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Authors: Orlando Figes

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BOOK: Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag
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Lev could not have known what he would have found if he had ever reached Poland or if he had crossed the German lines and somehow made it to Moscow. He had no real idea about the situation in the Soviet Union or about his chances of ever seeing Sveta and her family again. From the moment of his initial capture there had been no way of receiving reliable information from Russia. In Oschatz the prisoners were given pens and writing paper by the Germans, but they could write only to people in the German-occupied territories. Lev once wrote to Prague, to the wife of a fellow prisoner who had disappeared, asking if she had had news of her husband. The wife replied to Lev and even sent a parcel but told him that he was more likely to know about the fate of her husband than she was.
 
Sveta was equally in the dark. She had received no news of Lev since he had disappeared in the last days of September 1941. Everything had been uncertain then. No one knew if Moscow would survive. The city had been heavily bombed by German planes since July. Sirens sounded several times a day. The power stations had been hit, so there was no heat or lighting in apartment blocks, although burning buildings lit the sky at night. People lived in shelters underground. Untold thousands died. On 1 October Stalin ordered the evacuation of the government to Kuibyshev on the Volga. Panic spread as the bombing of the city became more intense. Huge queues formed at all the shops: there was fighting over food and widespread looting, which mass arrests did little to control. Reports of the German breakthrough at Viazma finally reached Moscow on 16 October. At railway stations there were ugly scenes as crowds struggled to board trains for the east. People cursed the Communists when they found out that the factory and Party bosses had
already left. Workers fought with the police. Families packed up their belongings and moved out of the city by whatever means they could afford. Taxi drivers were charging 20,000 roubles to go from Moscow to Kazan.
Moscow University was evacuated in October. Sveta travelled with her family. Among the students on the train was Andrei Sakharov, the future Nobel laureate, who had joined the faculty a year after Lev and Sveta but was now in the same year she was after the break in her studies. Their first stop was Murom, an old provincial town 300 kilometres east of Moscow, where Sakharov stayed with a mother and daughter who turned the wartime chaos to their advantage: by day the daughter stole sugar from the shop where she worked and by night her mother entertained ‘a succession of soldiers’. The town was overrun by wounded troops waiting for evacuation to the east. Many lay on stretchers in the station hall, even in the snow by the railway tracks. Women from the nearby villages came to the station to sell them food and tobacco. Others came to look for sons and husbands, asking the wounded soldiers who might know of their whereabouts or putting letters in their hands in case someone should come upon them in a hospital.
From Murom the students continued east to the Urals and then headed south across the frozen Kazakh steppe to Ashkhabad, the dusty capital of the Turkmen Republic, not far from the Soviet border with Iran. Here the Physics Faculty would recommence its work. The journey took a month. The railway cars, each with a stove and bunks for forty people, ‘became separate communities’, recalled Sakharov, ‘with their own leaders, their talkative and silent types, their panic-mongers, go-getters, big-eaters, the slothful and the hard-working’. Sveta must have been among the quiet and industrious ones. In Ashkhabad, where lectures started in December, she needed to work hard to make up for the break in her studies before the war. She went to classes in chemistry and oscillation physics, a difficult theoretical subject for which there was no practical training, so she was buried in the library for long hours. She also worked as a dishwasher in a cafeteria to support herself and her
parents. For much of that winter and the following spring Sveta suffered from malaria, a common disease in Central Asia at that time. ‘It wore me out so much that it was even difficult for me to drink,’ she would later write. Fighting off fever, exhausted and becoming ‘quite jaundiced’, she struggled to keep going. But she managed.
