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

by Figes, Orlando

  Aleksandr and Maria were good friends of Strelkov. They often entertained him and his followers from the Electrical Group in their home. They sympathized with the political prisoners, and did everything they could to help and support them. Maria listened in on official conversations at the telephone exchange and so was able to warn the prisoners of planned convoys and other punishments. The two of them sent and received letters for the prisoners. ‘My father would hide the letters in his shirt and take them in or out of the prison zone,’ recalled their son Igor, who liked to collect the stamps. (Lev encouraged Sveta and his aunts to send different types of ‘interesting stamps’ because ‘there is a keen collector here’.) ‘My father had a pass for the industrial zone and was never searched,’ Igor continued. ‘He was not afraid of anyone. He used to say: “Let them try to punish me!” ’

  A machine operator at the wood-combine, Stanislav Yakhovich was another of the voluntary workers involved in smuggling letters for the prisoners. The first time Lev met him at the power station, they nearly got into a fight. Yakhovich had taken Lev’s clean gloves and returned them covered with dirt and grease. It was Lev’s first week at the power station, so he was eager to show that he was not a person to be pushed around. He had been in the army and was strong. He knew that his survival depended on his ability to defend hismelf. So he jumped on Yakhovich and threatened to ‘smash his face’ if he took his gloves again. Yakhovich said nothing; he just smiled. He was much bigger than Lev and could see that Lev was not a violent man, despite his fighting words. The two men became friends.

  Yakhovich was a Pole from Lodz who spoke Russian with a slight accent. He had graduated from a technical college, married a Russian from Orel and had two children, a son born in 1927 and a daughter in 1935. He worked as a machine operator until 1937, when he was arrested, almost certainly because of his Polish origins (enough to make him a ‘Polish nationalist’). Sentenced to eight years in the Pechora labour camp, Yakhovich remained there after his release in 1945, living now with a woman called Liuska, another former prisoner, in a room in one of the barrack houses on Wood-Combine Street just outside the barbed-wire fence of the industrial zone.

  Having spent so long in Pechora, Yakhovich had a profound sympathy for the prisoners and did what he could to help them: running errands, bringing food and delivering letters, at great risk to himself. He had a special feeling for those prisoners who, like himself, had been separated from their wives. In 1947, he would travel to Orel to try to persuade his wife and daughter to come and live with him in Pechora.

  On one occasion, Lev gave Yakhovich a bundle of Sveta’s letters that he had been storing underneath a floor plank in his barrack. Lev wanted Yakhovich to take them out of the camp for safekeeping, until someone could be found to carry them back to Moscow, where Sveta collected them. Lacking a stamp from the camp censors, the letters were illegal, so if they were found during a search by the guards they would be confiscated and destroyed. Lev would be punished in the isolation block or transferred to the 3rd Colony, where conditions were appalling and prisoners were sent on a penal convoy if they broke the rules again. Yakhovich took the tightly packed bundle of letters, stashed them inside his jacket and headed towards the main guard-house on his way out of the camp. But the guard noticed the bulge in his jacket. Stopping Yakhovich, he asked him what it was. ‘What, this? Just papers,’ Yakhovich replied. ‘Show me,’ the guard said. Yakhovich took the packet out. ‘But those are letters,’ the guard said. ‘Well, so what?’ Yakhovich said. ‘Someone chucked them out, so I’m taking them to the toilet block to use as paper.’ The guard waved him through.

  As the network of smugglers developed, Lev became more confident of avoiding the censors and began to write with greater openness. The first issue on which he wrote in this new mode concerned something that had bothered him for several months: a vendetta against Strelkov that exposed the darker side of human nature in the camps. Strelkov’s expertise as a mining engineer had given him a powerful position as the head of the laboratory that tested and controlled production methods in the wood-combine. No one else could do Strelkov’s job. But his ‘obstinate persistence’ (Lev’s words) in getting his own way had alienated several of the Gulag bosses, who resented being told what they could or could not do by a mere prisoner when they were themselves under pressure to meet the production plan. In 1943, Strelkov had clashed with Anatoly Shekhter, the deputy director of the forestry department of the Pechora railway: Strelkov had stopped him from building with materials that did not comply with technical requirements. The matter had gone all the way to the highest Gulag authorities, who had found in Strelkov’s favour. But Shekhter had not forgotten the incident, and had presecuted Strelkov ever since, finding fault with everything he did.

