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

by Figes, Orlando

The delay was frustrating. Lev had been planning to visit Sveta, but the problems with his passport meant that ‘my journey has to be postponed’, as he wrote to Sveta on 7 August.

  I called you today (some girl came to the phone) to let you know as soon as possible. My passport will be ready ‘perhaps today after 4 o’clock in the afternoon’, but most likely I won’t have it until the next day the passport desk is open, which is Tuesday. After that it’s supposed to be taken to the village soviet for registration, and from there to the police on the next day they’re open – possibly Wednesday or else Saturday again (the office is open only 3 days a week). What a lot of tedious red tape. Damn those Pechora cretins from the special department.

  Meanwhile Lev occupied himself in Kuzminskoe. He liked the Roshchins, but as an urbanite he found their peasant way of life, shared by much of the rural population, strange and primitive. He described it to Sveta:

  My old couple – Petr Kuzmich and Marfa Egorovna – are illiterate and childless. Their wooden hut is made up of small anterooms and one large room, approximately 6 × 6 m, with a little kitchen off to the side. It’s relatively clean; in comparison with the previous place it’s even very clean. There is a smell of ammonia – the pigsty is next door (under the same roof which stretches over the interior courtyard) and doubles as the toilet. This is new to me but, if you believe a certain folk rhyme I heard a long time ago, it is characteristic of villages in Tver. After 20–30 minutes you don’t notice the smell, and you take great pleasure in the silence and spaciousness and the illumination of the table I use for writing (with one window in front and another to the left) and the tranquil nature of the hosts.

  The old couple are letting me sleep on a day bed in their main room for 10 roubles a day, with full board, which consists of:

  1) Breakfast – eaten with them just like all the other meals – made up of something like potatoes with cucumber, cottage cheese and tea.

  2) Lunch – I still don’t know what this consists of.

  3) Dinner – either soup or kasha and milk. There’s no tea in the evenings.

  They don’t have any bedclothes; laundry wasn’t agreed on but it’s hardly likely that the grandmother is going to do the laundry since she’s 70 and doesn’t work on the kolkhoz. The grandpa repairs saddles on the kolkhoz. He drinks vodka, smokes and has tuberculosis. But on the whole he seems like a good fellow. I should also buy them some knives and forks because all they have in the house is a samovar and a couple of plates and spoons. It’s really quite surprising.

  From Kuzminskoe Lev could walk to Kalinin, only 12 kilometres away. He visited the town and reported on its merits as a place to live. He considered it a ‘handsome’ place with lovely squares and streets, well-maintained historical buildings and ‘none of the tasteless mix of styles or pretensions to style of certain buildings on Gorky Street in Moscow, for example’, he wrote to Sveta. The housing situation was not good, however. It was practically impossible to find an apartment. There were many ‘new arrivals’ in the town, released prisoners attracted to Kalinin’s proximity to the Soviet capital. They were paying 7 roubles a day just for a bed in a hostel. Thinking of the money Sveta’s father had given the two of them, Lev wondered about the cost of purchasing a house.

  A mere cubbyhole in a house on the outskirts of Kalinin costs 14,000. From that I assume that it isn’t possible to find a governor’s house for 30,000. It may be better not to look in Kalinin at all and to try somewhere in Yar[oslavl] or Vor[onezh]. But if we’re being serious I think your father himself needs to look, though there’s no great rush. Half a hut here in the village was bought recently for 10,000, which was considered a good deal, even though it’s going to need repairs at the new owners’ expense.

  The Roshchins.

  Sveta, who had made another work trip to inspect the factory in Yaroslavl, wrote to Lev about prospects in the northern Volga town:

  Right now is still a very bad time for finding work – they’re expecting cutbacks everywhere. The management is being cut by 12 per cent here … So don’t take it personally, Levi. You yourself have written that in the majority of cases they just reply ‘We don’t need anyone’ without asking a single question. And don’t lose heart, even if all this drags on, or else I’ll also start sinking just by looking at you.

