Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag (35 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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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.

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 is 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.

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Interpreting the Russian Revolution:
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Natasha’s Dance:
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The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia

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