  In December 1946, Shekhter spent some weeks at the wood-combine to inspect its work. Taking advantage of this opportunity to advance his own career, the head of the drying room – a prisoner called Gibash, ‘known to everyone as a liar and racketeer’, according to Lev – wrote a vicious denunciation accusing Strelkov of refusing to release wood for the workshops on the grounds that it was not dry when in fact it was. Gibash sent a sample of the wood for tests in a neighbouring laboratory, which found them to be dry, though it was widely suspected that he had dried the sample before sending it. On the basis of this denunciation – which in the language of the Great Terror had accused Strelkov of ‘subversively delaying the release of dry material and wrecking the plant’s plan’ – Strelkov was removed from his job and hauled before the MVD on charges of ‘sabotage’. Strelkov appealed to the Department of Technical Control, more wood samples were tested, and he was eventually rehabilitated in his post. But Gibash came up with new charges, and the case dragged on until the early weeks of 1947, when Lev wrote to Sveta:

  I didn’t want to write about this, it’s so very sad, but you’re the only person I can share it with … What makes people want to ruin others who are in the same position as them? Gibash isn’t a human being at all – he lost the right to that description long ago … During the whole of this saga I have genuinely admired Strelkov’s composure and self-control. Sometimes I want to write to his wife or daughter and tell her what a wonderful person they have. Of course, that’s stupid, they know it better than anyone, and I wouldn’t accomplish anything except indiscretion, but I’m afraid I’ll do it all the same. His daughter is a student at Moscow State University of Railway Engineering and lives with her husband, their baby son, and her mother on Pravda Street. The authorities are going to do something about the Strelkov business but it’s too slow and God knows whom they’ll decide for. Sometimes the most idealistic people are forced here into the darkest alleys – I have become an utter sceptic and have faith only in the past.

  Good news came on 28 January, when the Pechora Gulag administration in Abez passed a resolution reinstating Strelkov. A few weeks later, Gibash was sent to Vorkuta, the coal region further north.

  The Strelkov incident had set off something inside Lev. He began to write more frankly to Sveta about how he was affected by conditions in the camp. What disturbed him most was the way the camp system brought out the worst in almost everyone: petty rivalries and animosities were amplified by the cramped conditions and struggle to survive; ill-will festered and easily erupted into violence. ‘My darling Sveta, I need to tell you about all kinds of things,’ Lev wrote on 1 March.

  I don’t have much to say to bring you comfort, Sveta, maybe I should not be writing this at all. You once said that it’s not always good or necessary to finish painful sentences. But having started, I need to finish. Can you see that the hardest thing for us to bear is not the material hardships at all? It’s two other things – the lack of contact with the outside world, and the fact that changes in our personal situation can happen any time and unexpectedly. We have no idea what will happen tomorrow, or even in the next hour. Your official status can change, or you can be sent elsewhere any minute for the most trivial reason, and sometimes
for no reason at all. What happened to Strelkov, Sinkevich (he had to leave today) and a multitude of others is proof of this.

  It’s interesting here (in a tragic sort of way) because everything in normal life is magnified. Human shortcomings and defects and the consequences of people’s actions take on huge significance. There are virtues too, of course, but inasmuch as they don’t play a great part in normal circumstances to begin with, here they become so much rarer that they start to disappear. Ill-will turns into hostility, hostility takes the form of wild hatred, and pettiness becomes meanness, eventually leading to some crime. Abruptness becomes an insult, suspicion slander, money-grabbing robbery, indignation rage, sometimes ending in murder …

  Any remotely positive activity becomes pointless and unnecessary, from both a selfish angle and a general one. The most one can hope for is something quite dull, like the duties of an usher in an out-of-the-way provincial theatre, which at least leaves you 16 hours a day for your personal life and brings in a little money too …

  Oh Sveta, it’s such a sunny day today that it seems all this nonsense I have written is of no use to anyone.

