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

by Figes, Orlando

  Once we were settled, Lev announced that he would fetch Svetlana Aleksandrovna. I was surprised to hear him use her name and patronymic in this rather formal way. I put it down to his old-fashioned gentlemanly manners, although later I came to understand that it was part of his veneration for the woman who had saved him. Lev soon reappeared with Svetlana in a wheelchair. He manoeuvred it into the kitchen with an ease suggesting years of practice and devotion. Svetlana had been ill for a long time: heart disease and a series of small strokes had left her unable to walk. Her grey hair and pebble glasses made her appear very old. But once she began to talk, she displayed a liveliness, her playful blue eyes sparkling when she made a joke and smiled.

  Svetlana had retired from the institute in 1972, and six years later she and Lev had moved to Yasenevo, at that time a new suburb beyond the reach of the Metro. They lived with their daughter, Anastasia, who suffered chronically from bipolar depression and was unable to work. Their son, Nikita, a medical researcher, later moved with his wife and three children into an apartment in the same building.

  Despite his fears that he would ‘never turn into any kind of scientific researcher’, Lev in fact returned to the world of Soviet physics. In 1956, he joined the Cosmic Rays Laboratory, part of the Scientific Research Institute of Nuclear Physics at Moscow University, on the invitation of its new director, Naum Grigorov, Lev’s friend from the Physics Faculty before the war. Grigorov had recommended Lev to the Lebedev Physics Institute in 1940, and had written to him in the labour camp, even though, as a Party member, he had much to lose by doing so. Lev worked in the Cosmic Rays Laboratory for the next thirty-four years. He helped with the design and installation of the equipment and recorded observations from experiments. But it was too late for him to build a career as a researcher in his own right. Too many years had passed since he had worked at the Lebedev Institute, years of huge advances in the field of subatomic particles.

  Lev’s main focus was his family. Unusually, he shared the care of the children with Sveta, did the shopping, the cooking and cleaning at Kazarmennyi Pereulok, where they lived until the move to Yasenevo, and looked after Aleksandr Alekseevich, who died in 1962. Sveta was the dominant personality in the household, and made all the practical day-to-day decisions. But in important matters she deferred to Lev.

  They had the same philosophy of how to bring up their children. It was something they had discussed in their correspondence over many years, and their experience had made their common values clear. According to Nikita, they were not strict parents in the usual sense. ‘They did not try to control our behaviour,’ he explained. But the family held to a strict code of ethical principles:

  The moral authority of our parents was very great indeed. It induced in us a certain self-control: we limited our wants and learned to see the world as they saw it. They taught us through personal example and by talking to us openly and with respect. My father, in particular, tried to spend as much time as he could with us. He told us stories from his life, evaluating how people had behaved in the circumstances they had faced.

  Looking back on their influence today, I would say that it was definitely positive, although they did to some extent impose on us the values they’d taken from their own experience and try to shape our consciousness. As we grew up, we needed to free ourselves from some aspects of their rather strict didactic view. The education of children is a difficult process, and it’s hard to say what is good or bad.

  The main thing about our parents is that they were always ready to listen and help us correct our mistakes rather than punish us. In our family there was an atmosphere of complete trust. If someone said something, it meant that it was true (or that the person believed it sincerely). To doubt the word of someone in the family, including ours, was unthinkable. We were never afraid that our parents would punish us, or that they would not believe what we said. But we were afraid of their judgement.

  Lev and Sveta talked freely about their past to their children – a rare phenomenon in families that had been swept up in the mass arrests of the Stalin period. Litvinenko and Lileev, for example, did not talk about the labour camp to their children. Like millions of former prisoners, they wanted to protect them from the truth, which could burden them for life with the stigma of their ‘spoilt biography’. Perhaps they also wanted to protect themselves from the judgement of their children, who were taught at school to believe in enemies of the people. Lev and Sveta took a different view. They thought that it was wrong to conceal anything from Nikita and Anastasia and wanted to prepare them for the difficulties they were bound to face. As Sveta had once written, it was not enough to love: ‘One must be able … to live in this world, which will probably always remain cruel’.

  As a child Nikita took his parents’ story for granted. He thought of it as normal, ordinary. It was only in his later teenage years that he came to understand how exceptional it was. He was always aware, however, that his parents’ history was not something he should talk about at school or anywhere outside the trusted circle of relatives and friends. ‘From an early age I understood that we had two different lives – one lived in public and the other privately –which we somehow needed to combine yet keep apart.’

  It was mainly Lev who talked about the past. Sveta did not like to dwell on it. Lev was proud of her and liked to tell the story about how she’d waited all those years for him. It was his way of reminding the children – who often bore the brunt of her bad temper when she got tired or depressed – that their mother was wonderful, no matter what.

