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Authors: Orlando Figes

Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag (8 page)

BOOK: Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag
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By the start of 1946, Sveta had given up all expectation of seeing Lev again. Everybody else had returned from the war, so she must have assumed that he was dead or had gone missing for ever. For months, she ‘could not sleep’, she ‘would not eat’ and she ‘drove her parents to despair’. She ‘longed for even just a word’ from Lev. It ‘would have changed everything’. But as time passed she became more despondent and lost hope. And then she heard from Olga.
At once Sveta wrote to Lev
12 July 1946 (1)
 
Levi, if I didn’t know that actions should be judged by their motives and not by their results, I would reproach you for your silence.
You remember that September when you said you didn’t want us to meet like that, whereas I was grateful for the week that was given to us? It’s the same now, Lev: if it can’t be otherwise, this way is better than nothing. We are both 29 years old, we first met 11 years ago, and we haven’t seen each other for 5 years. It is terrible to spell out these figures, but time passes, Lev. And I know you will do all you can so that we can meet before another five years pass.
I’m becoming stubborn, Lev. How many times have I wanted to nestle in your arms but could only turn to the empty wall in front of me? I felt I couldn’t breathe. Yet time would pass, and I would pull myself together. We will get through this, Lev.
I promised you I would finish university and I kept my promise. We graduated in the summer of 1942 (after the fourth year of courses) but were relocated for almost six months – from Moscow to Ashkhabad to Sverdlovsk …
Soon I will have been working in the physical and mechanical testing laboratory at ‘Papa’s’ Institute (the Scientific-Research Institute for the Tyre Industry)
9
for four years (since my birthday in 1942). No matter how much I tried to avoid rubber, I still came back to it. Aren’t you glad? My job is to come up with new and better testing methods (there are too many details to put in one letter, so I’ll tell you about it bit by bit). My manager is very good but he’s not really an administrator and the two of us together supervise 42 young women quite unsuccessfully. There’s a new postgraduate course in our institute and the first candidate is – Svetlana Aleksandrovna! I passed my exams (in May and June) with flying colours, better than anyone at the university (mainly because of my background in sciences rather than because of my talents) … Are you happy, Levi?
I should be on holiday from 1 July, but our academic secretary is keeping me here until I hand in an article for the journal. I’m torturing and tormenting myself, trying to picture how I’ll ever get it done (it’s about experiments on the plasticity of rubber and rubber composites). Mama and Alika [Sveta’s nephew] have already been at the dacha for a month – it’s on the Istra again but a little bit closer to Moscow this time. Alika is already six. He knows how to read and is fascinated with capital letters. He’s inherited all of Yara’s skills and talents. He draws, sets up ‘experiments’, talks about the way words are spoken and written, and already knows a lot of poems. He is building a herbarium and collecting beetles, flies and caterpillars, and he sings songs – clearly taking after his aunt! His little head is as round as a button, he’s blond with big black pupils but blue irises (also from his aunt). Yara came home last November. We hadn’t heard anything of him for more than three years. At the moment he’s still quite gaunt. Tanya was in the army (from May 1942) and died in hospital from appendicitis on 2 September 1943. I think about her, just as I think about you, all the time, but I can’t talk about it. Mother and Father have got older, of course. Father is currently working at the Ministry of Rubber Industries, and Mother busies herself around the house –brucellosis is wearing her out …
Levi, write and let me know if I can send you any small parcels. If I can, then what do you need? Any fiction or physics books? The sooner this letter gets to you, the sooner I’ll get a reply, so I’m finishing it now.
 
All the best, Levi.
Svet.
Lev received the letter when he went to get the post for his barrack after work on a Thursday evening, 8 August. He recognized her writing on the envelope. Opening the letter, he found a photograph of her inside. Lev read the letter over and over again that night. He did not go to bed but paced around outside, the white night of the Arctic giving him his reading light. The sun had been up for two whole hours when Lev began to write at half past five the next morning:
Pechora, 9.VIII.46 No. 1
 
Sveta, Svet, can you imagine what I’m feeling now? I can’t put a name to it or measure the happiness I feel. The 8th has always been an important date in my life (you see, I’ve become a fatalist) – and now it has become a joyful date. I went to get the letters for our block and was not at all jealous of those who received letters, because I didn’t expect anything for myself. I had got a letter from Aunt Olga on the 31st and didn’t expect anything else until the start of September. And then suddenly – my surname! And, as if it were alive, your handwriting! For three years I had managed to keep safe a tiny scrap of paper with your handwriting – it was all I had of you – until it was confiscated in the full search at Buchenwald on 3.VII.44. I lived with the hope that you were still alive and that I’d see you again. But on your last birthday, which I celebrated at a difficult moment in the interrogation, I resigned myself to saying goodbye to you … I carried on denying myself any hope, not only of our ever meeting again but even of my ever hearing anything about you.