  ‘Being sent elsewhere’ was Lev’s great fear. What he meant was a penal convoy despatched to another camp or forest colony where conditions would be worse. Lev was afraid not of the ‘material hardships’ but of losing ‘contact with the outside world’, by which he meant Sveta. On a convoy the guards were bound to take his things (‘everything will vanish – printed material, written material, letters, photographs’, he had explained to her) and he might end up in a place where he would not be able to write. This was Sveta’s fear as well – that at any moment Lev might disappear and she would lose touch with him. There were convoys every month from the wood-combine. The camp administration used them to punish certain prisoners and break up groups considered dangerous. What determined whether a prisoner was chosen for the convoy was usually arbitrary and often came down to no more than a guard’s or manager’s disliking him.

  Falling ill was Lev’s other fear. The arrival of prisoners from other camps and colonies – who ‘nearly always look much worse and frightfully unwell’ – served as a reminder of how easily he could get sick:

  Dystrophy – consumption – is normal in our camp. There’s also scurvy, but with some know-how and experience it’s fairly manageable, because the summers are green and if you can’t get vitamin C by eating lemons, there’s enough of it in pine needles and all kinds of herbs, so you just have to remember that. During the winter I put your tablets to good use and gave them to a couple of friends. Anisimov is finishing the rest; he got a bit of scurvy but is better now. See how your tablets helped!

  If Lev got sick, he was not likely to recover quickly, if at all, in the infirmary of the wood-combine. There was only one doctor there, hardly any medicine and little food, because supplies for the patients were regularly stolen by the guards.

  As the smuggling system developed, Sveta shared more news with Lev as well. On 20 January, she celebrated the eve of Lev’s thirtieth birthday by drinking a toast to him with her family and friends. She then went to see Aunt Olga, who had a parcel for Sveta to send to him. ‘I made your views known and refused to accept a pillow and a summer uniform,’ she explained, aware of Lev’s discomfort with people taking any trouble over him. Olga had got herself into a flap about the local soviet moving ‘gypsies’ into Lev’s old room in the communal apartment on Leningrad Prospekt. She had been battling with the authorities to get it back from the ‘gypsies’, who had packed all of Lev’s things into his trunk and thrown it out. Olga was concerned that he would be upset by the loss of his belongings, but all Lev really cared about were some photographs that had belonged to his parents. ‘The room is no longer mine,’ he had written to his aunt,

  and there is no need to worry yourself about my property. It’s true that I was not stripped of any of my things by my sentence and formally they should belong to you and me, but it’s too late to get any of it back now. And I don’t need it. If anything remains, don’t keep it for me but sell it: you need the money more. Things are so unimportant in the life of a human being: they’re not worth any fuss or frayed nerves.

  Material conditions were hard for everybody in Moscow. The shops were empty, food was in short supply, and even basic items were rationed. Like many Muscovites, Sveta’s family survived by growing potatoes and other vegetables on a suburban allotment that they travelled to on Sundays by metro and train. By the spring of 1947, conditions in Moscow had worsened to the point where people were beginning to worry about going hungry, an anxiety fed by rumours of famine in Ukraine, where several hundred thousand died from starvation in 1946–7. ‘As for what is taking place in Ukraine,’ Sveta wrote to Lev in a letter so explicit that it would not have been passed by the censors, ‘I simply cannot bear to think of it.’

