all finally settle together. What more can we hope for when there’s still absolutely no information?

  Lev had no idea when he would be released. ‘My leaving is still obscured by shadow,’ he wrote on 4 June,

  but I’ve already started thinking about sending my books home little by little. The only thing I don’t know is where to. I’ve got 2 suitcases full of all kinds of books. I’m going to try to cut the amount down to one and a half and send them in small parcels since I don’t know where I’m going to be going first and it will be awkward to drag them along with me everywhere. But if I send them in small parcels then where to? To you or to Uncle Nikita?

  Six days later there was ‘no more certainty about the future’. There were ‘no official statements or signed documents’ about the procedures of release, Lev wrote to Sveta, ‘and those leaving go through the formal procedures one way today and a different way tomorrow’.

  In this limbo state, Lev decided on a temporary plan to optimize his chances of living within 50 kilometres of Moscow by travelling first to Uncle Nikita’s at Malakhovka and trying to obtain his diploma, which he thought would help him find a better job and place to live.

  I’ll go about tracking down my diploma from Uncle N.’s and look for work. And I’ll visit everybody who’s expecting me, of course. I’m promising myself that I’ll control my obstinacy [about not wanting to depend on people] for a month, for the sensible reason that a person has the right to take a month off after such a period of labour, and if he doesn’t die over the course of the following year he’ll be able to pay off his debts … If, at the end of the month, or near the end, it finally becomes clear that it’s not working out [with the diploma and the search for a job near Moscow], then I’ll go to K[alinin] or somewhere that seems right for both of us and try to find work there and four walls and a ceiling, where I’ll be able to wait for you to visit, pending better times.

  On 7 June, Sveta’s father went to a sanatorium in Shirokoe, not far from Kalinin, to spend the summer recovering his health. On 1 July, he had a stroke. Ten days later, he had another. Sveta rushed to be with him. There was no paralysis but he was very fragile and had problems with his speech. Sveta sent a telegram to Lev: ‘Papa’s condition complicated by secondary stroke. Now slowly improving. I’m staying at Shirokoe Bologovskoe.’

  Lev was expecting his release in the next few days. Now that the moment was upon him, he felt none of the euphoria he might have expected. In some ways, he was sad to be leaving. There were friendships he had made that he would miss, people like Strelkov who were sick, whom he did not want to leave behind, as he explained to Sveta in his final letter from the labour camp. If he had numbered all his letters over the past eight years, it would have been the 647th.

  9 July 1954 No. 29

  Svetloe, after your telegram I received your letter dated the 29th. I’m hoping there’ll be something else tomorrow. How’s Aleksandr Alekseevich [Sveta’s father]? And your mother? The past week has been really full for me – I’ve had to help Strelkov ‘pay old debts’ in the form of all kinds of orders and promises. Strange as it may seem, in a week’s time I’m going to be parting from old friends. And – this is less strange – I have some regrets. Only about people, of course, or rather their company, although with some there will be the possibility of meeting up again, probably quite soon. Incidentally, Strelkov has more freedom of movement than the rest of us at the moment, which is obviously improving his mood. Financially, the last two months have been three times better for him, first because of general changes to his pay-rate and second because he’s currently substituting for one of the workshop’s managers who has gone on holiday …

  I have not managed to find anyone from K[alinin]. Well, it doesn’t matter. If I’m not able to stay at Uncle N[ikita]’s for longer than a couple of days, I’ll go to K[alinin] anyway. I still don’t know how much longer I’ll be here. In any event the delay is hardly going to be more than a week. For more than 10 days now we’ve had a heatwave here, and yesterday it was nearly 38 degrees, but I only managed to go swimming for the first time today.

  The day before yesterday, when I was with A. M. [Iushkevich], I allowed a doctor to tap on my chest and have a good listen – it was the same doctor who put me in the hospital 4 years ago. He found that I still don’t have any particular grounds for complaint or worry, which I agree with completely.

  I still haven’t written anything to my aunts. I’ll write to Uncle N. tomorrow.

  Look after yourself, Svet.

  12

  Lev was released on 17 July 1954. It was eight years and four months since he had arrived in Pechora, but under the credit system introduced in 1948 he had managed to reduce his ten-year sentence by one year and eight months. In preparation for his departure he had made two wooden suitcases in the workshops, one for his clothes, his linen and other personal items, the other for his tools – the pliers, spanners, hammers and screwdrivers that he would need to work as a mechanic or electrical engineer. With one heavy suitcase in each hand, he left the barracks zone. He was free at last.