  By the end of August, Lev had at last managed to get his passport from the Emmaus soviet. He was registered to live (and therefore work) in the Kalinin area. But in the passport was the stamp, ‘Art. 39’, which told prospective employers that he was a former prisoner. Lev looked for work in more than twenty factories. He applied for jobs on construction sites, in schools, even in a theatre and a museum. But everywhere the answer was the same: ‘We absolutely don’t need anyone.’ After three months of searching, Lev was becoming despondent. ‘Svetloe,’ he wrote on 23 November.

  The day hasn’t really yielded anything new, unless you count the frail hopes for work at 3 of the 9 places I’ve visited over the last 24 hours. I’ve been to the trade school, the textile training college, the textile factory (a different one – named after Vagzhanov), the knitting factory, the silk-weaving factory (‘Proletarian’), the Kalinin construction materials testing laboratory and the construction site for the printing plant, but nobody has anything. Three of the places asked me to check back again: the Voroshilov textile factory, which needs a heating engineer, and the Volodarsky garment factory, where there’s a vacant position for a chemical treatment engineer (or a foreman) – my ‘crowning role’ over the last year and a half, as you know. Both places are cutting back on staff and they weren’t sure whether they’d fill these posts with their own employees, so they’re going to consult among themselves and give me an answer during the day tomorrow. The third place is the industrial training college correspondence department, where the teachers of theoretical mechanics and higher mathematics have been complaining to the director that they’re overworked. The director is intending to find out whether these teachers really mean to cut back some of their hours, in which case he’s going to recommend me to take up the slack. But there’s huge difference between abstract complaints about being overworked and an actual refusal of money, so I’m not really expecting too much on Monday (or Tuesday), when I’m to call in for the results of the director’s negotiations. That’s all for the time being.

  In the end Lev gave up looking for a job altogether. Instead Sveta found him freelance work as a translator through Sergei Rzhevkin (‘Uncle Seryozha’), his father’s friend who had been a professor of acoustics at Moscow University. Rzhevkin had good contacts at Physics, a Moscow-based journal that needed translations of articles from German, French and English – all languages that Lev had learned at school or picked up in the labour camps. Sveta would bring the articles to Kuzminskoe and take the translated texts back to Moscow, where she would type them out on a typewriter borrowed from a neighbour in her block of flats. Rzhevkin would present the translations to the editorial board of the journal in his own name and give Sveta the payments, which she would pass along to Lev. Had it been found out that the translations had been done by a former prisoner prohibited from working in the Soviet capital, there would have been a scandal. Soon Lev was also writing book reviews and articles that Rzhevkin signed with his own name, though again all the money went to Lev.

  Lev came frequently to see Sveta in Moscow. He often stayed for days, sometimes even longer than a week. He had no legal right to be in the Soviet capital; that was what the stamp in his passport meant. If he had been caught by the police, he would have been expelled and possibly sent back to a labour camp. At first, the thought of entering Moscow filled him with anxiety. But he took comfort from the thought that Sveta would be there to support him. ‘Sveta,’ he had written in anticipation of his first visit, in August,

  Sometimes when I’m in crowded places or on the street I suddenly start to feel ill at ease, but then I imagine that you’re next to me and right away I can lift my head higher, the awkwardness passes, an
d everything seems simpler and easier.

  What did Lev make of Moscow? He had not seen it for thirteen years, and all that time he had yearned to return to it. He had loved to talk about it with his fellow Muscovites in the labour camp, to hear news about it from Sveta. He had even seen it in his dreams. Looking back on his return to Moscow, Lev recalled that the city did not seem so greatly changed. There were more cars on the roads, the Metro was much busier and people were better-dressed, but otherwise it felt like the ‘same old Moscow’ he had known until the age of twenty-four.

  By the end of 1954, Lev was practically living at the Ivanov apartment. During the day, while Sveta was at work, he would do his translations and look after Sveta’s mother, who was now in the advanced stages of TB. Sveta’s father was at home as well and in need of care, so Sveta had employed a housekeeper, who slept in the kitchen, the only space for her in the apartment. Lev took Yara’s room – Sveta’s brother was now in Leningrad – and Sveta slept with her parents so that she could tend to her mother at night.

  Anastasia died on 28 January 1955. Lev was with her when she passed away. He had just raised her in bed to make her more comfortable and was embracing her, as she had embraced him all those years ago before his departure for the front, when she said her final words, ‘Thank you, God.’

