Book Read Free

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

Page 34

by Figes, Orlando


  p. 254 ‘Sveta, my darling, you must not take yourself to task’: LM53-65.

  p. 254 ‘Of course, Lev, it’s 14 months’: SI53-61.

  p. 255 ‘Levi, why do you dismiss’: SI49-17.

  p. 256 ‘Yaroslavl is a nice town’: SI53-78.

  p. 256 ‘M. A. says that Voronezh is better’: SI53-77.

  p. 256 ‘I’ve been told good things’: LM54-6.

  p. 257 ‘So, Levi … no matter whom I ask’: SI54-3.

  p. 257 ‘As regards the possibility’: LM54-19.

  p. 258 ‘further down the line’: LM53-77.

  p. 258 ‘My darling Sveta, the things I’m going to write’: LM54-21.

  p. 259 ‘Spring has been here for three days now’: LM54-13.

  p. 259 ‘In the hope of glory and good’: LM54-1 (from Pushkin’s ‘Stanzas’).

  p. 259 ‘My darling … I’ve been planning to tell you’: SI54-8.

  p. 259 ‘I can imagine’: SI53-81.

  p. 259 ‘if only for a day or two’: LM54-21.

  p. 260 ‘I don’t think—as far as I understand’: LM54-15.

  p. 260 ‘I could apply for a change’: LM54-21.

  p. 261 ‘For a long time now’: SI54-26a.

  p. 262 ‘I should have also written about Kalinin’: LM54-21.

  p. 262 ‘almost accidentally, but not completely’: SI54-31a.

  p. 262 ‘so vast and individuals get lost there’: SI54-30a.

  p. 262 ‘At home, I casually asked’: SI54-30a.

  p. 263 ‘list of towns’: SI54-30a.

  p. 263 ‘Possible options’: SI54-31a.

  p. 264 ‘I’m already falling headlong’: SI54-31.

  p. 264 ‘Sveta, my darling, there’s not going to be any need’: LM54-26.

  p. 265 ‘My leaving is still’: LM54-24.

  p. 265 ‘no more certainty about the future’: LM54-25.

  p. 265 ‘I’ll go about tracking down’: LM54-25.

  p. 266 ‘Papa’s condition complicated’: SI54-34a.

  p. 266 ‘Svetloe, after your telegram’: LM54-29.

  Chapter 12

  p. 268 ‘two wooden suitcases’: Interview with Lev, 2006.

  p. 268 ‘Send your letters here’: LM54-27a.

  p. 268 Trip to Kanin: Interview with Igor Aleksandrovsky, 2010.

  p. 269 Lev’s arrival in Moscow: Interview with Lev, 2006.

  p. 269 ‘the lights in the windows’, ‘Anastasia Erofeevna’: Poka ia pomniu, p. 24.

  p. 269 ‘I don’t want our first meeting’: SI53-81.

  p. 270 ‘30,000 roubles’: Interview with Lev, 2008.

  p. 270 ‘Dear Anastasia Erofeevna!’: LM54-30.

  p. 271 Kuzminskoe descriptions: LM54-31.

  p. 271 ‘I found the woman quickly’: LM54-31.

  p. 272 ‘As a way out of this vicious circle’: LM54-32.

  p. 273 ‘I’m going to go to the soviet’: LM54-33.

  p. 273 ‘my journey has to be postponed’: LM54-36.

  p. 273 ‘My old couple’: LM54-33.

  p. 274 ‘handsome’, ‘none of the tasteless mix’: LM54-35.

  p. 274 ‘They were paying 7 roubles a day’: LM54-40.

  p. 275 ‘A mere cubbyhole’: LM54-40.

  p. 275 ‘Right now is still a very bad time’: SI54-48.

  p. 276 ‘We absolutely don’t need anyone’: LM54-38.

  p. 277 Freelance work as a translator: Poka ia pomniu, p. 107.

  p. 277 ‘Sveta … Sometimes when I’m in crowded places’: LM54-35.