  But he could not leave right away. First he had to get his exit papers processed by the MVD and this took about a week. While he waited for his papers Lev stayed at the Aleksandrovskys inside the industrial zone, in the same apartment where he had met Sveta in 1947. ‘Send your letters here for the time being, as before, but starting with your next letter, it will be better to send it to Marusia [Maria Aleksandrovskaya],’ Lev had written to warn Sveta not long before his release.

  He spent these last days in Pechora saying farewell to his friends and sorting out his things. He packed his books into parcels and sent them to his Uncle Nikita, who had room to store them at his house in Malakhovk
a. He also went to the market at Kanin, the settlement neighbouring Pechora. On his day trip there he took Igor, the eleven-year-old older son of the Aleksandrovskys, who had never been anywhere out of Pechora. It was very hot, and Igor got a headache on the long walk to Kanin. At the market Lev bought the boy an ice-cream. It was the first time he had ever eaten an ice-cream –an ‘unheard-of delicacy in Pechora’, recalls Igor. While he was enjoying it, a boy dressed in rags began to badger him and would not go away. He could not take his eyes off the miracle of the ice-cream. Taking pity on the boy, Lev spent the money he had saved so carefully and bought an ice-cream for him too.

  Once he had his exit papers, Lev was at last ready to leave Pechora. He said a final farewell to his friends and exited the camp through the main gate of the wood-combine. Carrying his wooden suitcases, he turned left on Moscow Street and then right into Soviet Street, the long main avenue that ran through the town to the station, 4 kilometres from the wood-combine. At the station he waited for the Moscow train coming in from Vorkuta, along the railway built by Gulag prisoners. The MVD had given him a ticket that would enable him to travel all the way to Kalinin, where he had chosen to go in search of a place to live.

  Lev’s first aim was to find Sveta. His train arrived in Moscow late at night. It was dark everywhere. From the Yaroslavl station he went to Sveta’s house but ‘the lights in the windows were out’ and he did not want to wake the family. The last train for Malakhovka was about to leave from the Kazan station, so he went there and stayed the night at his Uncle Nikita’s house. The next morning he returned to Moscow and knocked on the door of Sveta’s apartment. He had not been there for thirteen years, since before his departure for the front in 1941. Now, as then, the door was opened by Sveta’s mother. ‘Anastasia Erofeevna, herself ill, said that Aleksandr Alekseevich had had a stroke and that Sveta was with him at the sanatorium,’ recalled Lev. The scene that he had pictured in his head a million times – his knocking on the door of Sveta’s home and her opening it to embrace him – was not to be.

  Lev returned to the station and got on a train to Bologovskoe, the nearest stop to the sanatorium at Shirokoe, which he reached on foot. Dressed in the clothes in which he had left Pechora, thin, pale-faced and exhausted from his long train journey in the heat, he had the unmistakable appearance of a newly released prisoner, which attracted the attention of the staff at the sanatorium. Lev found Sveta in the ward with her father. She had wanted them to be alone at this moment. ‘I don’t want our first meeting to take place in front of other people,’ she had written six months earlier. But that did not matter any more: they were at last together and that was all that counted now. During these first hours Aleksandr was the focus of their emotions. They sat together by his bed. Sveta’s brother, Yara, had joined them at the sanatorium. Lev now felt that he belonged to Sveta’s family. More than fifty years later Lev recalled a moving gesture of kindness that made it clear he had Sveta’s father’s blessing as a son. Aleksandr was in bed. He could not sit up, but beckoned Lev to him. Lev kissed him, and he kissed Lev. Aleksandr told him that he had 30,000 roubles in his savings account – enough to buy a home. ‘That money is for you and Sveta,’ Aleksandr said.

  That evening Lev wrote to Sveta’s mother from the sanatorium. He wrote as if he had been her son-in-law for years:

  Dear Anastasia Erofeevna!

  Svetka told me to write everything to you just as it is, objectively, which I’m going to try to do. Firstly, Aleksandr Alekseevich was in better form than I expected from your report … He’s in good spirits and making jokes. The clarity of his thoughts and his memory is impeccable but his speech is still causing problems: he speaks somewhat indistinctly, though always coherently. If he wants to emphasize something he articulates the phrase very clearly but with obvious effort.

  Svetka is probably exhausted but it’s not noticeable. I think she’s looking well, but I don’t have anything to compare it to. We’ve been given lodgings: Yara is in the 5th dacha, 11/2 minutes’ walk away, and I’m here with Aleksandr Alekseevich and Svetka. There haven’t been any complications so far.