Sveta, if you could only imagine, understand, what an interrogation really is! It’s not just a question of the physical sufferings – I never experienced those – but what it feels like in the soul! Did you know that there’s something worse than death? It’s mistrust. But I’m getting off the point. And so, anyway, I said goodbye to you. But I couldn’t hold out without you. Eight months later, I wrote a letter to Aunt Olya – just on the off-chance, without much hope. And I asked her about you. And then on the anniversary of that foolish day on 31 July 1936 when I nearly drowned and had to be pulled out of the Istra on my way to see you in Boriskovo, I was saved again. I had never expected such an affectionate, warm-hearted and maternal letter; in fact I hadn’t expected a letter at all … Aunt Olya wrote all about you! You –alive! And it turns out you even visit her, which means that you couldn’t have decided to erase me from your memory. What more could I wish for? I had only wanted to find out about you, without interfering in your life. And then, suddenly, yesterday, or rather today,
because although it’s now 6 o’clock in the morning on 9 August, I still haven’t gone to bed, so for me it is today – and anyway there is no night in the Arctic – suddenly a letter came. Not only the handwriting, not only the words written by you, but what words, what a letter! And a photograph as well. And it’s all for me? For me? Svetka, Svetka, I’m not in a fit state to say more …
Let’s move on to something else. You ask about a meeting … Svetka, it’s almost impossible. 58-1(b) is a terrible figure.
10
I don’t have any illusions about this. But I promise you I’ll do everything I can to improve the sentence.
I’m so happy that you’re taking control of your life at last, Sveta, that you’re strong and in good spirits. It’s good that you have a serious job, and that they value you. You have a fine mind, Sveta, you’re so intelligent! Now, now, don’t screw up your nose – it’s praise from an unauthoritative source. Sveta, Sveta, you are so close to me – it feels as if the last five years never happened, although it’s also distance that separates us now, 2,170 kilometres of it. And to me you look practically the same – an imperceptible something, hardly noticeable in the photograph, says your heart has aged a little, that is all …
You ask about books. I’ve missed books terribly over the years. It has been very difficult to get hold of any and therefore I’ve read shamefully few … Do you remember the Akhmatova and the Blok? I longed for Pushkin and your favourite, ‘The Stone Guest’ – I remember bits you recited to me once while we were walking, arm in arm, beneath the lights of the Tver Boulevard.
La Traviata
is another thing I cannot hear without emotion, if somebody is whistling it, or if I hear it on the radio …
Sveta, as you said, we’ll get though this …
I need to stop now. I wish you all the best. Don’t send anything except letters – letters – letters! …
Lev
The Gulag had elaborate rules for the sending and receiving of letters. These rules altered over time, as circumstances changed, and were applied with varying degrees of strictness in each labour camp. How many letters a prisoner received depended on his sentence and on how well he met his production quotas.
In the wood-combine prisoners were officially allowed one, censored letter every month. This was better than in other camps, where the allowance was as few as four a year. In his letter to Aunt Olga on 1 August 1946, Lev told her that there were ‘no restrictions’ on how many letters or packages he could receive:
Letters and printed matter [
banderoli
] get here in 2 to 3 weeks, but there have been cases of their getting here from Moscow in 7 or 8 days. They are not held up long by the censors … If you write, remember to number your letters in order, so that I can check if they have all arrived. There’s no need to send me anything, except perhaps paper and pencils.
What Lev said was not entirely true. He often gave a reassuring picture of conditions in the camp. In fact, letters were delivered to the camp only two or three times a month, so a prisoner was likely to get several at a time. But this was still fairly good, and certainly much better than in the Gulag camps of the 1930s, when prisoners could go without a letter for several years. Censorship was relatively light – most of it by the wives of camp guards and other officials who often did not read through the letters properly but merely blacked out the odd harmless phrase to show that they were doing their job. But the prisoners did not know that and exercised self-censorship in their writings.
Nor was it so simple with parcels or printed-matter rolls. Sending them was a complex bureaucratic procedure that involved travelling to Mytishchi, or some other town outside Moscow, because parcels to the Gulag labour camps could not be sent from the Soviet capital, and standing for hours in long queues to have one’s package checked and registered. Parcels were not accepted if they weighed more than 8 kilograms. When they arrived at the camp there was an equally complicated process for receiving them. At the wood-combine parcels were collected from an MVD office where the guard on duty unpacked all the items and often helped himself to what he wanted before giving the rest of the contents to the prisoner. Because food and money and warm clothes were nearly always taken by the guards, Lev discouraged friends and relatives from sending them, asking only for books, though here too vigilance was required, as foreign literature was likely to be confiscated, especially if it had been published before 1917. As Lev warned Sveta in his first letter:
So if you or Aunt Olya are going to send me books, make sure they are cheap. The cheaper the edition and the more tattered the book the better, as then you won’t have wasted so much money if they get lost. And if you send any foreign-language literature, make sure it’s a Soviet edition and not from an antiquarian store, which may result in a misunderstanding with the censors and my not receiving it.
