Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag (18 page)

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Authors: Orlando Figes

BOOK: Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag
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Tamara started coming every day to visit Lev. He became fond of her, giving her food and beginning to teach her how to read and do arithmetic. ‘I was enlisted as a father again today,’ Lev wrote to Sveta on 25 October.
I arrived for my shift and suddenly Tamara appeared with her sister and little brother. I wrote to you about Tamara – she’s 11 years old and infinitely sincere and affectionate. Anyway, having spotted me, she abandoned her little family (her sister is 14 and her little brother is 6), telling them to go home without her, and ran to me. She threw
her arms around me – I don’t know how she managed it – and announced that she had missed me very much, that she had come twice before but hadn’t been able to wait for me, and that she was going to stay with me until the whistle blew (at the end of my shift at 5). She told me that she’s going to school now, she’s in the second class, so it seems her parents have seen reason. She pulled out an old red silk ribbon to tie a bow and with regret said that she had only one. Sveta, if you can, slip a few more ribbons into a parcel of books – and some kind of children’s book.
It was not long before Lida came as well. ‘She is older and … acts more grown-up. They’ve become the daughters of three electricians and one machine-operator, but it seems they think of me as their main “papa”.’ Thanks to Lev’s tutoring, the girls’ grades improved at school. Then Tamara stole some trinkets from one of the prisoners. Lida returned the missing things, but Lev was disillusioned. ‘I have lost faith in myself,’ he wrote to Sveta. ‘There’s no need for more ribbon. Tamara won’t be coming to the station any more.’
Lev was studying hard, reading up on electrical engineering in any books that he could find, in an effort to improve the functioning of the power station, whose poor capacity was holding up production at the wood-combine. Without enough electricity the workshops were often forced to shut down (in May 1948, it was calculated that the machines were idle for almost a quarter of the working time). The prisoners sat around all day, smoking, playing cards, until the power was turned on again; then they had to work around the clock to meet the production plan. ‘There is no rhythm in our work,’ complained one of the Party leaders of the wood-combine at a meeting on 12 May. ‘We reel from one frenzied burst to the next, trying to fulfil the plan.’
Lev was highly critical of the erratic work culture of the wood-combine. He thought the place was run by ‘idiots’ and often wrote of the ‘stupidities’ committed by the bosses whose determination to increase output at all costs frequently led to mechanical breakdowns, accidents, fires and general chaos – all of which made it even
harder to fulfil the plan. On 12 May, for example, Lev described the ongoing repairs at the power station:
There’s such a dreadful shambles over making the new concrete floors. We’ve had to do a lot of the dirty work – replacing the wiring of the motor pump which the electrical department had done abominably, installing new circuit breakers and so on. The reason the floor job is being done so sloppily is that none of the bosses overseeing it care one bit; they won’t be punished if it’s done badly. Enormous amounts of labour, materials, time and energy are just wasted here –nothing is done responsibly. Things that took 10 years to make are abandoned after a year; installations meant to be temporary are refitted to last for years and only made to look as if they meet the plan. Everything is done haphazardly – unless it’s overseen by someone like Strelkov, who worries about every detail, but he’s one in a thousand and even he’s not always in a position to do anything about the stupidity and stagnation that are so much part of the system.
Lev’s efforts to improve the working of the power plant were completely voluntary. His motivation was not political, as it was for Strelkov, an old Bolshevik who believed in the system and tried to make it work. But, like him, Lev was conscientious by nature and took pride and interest in his work. ‘I’m unable to sit calmly in a room if there’s something wrong with the ticking of its clock,’ he wrote to Sveta. ‘I cannot relax if the timing between its ‘tick-tock’ and ‘tock-tick’ is uneven. When I see our electricians, even our best ones, at work, I think, what a torture it would be for them if I were their manager.’ And those electricians would agree:
Yesterday one of our operators remarked that I’m always finding something to do. ‘Lev,’ he said, ‘you without work is like a fool without a smack’ (a smack around the head, that is). It’s a crude but vivid comparison: one man walks about looking for something constructive to get on with and is at peace when he finds it; another hangs around, poking his nose where he shouldn’t and disturbing
everyone, eventually gets smacked on the head for it, and, having learned his lesson, does nothing.