  Svetka thinks she’ll bring Aleksandr Alekseevich home on the 29th if there’s a definite decision about his release by then … It’s rather cool here at the moment with intermittent rain showers, but we’ve been able to drag ourselves out of our room every so often. Svetlana and I tried to set out for some raspberries but were frightened off by the waterlogged bushes and so just settled for a walk for an hour and a half and an overview of the surrounding countryside.

  It’s a really beautiful place. It would still leave an enormous impression on one, even if it wasn’t coming in the wake of such a dramatic change in scenery – and that’s all there is to say for now. Well, it seems as if it’s a full report.

  Look after yourself. All of us send all of you our greetings. L.

  Three days later, Aleksandr was transferred to a hospital in Moscow, and Sveta went with him while Lev set off for Kalinin, where he was obliged to register his place of residence with the police. It was difficult for them to separate after such a brief reunion. But they knew they were together now.

  Before he left Pechora, Lev had found someone to help him get set up in the Kalinin area, a stoker in the workshops who came from nearby Kuzminskoe. He gave Lev the address of a woman who, he said, would put him up. Kuzminskoe was a run-down settlement of fifty houses with a ruined church, a small brook, a pond and a few fields, a half-hour walk from a railway station on the Moscow–Kalinin line. Maria Petrovna and her children lived in a dirty peasant hut with a small orchard garden on the edge of the village. Her eldest son, who was supposed to help Lev find a job, was not there when Lev arrived: it was harvest time and he had left to work on a collective farm. Lev had hoped to rent a room, but the one he was now offered by Maria was so filthy that he chose to stay instead in the hayloft and find another place to live. On 1 August Lev explained his situation to Sveta:

  I found the woman quickly but her son, who’s going to help me get settled in K[alinin], is on a kolkhoz until 4 or 5. So I’ll try tomorrow to sort things out myself, get a passport53 and so on. But today I’m going to go to Kalinin to buy some tea, sweets for the children and spoons and other things for the household where I’m taking refuge for the moment. They’re good people – the mother, from Karelia, about 50–55 years old, and her younger sons, 18 and 14 – but they keep the house according to the principle of indifference and inattentiveness, so that even I, who am after all used to anything, can hardly bear to stay here any longer than basic politeness requires, which is about 3 days. After that I’ll try to find a place with somebody else in a different hut. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to get a separate room (bearing in mind the most important of our requests). I’m going to consider the situation carefully tomorrow but for now I’ll settle for Maria Petrovna’s hayloft … The area is rather monotonous – near the village at any rate: a field with gently sloping uplands and some emaciated-looking villages every 1 to 2 km. There are gardens in the villages – as in ours – with apples, cherries and berries. Vegetable gardens, obviously. Cherries are 6–7 roubles per kg, cucumbers – 2.50. I was fed with a baked potato and cucumber yesterday and goose eggs and milk today.

  Lev could not begin to look for work until he had a passport, but he had left Pechora before one had been issued by the MVD, so now he had to spend a lot of time trying to get hold of one from the police in Kalinin, a task complicated by the fact that he had none of the required documents to hand except for his birth certificate. ‘As a way out of this vicious circle,’ he wrote to Sveta on 4 August,

  I went to the head of the local MVD administration’s passport department yesterday. He was suspicious at first, but then I guess he saw that my face showed nothing but suffering. They can’t decide about authorizing the passport without consulting ‘Moscow’ first. Fortunately, it turned out that one of Moscow’s representatives is here at the moment and they suggested that I call on him. But at the appo
inted 16:00 hours, another meeting had already started and he put me off until this morning. It’s now 10 o’clock and I’m waiting at the main post office before I go and see him. So that’s what’s happening.

  The next day, Lev moved out of the hayloft and became a lodger in a neighbouring house owned by an elderly couple, the Roshchins. He hoped that the move would allow him to register as a resident with the local soviet and thus qualify for a passport. ‘I’m going to go to the soviet first thing tomorrow morning,’ Lev wrote to Sveta, ‘it’s in a village with the inexplicably evangelical name of Emmaus. We should find out what kind of jokers the landed gentry were who called it that.’ Lev set out on the road to Emmaus. The passport desk was closed, so he was given a receipt and told to come back the next week. The chairwoman of the village soviet, once she found out that he had worked as an electrician, offered him a job at one of the smaller power stations in the area, but Lev rejected the offer, intending to apply for a job instead in Kalinin.