After her graduation, Sveta was assigned to the People’s Commissariat of Munitions. But with her father’s help she was transferred to the Scientific-Research Institute for the Resin Industry, then operating out of a chemical compound in Khromnik, near Sverdlovsk, where she worked in the ‘physical and mechanical testing laboratory’ as an industrial physicist from August 1942. The institute was working eleven-hour days, and Sveta found it had to find her place at first. As she later wrote,
I was in a strange, unfamiliar laboratory and didn’t know what I should begin with, where I should perch myself. I was afraid of the machinery and didn’t know anything about rubber. So I escaped to the library … where I spent half the day reading Russian articles and reports and the other half huffing and puffing over the English language. I joined an English-language club, although I hadn’t studied it in Ashkhabad. Generally it was quite an uplifting period. After the fumes of Ashkhabad, the Afghan winds, the sand blown in from the desert as fine as dust, and the leaves that fell in August without any hint of a golden autumn, the Urals seemed like paradise on Earth – pines, birches, mushrooms, rain. I exchanged letters with the whole world … I received between 2 and 3 letters every day and I knew I’d be home soon.
The institute was already preparing to return to Moscow, where the German threat had passed after a Soviet counter-offensive during 1942. The Red Army was in urgent need of the institute’s research expertise to boost the tyre industry. By January 1943, Sveta was back home. Much of the city Lev and Sveta had known as students had been destroyed or damaged by the war. Many of its
buildings remained unheated, the lights were dimmed and often failed completely because of power cuts, sewers leaked, and the food shops were empty. ‘It was very hard for everyone in ’43 and ’44,’ Sveta later wrote. ‘We were all cold and hungry and living in the dark.’
Sveta’s parents had returned to Moscow with her younger sister, Tanya, in April 1942. They had aged noticeably. Anastasia was often ill with brucellosis, a painful stomach disease that left her exhausted, and at the age of sixty Aleksandr was also showing signs of slowing down. Sveta found them in a nervous state when she returned. There was plenty for them to worry about: they had not heard from Sveta’s brother since he had left for the front (he had been captured by the Germans and imprisoned in a concentration camp on the Baltic Sea island of Usedom), while Tanya had been assigned as a student ‘volunteer’ to Stalingrad in September 1942.
6
Meanwhile they had Aleksandr’s younger brother Innokenty (‘Uncle Kesha’) and his wife on their hands. The Leningrad couple had been in Moscow since the beginning of the war and would not return home until the siege of Leningrad was lifted in 1943.
From the family apartment on Kazarmennyi Pereulok Sveta had a long tram journey to the institute on the Highway of Enthusiasts, where she worked in an old laboratory on the third floor with windows looking out on to the factory smokestacks of east Moscow. The place depressed her. Many times she thought that she should run away or take a research post elsewhere, maybe even in another town, but she was ‘afraid of losing touch with Lev’. Moscow was the only point of contact they had, the place where she hoped he would return.
Although she had not had any news of Lev, she had good reason to believe that he was still alive: in 1942 the NKVD had visited his Aunt Olga to ask if she had heard from him. They went through
the belongings in his room, which was still being kept for him as someone who was serving in the army. Some of the spies who had been recruited by the Germans in Katyn had evidently entered Soviet territory and been arrested. Under interrogation one of them must have mentioned Lev and recounted the incident when he had spoken with the captain in German. The NKVD was probably working on the assumption that Lev was spying for the Germans in Moscow. After Sveta returned to the capital they summoned her for questioning practically every evening. They knew that he would come to see her if he was already in the Soviet capital. Claiming that Lev was a spy, they tried to force her to cooperate with them in catching him, threatening serious consequences if she refused. It was frightening to be summoned to the Lubianka, the NKVD headquarters; the memory of the Great Terror was fresh in people’s minds. But Sveta was not easily frightened. To defend her relationship with Lev, she was ready to defy the Soviet authorities. Eventually she got fed up with their badgering and, in a moment of characteristic bravery and headstrong foolishness, told the NKVD men to leave her alone. ‘Getting a bit angry because these same relatives [code for NKVD men] kept pestering me, I said that I was not yet your wife and that the matter would only be cleared up when we met – not just for an hour but for good,’ she later wrote to Lev.
Sveta was meanwhile writing to the military authorities asking them for any information about Lev. News came shortly after her twenty-sixth birthday, 10 September 1943. ‘All my relatives had come for my birthday,’ she later wrote to Lev.
My father’s brother from Moscow and his family were there, his brother from Leningrad with his wife, my cousin Nina with her husband and their baby, and so on. Everything was great and everybody was having a good time. We drank to the health of all those who weren’t with us, of course. And then everything happened all at once – a message came about the death of Tanya (Uncle Kesha intercepted it and didn’t show it to Mama for a long time).