  Because he was staying in Moscow illegally, Lev was careful to avoid Sveta’s neighbours on the stairs, although some of the more trusted ones had known about him for years. He also had to avoid the police on the street – not an easy task given his propensity for crossing in places where he was accustomed to from his student days without knowing whether they were legal crossings any more (post-war Moscow had strict new laws against jaywalking). He never took his passport when he left the house, in case he was stopped by the police. Instead he took an empty bag, a shopping list and money, so that he could say he lived around the corner and had nipped out to the shops. Sometimes he put a bottle of vodka into the bag as a prop he could claim to have bought for a friend who had come to stay: it added credibility to his story and gave the police something to confiscate while they let him continue on his way. Everything went smoothly until one day there was a knock on the Ivanovs’ door. It was a policeman. He asked who was living there without a right of residence. Hearing the conversation in the hall, Lev prepared to make a run for it. But the policeman was interested in the housekeeper, who had indeed not registered with the police. The situation was resolved and Lev could breathe more easily.

  On 17 September 1955, Lev had some good news. The Soviet government declared an amnesty for Soviet servicemen who had collaborated with the Germans during the war. The announcement came unexpectedly a week after Konrad Adenauer, the Chancellor of West Germany, visited Moscow and asked for the release of German nationals from the Gulag. To improve relations with West Germany, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, ordered the release of 9,000 German POW s imprisoned in the Gulag for ‘crimes against humanity’ under article 58 of the Soviet penal code. But since it was absurd to liberate the Germans and go on punishing their ‘collaborators’ in the Soviet Union, the amnesty was soon extended to Soviet servicemen like Lev, sentenced under article 58 for ‘treason against the motherland’.

  The amnesty meant everything to Lev – far more than the formal recognition of his rehabilitation by the government. It allowed him to return to Moscow as a legal resident and look for work with a clean passport; it let him start a new life with Sveta as his wife. The day after the amnesty’s announcement in Izvestiia, Lev went back to the Emmaus soviet and got the ‘Art. 39’ stamp crossed out in his passport. His status now reverted to the legal basis of his pre-arrest passport, whose number was recorded with a statement of this fact on the same page as the crossed-out stamp. With his sentence cancelled from the record, Lev could openly live with Sveta in her apartment, if they were registered as man and wife. Until they could live together legally, they had not planned to get married.

  They registered their marriage on 27 September 1955. Both of them were thirty-eight years old. There was no wedding ceremony, no special dress or suit that either of them wore for the occasion, no invited guests or witnesses. They didn’t even have wedding rings. Lev and Sveta simply took their passports to the local office of the civil registry, a ‘gloomy basement room’, as Lev recalled, and registered themselves as man and wife. Lev’s name was then added to the list of residents at Sveta’s house. The young woman in the office who recorded their marriage understood that Lev was a newly released prisoner; the police had issued his passport in Kalinin, well known as a place of temporary settlement for ex-prisoners, and there was that crossed-out stamp in it. Thinking she might prevent Sveta from ruining her life by marrying a former prisoner, the woman said to her, ‘I wouldn’t recommend you marry him.’ Sveta smiled. ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘Just put his name down as my husband.’

  Lev and Sveta went home and told her father that they were married. ‘Let me kiss you both,’ Aleksandr said. ‘That was all our wedding was,’ Lev recalled. ‘There was no celebration.’ But eventually relatives and friends arrived with wedding gifts, food was put on the table, and toasts were drunk to the couple. There was no best man to make a speech, but a few days later Strelkov came to congratulate the newlyweds, and no one was better suited for that role. It was Strelkov who had saved Lev’s life.

  Strelkov had been released in November 1954. The old Bolshevik had served sixteen of the twenty-five years of his sentence. Dedicated to the Soviet cause, Strelkov had decided to continue working at the wood-combine, taking on the relatively well-paid post of deputy head of works at a time when the labour camp was being turned into an industrial enterprise under the control of the Ministry of Transport. Strelkov no longer lived in the laboratory but in a room in the communal block on Soviet Street, although he kept his books and other things with the Aleksandrovskys, inside the industrial zone. At the time of Lev and Sveta’s wedding, Strelkov was in Moscow to see his daughter, Valya, and his seven-year-old grandson, whom he had never met.