  p. 278 ‘same old Moscow’: Interview with Lev, 2008.

  p. 278 Anastasia’s death, ‘Thank you, God’: Interview with Lev, 2008.

  p. 278 ‘empty bag, a shopping list and money’: Poka ia pomniu, p. 108.

  p. 279 ‘It was a policeman’: Interview with Lev, 2008.

  p. 279 Amnesty of 17 September 1955: Rossii, Spravochnik po GULAGu vol. 1, p. 16.

  p. 280 ‘gloomy basement room’: Interview with Lev, 2008.

  p. 280 ‘I wouldn’t recommend you marry him’: Poka ia pomniu, p. 110.

  p. 280 ‘Let me kiss you both’: Interview with Lev, 2008.

  p. 280 Strelkov details: V. Aleksandrovsky to LM , 20 February 1955.

  p. 280 ‘Lev, I need your advice’: Interview with Lev, 2008.

  p. 281 Lev’s job searches in Moscow: Interview with Lev, 2006.

  p. 282 ‘As I reached the edge of the forest’: Interview with Lev, 2008.

  Epilogue

  p. 284 ‘never turn into any kind of scientific researcher’: LM54-21.

  p. 285 ‘They did not try to control’: Communication by Nikita Mishchenko.

  p. 286 ‘One must be able … to live in this world’: SI47-30.

  p. 286 ‘From an early age’, ‘My father did not talk’, ‘He was very charming’: Communication by Nikita Mishchenko.

  p. 287 ‘I knew he was my future from the start’: Interview with Svetlana, 2008.

  About the Author

  ORLANDO FIGES is the author of The Crimean War, The Whisperers, Natasha’s Dance, and A People’s Tragedy, which have been translated into twenty-seven languages. The recipient of the Wolfson History Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, among others, Figes is a professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London.

  Notes

  1 Russian names have a full and a shorter version (used by friends and relatives) and any number of affectionate diminutives. The short form of Svetlana is Sveta but she was also known as Svetochka, Svetik, Svetlanka, etc. In his letters from the labour camp Lev would often call her ‘Svet’ or ‘Svetloe’ (Russian words for ‘light’ – an association which he liked). From this point in the text we will know her as Sveta.

  2 The Mensheviks were a Marxist party opposed to the Bolshevik dictatorship.

  3 She was actually the illegitimate daughter of Boris Tolmachev, the first husband of Aunt Katya.

  4 Carlo Rossi, the Italian architect who built many buildings and ensembles in St Petersburg in the reign of Nicholas I (1825–55).

  5 The rooms were laid out like this:

  6 Tanya had been pressured into volunteering by the military authorities, which desperately needed nurses for the front. To refuse would have put not only Tanya but her family in danger of arrest.

  7 A punishment technique designed to circumvent the Geneva Convention, which supposedly protected POWs (though not Soviet ones) in German concentration camps.

  8 Lev was saved from drowning in the Istra River on 31 July 1936.

  9 Formerly the Scientific-Research Institute for the Resin Industry.

  10 Lev was sentenced under Article 58-1(b) of the Criminal Code.

  11 Isaac Levitan (1860–1900) and Arkhip Kuindzhi (1842–1910), Russian landscape painters.

  12 A code word for the Gulag.

  13 Russian poet (1880–1972).

  14 From ‘How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich’.

  15 An opera by Tchaikovsky.

  16 The average monthly wage of a factory worker in Moscow was about 750 roubles.

  17 Andrei Tupolev (1888–1972), the Soviet aeroplane designer, was arrested in 1937 and worked as a prisoner in a secret NKVD research and development laboratory. He was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1943. Leonid Ramzin (1887–1948) was a Soviet heating engineer imprisoned in the Gulag from 1930 to 1936. He too won the Stalin Prize in 1943.

  18 A Russian folk-song (‘Ton’kaya riabina’), sad and beautiful, whose words had a special resonance for Lev and Sveta:

  Why do you stand swaying,

  Slender rowan tree,

  With your head bowed

  Down to your very roots?