  People are crowding on to trains for Siberia or Belarus, but there’s nothing other than potatoes there. Trains are being stopped from coming into Moscow, but there are masses of beggars in the city nonetheless. At least half of Moscow’s population is now living in worse conditions than even during the war. It is painful to see all this, Levi. Everyone is counting the days until autumn and asking themselves how the harvest will turn out. For the moment, everything is all right at home … We have six ration cards for the three of us and can do entirely without going to the private market (the only thing we buy from a private seller is milk every other day) … True, we don’t see any meat, but there are such things as vegetarians, and it is said that they often live to be a hundred years old. Matters are worse as far as our income is concerned: Papa gets 1,300 roubles, and my salary is 930 roubles, but all this money disappears very quickly.16

  From the beginning of their correspondence Lev and Sveta had discussed what they had called in code their ‘Minimum’ and ‘Maximum’ programmes – the ‘minimaxes’ for short. The first referred to a request for transfer to a different part of the Gulag, where Lev could do scientific work; the second was more ambitious: an appeal to get Lev’s sentence reduced or even to obtain his release. Sveta had been optimistic from the start. ‘Both are completely possible,’ she had written on 28 August 1946. ‘You know about the Stalin Prize winners Tupolev and Ramzin,17 but there are many other examples that are not so well known.’ It was true that the MVD had a policy of identifying scientists in the labour camps and redirecting them to specialist branches of the Soviet economy, especially to military research institutes under the control of the Gulag. The problem was that the bosses of the camps were usually reluctant to release their scientists, whom they relied on to run power stations, production laboratories, lighting systems and so on. Lev did not think that he could hope to achieve any more than he had done already by getting transferred to the Electrical Group. As for the Maximum, he didn’t believe in it at all: ‘I don’t want you to waste your energy petitioning for the Maximum,’ he had written to Sveta. But she continued on both fronts. ‘You don’t have faith, and I don’t have much faith either, probably no more than you do,’ she had written in December. ‘But, Lev, if there’s any kind of chance, isn’t it worth a try? I know there’d be more unnecessary pain if nothing comes of it. So we need to be level-headed and not deceive ourselves with hope – but still act. Nothing will happen by itself.’

  By February 1947, Lev had concluded that it was too late to think of an appeal of any kind. He thought his scientific research at the Physics Institute was too much ‘like student work’ to warrant any hope of a transfer, though he promised Sveta that he would find out through Strelkov if anybody from the Gulag’s scientific programme was due to visit Pechora; if so, he would ask them. An appeal of his sentence would entail a review of his investigation by the military tribunal in Frankfurt an der Oder. Since he knew that it had all been fixed, he saw no point in reliving the experience, and perhaps making his situation worse. In a long and candid letter of 1 March, Lev tried to rule out any further talk of ‘Minimums’ and ‘Maximums’.

>   I won’t think about the Maximum because witnesses are needed for an appeal to have any chance of success and they’re never summoned, and it would be difficult to find them anyway. I’m not even sure that new lies wouldn’t crop up between the time of their testimony and … the announcement of the verdict. It’s true that a person is more experienced the second time around … but the chances of success are still slim. Every action can always be attributed to at least two different motives – ‘good’, which is the natural explanation, and ‘evil’, which in their conspiratorial way of thinking disguises ‘dirty deeds’. The biggest problem is that many of the facts that could stand in my favour have no witnesses, and nobody is going to believe me. The gentlemen professors [procurators] are convinced that anybody brought before them is incapable of possessing sincere motives such as patriotism or adherence to the principles of common decency …

  With regard to the Minimum, the secret military significance of nuclear and space research rules out any possibility of a person charged under article 58-1b working in these areas, especially someone not particularly distinguished. The fact that a person who has served his time is not allowed to work in a major economic-industrial centre even in remote provincial towns – with the exception of Yakutia, Komi, Kolyma and some others – is a good indication of how the political articles, even the less serious ones, are regarded by the authorities. No testimony on a prisoner’s behalf can mitigate these articles. In two months’ time someone here is going to be released who was convicted in the ‘Tukhachevsky era’ [1937]. This person is a former member of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League, a military pilot and – he’s remained so in the camps – a genuine enthusiast. He worked here as a saddler and took on all the problems of the wood-combine as if they were his own … More than once, he sold his own bread and denied himself tobacco so that he could buy the leather straps we need in the workshops. And nobody ever thanked him for anything he did or remembered it when deciding where he was allowed to live on his release. You cannot change the terms of your sentence.