  There were also lessons that he wanted them to learn. ‘My father did not talk to us about the horrors of the Gulag,’ recalls Nikita, ‘but he tried to give us advice and guiding principles, illustrating them with examples from his life inside the camps. The first was never to feel sorry for yourself, a commandment he would reinforce by telling us about fellow prisoners who never once complained. The second principle was that wherever you may find yourself, if only temporarily, you should always try to live as if it’s permanent.’

  Nikita and Anastasia heard about the camps from the many former prisoners who visited their parents, whose home was always open to friends from Pechora. The connections established in the Gulag lasted for generations, uniting families across the Soviet Union. The Mishchenkos would stay with the Lileevs when they went to Leningrad, with the Litvinenkos in Kiev and with the Terletskys in Lvov; and all these families would stay with them in the Soviet capital. After his release, at the age of thirty-three, Lileev studied at the Polytechnic Institute in Leningrad and then became a teacher (he is still alive). Terletsky went to the Arts Institute in Lvov and became a sculptor (he died in 1993). Strelkov also kept in touch with Lev and often came to see him in Moscow. Nikita remembers him much as he appears in the photographs from Pechora, only older: ‘He was very charming, full of energy, with curly white hair, and smoked a pipe.’ Strelkov died in 1976.

  Lev retired from the Cosmic Rays Laboratory in 1990, at the age of seventy-two. In 1998, he wrote a short account of his time in the labour camp and sent the typescript to the Historical-Regional Museum in Pechora, which at that time was collecting memoirs of the camp by former prisoners. In 2006, he published his memoirs, Poka ia pomniu (‘While I Remember’), which were mainly about his war years. The book contained a section at the end about Pechora, similar to the earlier typescript, and in an appendix Sveta’s brief account of her visits to the labour camp. In 2007 the couple gave their archive to Memorial, which had carried out a series of interviews with Lev about his experiences in the war.

  We spent two days in their apartment filming interviews. Lev had a photographic memory and a remarkable ability to reflect on his own recollections of the past. Svetlana had less to say. But she sat with Lev and held his hand, and when I asked her what had made her fall in love with him, she thought for a few moments and replied: ‘I knew he was my future from the start. When he was not there, I would look for him, and he would always appear by my side. That i
s love.’

  Lev Glebovich died on 18 July 2008; Svetlana Aleksandrovna on 2 January 2010. They are buried side by side in the Golovinskoe Cemetery in Moscow.

  In 1980, the wood-combine in Pechora finally burned down. No one was surprised. Only the iron entrance gate, the power station’s brick chimney and a few buildings were left standing. By decree of the Ministry of Transport the wood-combine was liquidated shortly after the fire. It has since become a wasteland inhabited by a few people and wild dogs.

  ALSO BY ORLANDO FIGES

  Peasant Russia, Civil War:

  The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921

  A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924

  Interpreting the Russian Revolution:

  The Language and Symbols of 1917

  (with Boris Kolonitskii)

  Natasha’s Dance:

  A Cultural History of Russia

  The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia

  The Crimean War: A History

  Acknowledgements

  This book really belongs to the Mishchenkos. It is their story, and without their help it could not have been written. Lev Glebovich and Svetlana Aleksandrovna were supportive from the start of this project. I am only sorry that they did not live to see its fruition, but hope their family will accept this book as a token of my debt of gratitude to them. Nikita L’vovich read the drafts in Russian, added valuable insights and commentaries, and made criticisms with touching gentleness and tact. I am also grateful to his children, Ilia, Lida and Vera Mishchenko, all three rightly proud of their grandparents.

  In terms of the research and writing of this book my greatest debt is to Irina Ostrovskaya, Senior Researcher at Memorial, who knew and worked with Lev Glebovich and Svetlana Aleksandrovna for many years before the discovery of their letters. Irina persuaded them to give me access to their archive, conducted most of the filmed interviews, supervised the transcription of the letters, provided biographical notes, answered endless queries and read my drafts in Russian, correcting my mistakes with tireless patience and challenging my views on many things.

  At Memorial in Moscow I would also like to thank Alyona Kozlova, Elena Zhemkova and the members of the academic council, who read sections of the draft.

  In Pechora I would like to thank Tatiana Afanas’eva, the director of Memorial, who gave up a great deal of her time to help my research, and Boris Ivanov, who provided invaluable information about the town and wood-combine. Special thanks are owed to him for his extraordinary drawing of the convoy outside the 1st Colony.

  In Syktykvar I would like to say a special thanks to Anton Niskovsky, a researcher in the People’s Archive of the Republic of Komi, who helped me find, among many other valuable documents, the Gulag files of the wood-combine and the Pechora labour camp.

  I owe a debt of gratitude to the BBC for two visits to Moscow: the first with Mark Burman, the radio producer, who was with me when we discovered the trunks at Memorial; the second with Ben Lewis and Paul Cox to film the interviews. I would like to thank Nick Fraser for investing in the project, and Ben Lewis for his efforts to raise interest in a documentary film. Thanks are also due to the UK Film Council for financing the copying of the dvds for the Mishchenkos and Memorial. I am particularly grateful to Tanya Seghatchian, whose support has helped me far more than she knows.