Lev’s first letter had not arrived when Sveta wrote to him again, on 7 August: ‘My dear Lev, I spend all day wondering if you’ve received the letter I sent on 12 July. Have you got it?’ Lev had not (he got it the next day, on the ‘important’ 8th). Sveta received his first letter on the 23rd, shortly after she got home from the dacha. ‘I too have become a fatalist,’ she wrote to him that afternoon.
When I was writing my first letter you were writing your second, but I sent my second when you were receiving my first, and I was writing my third when I received your first – and
La Traviata
was playing on the radio!
Lev wrote his second letter to Sveta on 11 August, wanting to make sure it got to her in time for her birthday on 10 September, and received her reply to his first letter that very day. ‘It was a present for me,’ he wrote to her that evening, ‘although on this date all the presents ought to be for you.’
Their conversation had begun. But it was a halting and frustrating one. ‘I got your letter of the 26th today,’ Sveta wrote to Lev on 6 September,
and your letters of the 8th and 11th before that, but I still haven’t received your letter of the 21st. It’s difficult to talk, Levi, when the interval between our letters adds up to months. By the time you get my thoughts, you might already be in a different mood.
The delays were not the only frustrations. Their awareness of censorship also put limitations on their conversation. They were not sure how clearly they could express themselves without getting into difficulties. Lev could only intimate as much when he wrote of ‘defined boundaries’ in his third letter:
Sveta, you know that I’m never lazy when it comes to writing letters. And you’ll believe me if I tell you that in my thoughts I’m talking with you for no less than 16 hours in every 24. And so you will understand that if I don’t write to you often it’s not for lack of wanting to but because I don’t know how to write to you within defined boundaries.
Lev thought carefully about what to put in his letters and composed them in his head for days before actually writing them. Afraid that the other prisoners would use them for cigarette paper if he left them in the barracks, he carried unfinished letters in his pocket, so they were often creased and crumpled by the time he finished them.
Much of his meaning had to be read between the lines – with coded words for MVD officials (‘uncles’, ‘relatives’), the Gulag system (‘umbrella’), or bribe-money (‘vitamin D’: from the word for money,
den’gi
), and literary allusions (especially to the nineteenth-century
satires of Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin) to convey messages about the absurdities of daily life within the camp. The names of friends and relatives were never written out but given as initials or concealed through nicknames.
Lev’s initial fear was that Sveta might be endangered by receiving letters from a prisoner. In his first letter he had suggested writing to a poste restante. ‘There’s no need for any kind of poste restante,’ Sveta had replied, ‘we know all our neighbours.’ Later she would change her mind, suggesting that he omit her name from the address on the envelope ‘so as not to attract attention’ from the neighbours when they saw it in the mailbox by the entrance to their block. But for the moment she was open about writing to a prisoner, and all her family and closest friends were supportive.
Sveta also composed her letters carefully. She would write a draft, correct and copy it to make sure that she got her thoughts down right, and said nothing that could endanger Lev. She was unsure that her letters would get through, so keeping drafts was an extra measure of security. She wrote in small, barely legible handwriting on blank sheets or on the most narrowly ruled writing-paper she could find, cramming as much as possible on to the page. In each letter she inserted some blank sheets so that Lev could write back to her. She wrote at night when she was on her own.
I need to be at home to write letters and alone as well (or for everyone to be sleeping), for my head not to hurt, for me not to want to sleep, and for me to be in a tolerable mood. All these ‘fors’ don’t always coincide.
Sveta filled her letters with news and details of her daily life, family, work and friends. She lived for Lev through her letters. Outwardly her language seems to lack romantic sentiment. It has the somewhat dry and spare linguistic character of the Soviet technical intelligentsia – the milieu in which she had been raised – whereas Lev’s is closer to the more expressive language of his grandmother and the Russian gentry of the nineteenth century. Sveta acknowledged that
she did not like to gush. She was a practical person, emotionally generous, often warm in her affections, but far too honest and plain-speaking to succumb to romantic illusions.
Sentimental words about love (both lofty and cheap) produce the same effect on me as commerce. Mine to you, just as yours to me. From them stem never-ending grievances. In my mind, I always hear that line: ‘Give and don’t reach out for its return – this is the key to opening all hearts.’
The lack of sentimental words in her letters was deceptive. The Sasha Chorny poem Sveta quoted (‘For the Patient’) expresses perfectly the love she gave to Lev by writing to him every day:
If the best decide to end their plight,
Heavy-footed hyenas will scour the world whole!
Fall in love with the instinctive joy of flight …
Unwrap every corner of your soul.