Tanya had died of appendicitis in a military hospital in Stalingrad. Later more bad news arrived: Aunt Olga had been notified officially by the military authorities that Lev ‘had gone missing’ at the front. It was the kind of terrible announcement that struck fear into millions of families still recovering from the terror of the thirties, when so many people ‘disappeared’. Those three words (‘propal bez vesti’) could mean almost anything: capture by the enemy (equivalent to treason under Soviet wartime law); worse, ‘desertion’ to the other side (a crime by ‘enemies of the people’); or death without the body’s being found. So many soldiers had been killed that Sveta must have feared the worst for Lev.
It was so painful and distressing that I decided I would never celebrate my birthday again unless you were with me. You know, the existence of a dwarf-star is desperately painful, for it has lost the whole of its electron shell and preserved only its nucleus; in my breast it was just as empty and just as painful, as though my heart had withdrawn into itself. It was impossible to breathe. For months on end I couldn’t talk to anyone, couldn’t go anywhere, couldn’t read. As soon as I returned home I would turn my face to the wall. And however much I cried in the evening, during the night or in the mornings the pain never eased.
Struggling to cope with her longing and anxiety for Lev, Sveta poured her feelings into poetry. Two of her poems have survived. The first is dated ‘Winter 1943’, not long after ‘that terrible day’ in September when she heard that Lev had disappeared. ‘It was what I needed to say to someone,’ she would later write of the poem, which expressed her sadness about losing him:
For a long time I stood on the threshold,
But then I made my mind up and set off.
In the road, amidst the crushed stone,
I found a symbol of peace and happiness –
A horse-shoe to hang over your door.
I brought it to share my joy with you,
But the war threw us on to separate paths
Along which we have to wander on our own.
Through what forests have you forced your way?
Which stones bear the traces of your blood?
Here instead it is the spectre of a lonely old age
That hangs over me ever more menacingly.
What keepsake will you leave me with?
The bitter impression of a long-vanished dream?
Or will you let another woman touch your heart
With passionate words in September?
Can I not trust you? Who else if not you –
A youth who is a stranger to me now?
My circle of friends grows ever smaller,
Which of you will reach the end with me?
The second poem was shorter. It too was written that winter. Even more than in the first, there is a note of hopelessness in Sveta’s prayers for Lev’s return:
It’s not for me to judge you, who are under fire,
With whom death has already spoken more than once,
But to pray night and day,
That the Mother of God keep you safe for me.
 
I would pray for this. But the ABC of prayers
Was not taught to me by my mother and father
And I couldn’t find a path to God
In joy, sorrow, or in grief.
But Lev was not dead. He was a prisoner in one of Hitler’s harshest labour camps, a Stalag in Leipzig where Soviet POWs were marched under heavy guard to work every day at the Pittler ammunition factory. Lev had been sent there from the Mühlberg prison camp, where he had been held after being caught on the Polish
border in July 1943. The regime in the Pittler factory was punitive. Armed guards stood by all the doors in the workshops, and the German foreman carried a revolver, ready for use at any time. During the winter of 1943–4 the work regime became increasingly severe as the German army’s need for ammunition grew with every new defeat on the Eastern Front. Productivity declined as the POWs became more exhausted and undisciplined, prompting the Gestapo to investigate and root out potential leaders of a slave rebellion.
Lev was interrogated several times. One day in May 1944 he was arrested in a group of twenty-six prisoners and sent to the main prison in Leipzig, where they were all kept in a single cell with a toilet pan and basin by the door. They were held there for a month without being let out of the cell. On 4 July, they were transferred to Buchenwald, the notorious concentration camp near Weimar, where they were held in a quarantine barracks consisting of long, unbroken rows of sleeping shelves four tiers high. There were prisoners of every nationality – French, Poles, Russians, Yugoslavs –each one designated by a different badge on his striped uniform. Lev, like the other Russians, had a badge marked with an ‘R’ on a red triangle.
BOOK: Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag
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