  While across the road,

  Over the broad river,

  Also alone,

  An oak tree stands tall.

  How can I, as the rowan tree,

  Get closer to the oak?

  If I could I would not

  Stoop and sway.

  With my slender branches

  I would nest
le into the oak

  And with its leaves

  I would whisper day and night.

  But the rowan-tree can never

  Get across to that big oak.

  It’s condemned forever

  To bend and sway alone!

  19 Article 58-1(a) was treason against the motherland – a sentence similar to Lev’s Article 58-1(b) (treason against the motherland by military personnel).

  20 Anton Frantsevich Gavlovskii, a prisoner in Pechora since 1938, worked as an assistant in Strelkov’s laboratory.

  21 Code for the free worker who had agreed to hide her in the industrial zone.

  22 A reproduction of a famous landscape painting by Isaac Levitan which Sveta had brought as a gift.

  23 The sedimentation rate of red blood cells.

  24 The institute near Sverdlovsk where Sveta had worked in 1943.

  25 His stomach was ripped open by a piece of iron protruding from the side of a passing lorry.

  26 A bride who has lost her groom (solomennaia nevesta). In Russian folklore grass was used as a symbolic payment on the agreement of a contract.

  27 Shows at the Central Children’s Theatre based on tales by the Soviet children’s poet Samuil Marshak.

  28 This is one of the main themes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

  29 In White Nights, his account of his imprisonment in the Pechora Gulag from 1940 to 1942, Menachem Begin, later to become Prime Minister of Israel, quotes a fellow prisoner, who claimed the ‘north-flies’ of Pechora were even worse than ordinary mosquitoes: ‘They guard the prisoners better than all the strelki [sentries] with their rifles. How? Once a prisoner got out of the camp and ran away. A strelki fired after him, chased him, hunted for him with bloodhounds, in vain. The prisoner had vanished … Three days later the escapee returned of his own accord … He was unrecognisable. They took him to “solitary”. But he swore he would never again try to escape. The north-flies had taught him a lesson.’ (Begin, White Nights, pp. 160–61).

  30 Lev was probably thinking of the ‘special regime’ camps (osobye lageria), of which ten were established in the spring of 1948 to isolate the ‘most dangerous’ political prisoners (‘spies, diversionists, terrorists, Trotskyists, right-wingers, Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, Anarchists, nationalists, White emigrants and participants in other anti-Soviet organizations’). The ‘special regime’ camps were located in the harshest regions of the country, including several near or above the Arctic Circle (Inta, Vorkuta, Noril’sk and Kolyma). Prisoners had numbers branded on their skin, wore striped uniforms, and were allowed only ‘minimal contact with the outside world’ (Applebaum, Gulag, p. 419).

  31 Russians spoke of people ‘sitting’ in prison.

  32 Sveta is talking about making contact with the unnamed voluntary workers who will put her up in the settlement inside the industrial zone, Boris Arvanitopulo (the head of the electric power station in the wood-combine) and his wife Vera.

  33 Natalia Arkadevna must have advised Lev not to send a telegram.

  34 All that remained of Terletsky’s ten-year sentence when he was sent to Inta.

  35 The head of the Electrical Group, Semenov was a political prisoner, sentenced to ten years in 1944.

  36 Novels by the Russian writer Aleksandr Grin (1880–1932), whose real name was Grinevsky.

  37 Sveta is quoting a famous phrase attributed to Catherine the Great (‘pobeditelei ne sudiat’), supposedly said by her in 1773 when General Suvorov was brought before a military tribunal after successfully storming a Turkish fortress on the Danube River against the orders of Field Marshal Rumiantsev.

  38 The Russian word for vodka starts with the third letter of the alphabet.

  39 He must have helped Sveta in some way during her visit.

  40 By comparison, voluntary workers in the wood-combine earned on average about 800 roubles a month, and administrative personnel around 1,200 roubles per month in 1950 (GU RK NARK, f. 173, op. 1, d. 1, l. 2).