But there was more than conscientiousness in Lev’s efforts at the plant. There was self-esteem, the desire to accomplish something positive while he was a prisoner, perhaps the recognition that he needed at least to learn some new skills in these years, if they were not to be wasted altogether and he was to come out of the camp in the right frame of mind to rebuild his life (looking back on his prison years, Lev was always proud of what he had achieved by improving the capacity of the power station so that it could fuel the wood-combine). He also needed to distract himself, to block out negative and self-destructive thoughts and lose himself in work to help the days pass by – a method of survival adopted by many prisoners.
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Self-protection also played a part. By making himself useful at the power station, he was able to keep his privileged position and reduce the danger of being sent away on a convoy – his greatest fear – or put back into a hauling team. He hoped also to reduce his sentence. On 1 May 1948, a new credit system was introduced for the ‘auxiliary operations’ (including the power station) at the wood-combine: days in which a prisoner fulfilled between 100 and 150 per cent of his production quota were henceforth to be counted as 1.25 days; between 150 and 200 per cent as 1.5 days; between 200 and 275 per cent as 2 days; and higher than 275 per cent as 3 days. ‘So,’ Lev wrote to Sveta, ‘we may be due a quarter of a day, which means 6.5 days a month, or 2
1/2
months a year, and there’s also the possibility of additional credits in the event of a particularly excellent appraisal by the head of the facility, or the complete loss of credits in the event of a poor one … It’s all a bit of a lottery.’
The risk of being put on a convoy was a real one in 1948, when the 4th Colony was being developed and prisoners from the wood-combine were being sent to it. Skilled prisoners were also being
transferred to the 3rd Colony – made up mainly of criminals and workers who had broken camp rules – where labour discipline had completely collapsed, barely one-third of production targets were being met, and there were riots in protest against the poor living conditions. During the summer of 1948, a number of individual escapes and even mass break-outs from the 3rd Colony encouraged prisoners in the 2nd Colony to plot their escape. They were not discouraged by the news that several escapees from the 3rd had been shot in the forest, while others had returned because they could not bear the mosquitoes.
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There were rumours of a ‘large contingent of prisoners’ being transferred to the camps of north Siberia as a way of dealing with the unrest, Lev wrote to Sveta on 24 June. He warned her not to send any parcels until he was able to clarify the situation, as he was expecting the politicals, including himself, to be selected first for the convoy, possibly ‘within the next few days’. On 25 June, he wrote again, this time advising her not to plan another trip to Pechora and asking her to write to him through Aleksandrovich, in case he was sent away:
Well, Svetishche, some instructions for you in view of coming events: don’t spend your holiday leave undertaking a journey. Think of coming here only if a work trip won’t require any particular effort, if there is one at all, that is. The chances of success are going to be reduced to practically nothing as of the day after tomorrow. It
seems that all who have the most serious article [58] are going to be dismissed from their jobs – except for those doing ‘general’ work –and resettled in the 3rd Colony (by the river), which is being redefined as a ‘reinforced regime’.
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It will be completely impossible for you to stay, even for a short time, in the industrial zone (where we’re working at the moment). The only way it could happen is if there is an individual exception. But I’ll say it again, the likelihood of that is practically zero – this time it’s going to be a lot tougher … The best thing would be for you not to attempt a visit at all. Are you listening, Svet? Do as I tell you. Accept this as my final decision … Agreed, Svet? That’s how it is. As to the future, we’ll discuss it later, because at this point we can only guess at what’s going to happen … In case you need it I’ll send a new address in a few days time when ‘Zh[aba]’ [Aleksandrovich] gets a new job. But don’t use it too often. It will work for the time being. One more thing, Svetishche. You must not keep this letter – that’s why it doesn’t have a number. And write to let me know you received it – just say the one dated the 25th arrived.
Sveta did not do as Lev asked. His letters were precious – she kept them all. Nor did she abandon her plan to visit him.
Lev and Sveta had been discussing a second trip since April. This time she was far more apprehensive than before. The original plan was to go in the summer. Tsydzik, Sveta’s boss, encouraged the idea, advising her to take more time than she had done the previous year. ‘Yesterday, M. A. [Tsydzik] asked when I was planning to go to Kirov,’ Sveta had written to Lev on 16 April.
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”
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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.

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