  The Leverhulme Trust financed the transcription of the letters by Memorial. I am grateful to the Trust for its generous support.

  Special thanks are also due to my friend Emmanuel Roman, who has been a keen supporter of this project and helped to finance it.

  With the translation of the letters into English I was helped by Nicky Brown, who did the groundwork for my own translations of the letters in this book. I am very grateful to Nicky, a talented translator, who gave some precious insights into the letters. I am also grateful to Polina Haynes, who translated my draft chapters into Russian (so that they could then be checked by the Mishchenkos and Memorial) with tremendous care to detail and efficiency.

  I would like to thank David Khmelnitsky for his gudiance in the world of Soviet physics; Emily Johnson for sharing her research on Gulag letters; Anna Rotkirch for her advice on matters of courtship; and Deborah Kaple for sending me an early copy of her Gulag Boss. Special thanks are also due to Rodric Braithwaite and Hiroaki Kuromiya, who read the draft in its entirety and provided valuable commentary.

  I would like to thank my family – Stephanie, Eva, Lydia, Alice, Kate and Stoph – who read or listened to the early drafts and made helpful suggestions.

  As ever, I owe a debt of gratitude to my agent, Deborah Rogers, who always believed in this book, a new departure for my work, and fought hard for me to write it in this form. At RCW Mohsen Shah, Stephen Edwards and Laurence Laluyaux have been fantastic over many years.

  At Penguin I would like to thank Simon Winder, my ever supportive editor, Stefan McGrath, Jenny Fry, Marina Kemp, Penelope Vogler and David Watson, the copy-editor; at Metropolitan, the copy-editor Roslyn Schloss. But my greatest editorial debt is to Sara Bershtel at Metropolitan, whose wise guidance and rigorous attention to detail have made this a better book.

  London, January 2012

  A Note from Memorial

  Letters have a special value for the historian of daily life. Kept in private family archives, they offer direct evidence of a lived reality, written at the time, and letting us into the interior world of the people writing them. Through letters we can follow the stories of individuals, families and even whole generations against the background of historical events. They are particularly valuable when they are written during periods of turmoil in the lives of their authors.

  Memorial has a large archive of correspondence from the time of the Gulag – letters to the camps and letters from the camps. Most of the letters are to the camps. For prisoners, a letter was the only thread connecting them to ‘normal’ life. They tried not to lose the letters they received, and after their release they preserved them as precious things. By contrast, few letters from the camp survive. It was dangerous to hold on to ‘evidence’ of contact with a prisoner.

  The Memorial archive contains various collections of such letters. Sometimes just a single page – or only a torn fragment – has survived. In other cases there may be a few letters, rarely more, usually written within a few months or a year. To find both sides of a correspondence is extremely rare indeed: that is an enormous stroke of luck for a researcher.

  All of which is to underline the extraordinary significance of the eight-and-a-half year correspondence between Lev Mishchenko and Svetlana Ivanova. Preserved in its entirety in the Moscow archive of Memorial, it is the biggest known collection of private letters relating to the history of the Gulag. From the period of Mishchenko’s imprisonment in the Pechora labour camp there are 1,246 letters: 647 from Lev to Svetlana; and 599 from her to him.

  Memorial’s acquaintance with the Mishchenko family began in 2000, when Lev Glebovich was working on his memoirs. There were lots of questions our researchers wanted to ask him about his reminiscences, and in the course of many conversations he told us the story of his life. In these interviews Lev often mentioned the letters, but he gave them no importance, thinking they were simply private documents of little general interest. But as he wrote his memoirs and reflected on the past, Lev began to see himself from another perspective, as a witness of twentieth-century history. It was only in 2007, after overcoming many doubts, that he and Svetlana Aleksandrovna decided to give their family archive, including the letters to and from the camp, to Memorial.

  The correspondence is unique in its size and quality. Remarkably, it is a complete run of letters – from the first written by Lev from the camp on 12 July 1946 to the last he sent from Kalinin on 23 November 1954. All the letters were carefully dated and numbered by their authors, and at the start of every year the numbering began again. Lev and Svetlana kept a strict account of the correspondence and told each other about the receipt of ea
ch letter.

  It is no longer possible to tell which letters were sent by the normal post and which through official channels: there are no censors’ marks or stamps. Most of the letters did not pass through the censors but even these cannot be thought of as entirely free: their authors understood and always bore in mind that they could be intercepted by the authorities, so in the letters there are many silences, hinted meanings and allusions.

  To store the letters he received Lev made a small hiding place underneath the floorboards of his barrack. When he had collected a large number of letters, he sent them in a parcel back to Svetlana in Moscow with the help of the voluntary workers who had delivered them to him.

  The letters written from the labour camp by Mishchenko contain:

  1. Information about life inside the camp: the relations between the prisoners; their work; conditions in the barracks; their relations with the administration of the camp; details about feuds, intrigues, denunciations and slander.