  ‘Lev, I need your advice,’ Strelkov said when he came to see him and Sveta. ‘I need to buy a present for somebody, and you have an artistic sense, so you can help me choose something.’ Strelkov took Lev to an antique shop in Stoleshnikov Pereulok, just off Gorky Street in the centre of Moscow, and asked him to choose one of the boxed sets of silver-plated cutlery as a gift for his unnamed friend. Before Lev had a chance to make his choice, Strelkov picked out a copper-nickel set that turned out to be by far the most expensive on display. Lev suggested that they buy a cheaper one. He did not want his friend to waste his hard-earned money. But Strelkov would have none of it. He paid the shop assistant, then turned to Lev and said, ‘This is a wedding present for you and Svetlana.’

  Lev and Sveta began their married life together. She went on working at the institute, and Lev went looking for a job. The amnesty had not made employers any less suspicious, and in Moscow he met the same prejudice as in Kalinin. He was turned away from factories and institutes – even from the Moscow Zoo, which was looking for an electrician – until finally he was hired as an engineer in a factory making scientific instruments. The job advertisement had called for an engineer with expertise in physics. The boss was so delighted to find someone with Lev’s scientific background that he brushed aside Lev’s warnings about having been a prisoner and sent him off directly to the chief engineer, who asked him how much he was earning from his translations and then offered more, a starting salary of 600 roubles a month. It was an average worker’s wage, but enough to live on with Sveta’s salary, which was almost twice that sum.

  Lev and Sveta lived with her father at Kazarmennyi Pereulok, the newly married couple sleeping in the same large room as Aleksandr so that they could care for him at night. Sveta’s father gradually recovered something of his health. Retiring from work, he read a lot and did odd chores around the house while Lev and Sveta were at their jobs. They all got along. For the first time since his childhood, perhaps
for the first time ever, Lev experienced the happiness of family life.

  In December 1955, at the age of thirty-eight, Sveta gave birth to a daughter, whom they called Anastasia (Nastia), after Sveta’s mother. In January 1957 they had a son, Nikita, named after Lev’s uncle. To have two children at their age, after all they had been through, must have seemed a miracle.

  In 1945, after one of the most stressful nights of interrogration by the SMERSH investigators in Weimar, Lev had dreamed of Sveta in a white dress, kneeling by the side of a little girl. He had seen her in that vivid dream again in 1949, a few days after Sveta left him in Pechora.

  In 1962, Lev and Sveta were staying with the children at Uncle Nikita’s dacha at Malakhovka. One day, they were walking to the lake across a field that skirted the forest. Lev was in front, Sveta behind him with Anastasia, who was then six. ‘As I reached the edge of the forest,’ Lev recalled, ‘I had this feeling … I turned around and behind me I saw Sveta in a white dress kneeling on the ground to adjust something on Nastia’s dress. It was exactly what I had seen in my dream – Sveta on the right and, on the left, our little girl.’

  Epilogue

  In March 2008 I returned to Moscow to meet Lev and Svetlana. I wanted to record some interviews with them and ask them about the letters, which were hard to read and understand, even for a native Russian speaker, and full of details, code words, initials and hidden meanings that only they were able to explain.

  I went with Irina Ostrovskaya from Memorial to their apartment on the fourteenth floor of a tower block in Yasenevo, a residential suburb in the south-west corner of Moscow. When we came out of the lift, we were met by Lev Glebovich, small and thin with a gentle weathered face, smartly dressed in a light-blue shirt and grey trousers, who introduced himself in broken English and showed us into the apartment with a natural courtesy. Lev was nimble on his feet for a ninety-one-year-old. As he moved the furniture in the narrow entrance-hall to make room for our equipment, I noticed he was strong. We made ourselves at home in the small kitchen whose windows looked out on the concrete towers and factory smokestacks of Moscow. Bread, sausage, sweets and biscuits had been placed on the Formica table for our visit. Lev told us that his grandson had been sent to buy more bread. He was anxious that we might not have enough – a worry I had come across on previous visits to survivors of the camps.