 
Be a brother, a sister, a wife or a husband,
A doctor, a nurse, or a master of arts,
Give freely – but don’t reach for it back with trembling hand:
This is the key to opening all hearts.
Sveta wrote to Lev with a running commentary about her life. She described what Moscow looked like on her way to work and added little details about her clothes that connected her to Lev:
Muscovites wear whatever they have left – a fur coat or a wadded jacket (a favourite of the morning commuters with whom I travel to work). Factories start at 8, institutes at 9, and ministries at 11 … I don’t have a winter coat – the old black one having fallen prey to my passion to destroy, a characteristic of all two-legged animals, and reused for a good suit at Mama’s insistence … My summer grey-green coat is still alive … And do you know what else is still going? The shoes we
bought. They’ve been everywhere with me and now I wear them to the institute because they’re so light … That’s all I have to say about the way we live – which is not as well as I think you imagine.
Lev yearned for news about Moscow. He loved to hear about it from Sveta. In the camp he spent many hours reminiscing about the city with fellow Muscovites like Anisimov and Gleb Vasil’ev, a mechanic in the metal workshop who had studied at the same school as Sveta and had just completed his first year at the Physics Faculty of Moscow University when he was arrested in 1940. From the bleak northern landscape of Pechora, Lev wished his letters would carry him away to the Moscow of his dreams:
It’s grey and overcast today. Autumn has crept up silently, deceptively, and has thrown its persistent, web-like veil over Pechora, over the forest, over the houses on the embankment, over the buildings and chimneys of our industrial plant, over the impassive, severe pines … In Moscow you have an autumn worthy of Levitan and Kuindzhi,
11
a golden season where leaves fall and dry ones rustle underfoot. How far away it all seems. And yet I imagine that everything in Moscow must be as it was – the people are as they were, the streets unchanged. And that you are also as you were. And I don’t want to think that what I can still see is an illusion, that it will disappear. Oh, how many ‘ands’ I’ve written on this page, and how little logic. This is not a letter but an incoherent bundle of feelings.
Sveta counteracted Lev’s nostalgia with a more realistic portrait. ‘No gold has been seen in Moscow yet,’ she wrote on 10 September. ‘Moscow is not as you imagine it at all. There are too many people. It’s unpleasant on the trams. People are irritable. They swear and even fight. The metro is always full. The stations where you change lines can no longer cope.’
As she had promised in her first letter, Sveta told him more about her work. The institute was a large complex of workshops and laboratories employing 650 people, 120 of them engineers, 50 researchers and technical assistants, and the remainder labourers –fitters, builders, mechanics. Many of these workers lived with their families in the old wooden barracks built for the experimental rubber factory that had been there before the war. In the laboratories where Sveta worked they were testing new methods of manufacturing tyres from synthetic rubber (sodium butadiene). Her work involved a lot of research and teaching as well as learning English to keep up with the latest developments in the West, which she would need to discuss in her disseration, ‘On the Physical Mechanics of Rubber’.
Sveta’s research had military applications and so was deemed a ‘state secret’. She had access to ‘closed’ materials – confidential information about Soviet technology, Western publications and so on. Maintaining contact with a prisoner was therefore full of risks for her. If it was discovered that she was writing to a prisoner, she would almost certainly be expelled from the institute and probably arrested on suspicion of divulging state secrets to a convicted ‘spy’. Of all her colleagues at the institute, only two knew about her relationship with Lev: her close friend Bella Lipkina, three years younger than Sveta, who worked with her in the laboratory; and her boss, Mikhail Tsydzik, a chemist ‘on the grey side of 50’, who was an old acquaintance of her father. Sveta and Tsydzik got on well. He was always kind to her, protected her in a paternal way and relied on her help with administrative chores, since he was often in poor health. ‘I can talk with him easily and freely about everything and everyone, ’ she explained to Lev.
Sveta was fortunate in many ways, yet her heart was clearly not in her research:
I’ve learned that it’s very difficult to bang away from 9 till 6 or 7 o’clock without respite. Usually when you’re working you spend time on one thing, then another, you do some teaching, then you
give advice to someone about how best to test something, then you do some studying … and then you talk a little about some concert or a book … But here we’ve been working as if we were on an assembly line: I write, Mik. Al. [Tsydzik] reads, a girl copies, a second girl draws, I read again as the girls are poor at punctuation, and then we sign the document … and send it to the Academic Secretary and the registration office. That’s how we dashed off three scientific methodologies … The one on frost resistance was my first piece of work and now, in addition to the methodology, we’ve also written ‘A Project on the All-Union State Standard for the Determination of Frost Resistance Using the Impact Fracture Method’. It will probably spend more than a year making its way around various agencies and committees. It’s my job to write about elasticity at high and low temperatures. But I’m already bored to death by it.
BOOK: Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag
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