  41 Small cubes of instant coffee pre-mixed with dried milk and sugar.

  42 Lev had no reason to think this but he felt guilty because he had not been sent to the 3rd Colony.

  43 Once again, Lev is linking Sveta with the Russian word for ‘light’ (svet).

  44 Part of the seizure of industrial goods by the Soviet occupation force in Germany and agreed to by the Allies at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 as reparation for the damage caused by the German occupation of the Soviet Union.

  45 Both lyrics from songs in popular Soviet films of the 1940s.

  46 Konon Sidorovich Tkachenko, one of Lev’s fellow prisoners, an engineer and laboratory assistant to Strelkov, who was responsible for maintaining the correct chemical composition of the water in the boiler system of the electric power station.

  47 Green cabbage was regarded as a cure for liver disease, hepatitis and ulcers.

  48 The Russian poet Nikolai Nekrasov (1821–78). Lev is referring to his poem ‘Russian Women’ in praise of two princesses, Maria Volkonskaya and Ekaterina Trubetskaya, who had followed their husbands into exile in Siberia, where they had been sent for their participation in the Decembrist uprising of 1825. Lev is drawing a comparison between Sveta and these two famous heroines.

  49 The white nights of the North made the stars invisible.

  50 Lev and Sveta used code words for the Gulag associated with the rain (e.g. ‘umbrella’ and ‘mackintosh’).

  51 Lev’s bunk-mate in the barrack. Ivan was a student at the Odessa Shipbuilding Institute in 1950, when he was arrested and sentenced to ten years in Pechora.

  52 In 1949, there were six years remaining of Lev’s prison term.

  53 Soviet passports defined where a person was allowed to live and work.

  Copyright © 2012 Orlando Figes All rights reserved. Published simultaneously in the United Kingdom by Allen Lane, London.

  Metropolitan Books

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC

  Publishers since 1866

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, New York 10010

  www.henryholt.com

  Metropolitan Books® and are registered trademarks of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

  “In Dream” from Selected Poems, by Anna Akhmatova, translated by D. M. Thomas, published by Vintage Books. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Ltd.

  eISBN 9780805095234

  First eBook Edition : April 2012

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Figes, Orlando.

  Just send me word : a true story of love and survival in the Gulag / Orlando Figes. pages ; cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. Mishchenko, Lev—Imprisonment. 2. Mishchenko, Lev—Correspondence. 3. Political prisoners—Russia (Federation)—Pechora (Komi) 4. Political prisoners—Russia (Federation)—Pechora (Komi)—Correspondence. 5. Mishchenko, Svetlana. 6. Mishchenko, Svetlana—Correspondence. 7. Fiancées—Soviet Union. 8. Fiancées—Soviet Union—Correspondence. 9. Labor camps—Russia (Federation)—Pechora (Komi) 10. Imprisonment—Soviet Union. I. Title.

  DK268.M585F54 2012

  365’.45092--dc23

  [B]

  2011048355

  Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and premiums.

  For details contact: Director, Special Markets.

  First U. S. Edition 2012

  Lev and Svetlana in 1936

  Lev (third from left), and Evgenii Bukke (second from left) in 1936

  Svetlana’s letters on the left, Lev’s on the right

  The industrial zone of the wood-combine in 1956

  A view of Pechora River from the wood-combine

  The club house in the wood-combine

  Wood-Combine Street

  A convoy outside the 1st Colony (drawn from memory by Boris Ivanov)

  The remains of the wood-combine, with watchtower, in the 1980s

  A train ticket for the Pechora railw
ay, 1949

  Lev’s boots from Pechora and the suitcase he made before his departure from the labour camp in 1954

  Svetlana with her daughter Anastasia in 1956

  Lev with his children at Nikita’s dacha

  Svetlana and Lev, Moscow, 2002

 

 

 


‹ Prev