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

by Figes, Orlando

  I can imagine that Tamara likes Klara more, because of her greater femininity, her love of order, of comfort, clothes, etc. They’re probably also close because they’re both mothers and they’ve both lost children, whereas I’m just a grass bride.26 That’s probably the real difference, but I find it difficult to decide which is worse. Also, Klara is affectionate, and I’m not. Klara, of course, has cried on her shoulder, whereas I have not.

  Finally there was Nina Semashko, Lev and Sveta’s friend from the Physics Faculty, who had lost her husband, Andrei, in the war, and then her baby son. Writing to Lev about the death of Nina’s child, Sveta touched on her own suffering:

  It’s always difficult to bury someone but somebody small and young is a different thing entirely. An outsider perceives a child only in the present, but for the mother the present stretches back into the past and envelops everything in the future. There’s not just the 9 months of waiting and the 11 months of feeding but, long before that, the desire or reluctance (or anxiety about whether it’s even possible). I don’t know if I’m being clear, but this future is everything, all plans and dreams, right up to and including the desire to have grandchildren. And so [the death of a child] rips out such a chunk of this everything that it seems there’s nothing left to fill it with. Fortunately the world is such that the pain dulls over time … Nina is still young enough – and she has the freedom – to decide that another child may fill that void, but now is not the time to talk to her about it. At the moment she just says that if a person is unlucky, there’s no point in striving for anything or searching for happiness.

  Sveta longed to have a child. She was thirty years old. She knew that she would have to wait eight more years, at least, for Lev to be released and that he might not return at all. Perhaps that was what she meant when she wrote that she was waiting for her ‘life to start’. After her trip to Pechora, Sveta was certain that her future – her ‘everything’ –was tied to Lev. But they had decided not to have a child as long as he remained a prisoner. Lev reflected on their decision years later:

  I didn’t want to compromise her future with my present or future. I did not want her, out of love for me, to sacrifice herself, to tie herself to my fate. That’s why I didn’t want us to be bound by children. No one knew what would happen as long as Stalin was alive. I could expect nothing good. To burden Sveta with a child in such a situation –in which I could not help her and might subject her and the child to a terrible existence – was not something I could do. In Stalin’s time, prisoners released from the labour camps, ‘enemies of the people’ like myself, could not live normal lives. They were often rearrested or sent into exile … I couldn’t burden Sveta and her family with the terrible difficulties, the unhappiness, they were certain to suffer if we had a child. But Sveta wanted one.

  Sveta invested all her maternal affection in Alik, Yara’s son. Her letters contained regular reports on her nephew, whom she obviously adored. ‘Leva’, she wrote, ‘Alik is turning seven, not eight, and we celebrated his birthday on Sunday.’

  Today Lena [Alik’s mother] brought him with us to see Obraztsov’s Puss in Boots. He said he liked that it was so short, and although he understands that the animals aren’t real (he’s a good enough actor himself to know that) he nevertheless thought that people climb into (put on) the puppets – which means he didn’t notice that they were too small. He’s already been to real theatres – he went to Tales at the Children’s Theatre. Do you remember Terem-Teremok and About the Goat?27 I think you and I saw them the last time we were together, not counting our final trip to the cinema – I can’t remember what the film was. Alik has grown a lot, so he’s got thinner, but he’s not skinny at all. His physical courage and self-possession are improving slowly … [He] gets As in Russian and arithmetic, but Bs in physical education. I told you already that he understands that 1/7 is less than 1/5, and Lera [from his school] has taught him how to subtract fractions (not too difficult ones) from whole numbers. Now he’s become interested in engineering – he’s always trying to take something apart and climb inside and put it back together in reverse. He’s not noted for his tidiness. But I don’t have any idea how to ‘educate’ a child.

  In fact, Sveta’s mother, Anastasia, had suggested that she consider working as a teacher at a nursery. Sveta doubted her own abilities as a scientist, and her mother thought she might be happier if she spent more time with small children. Lev encouraged the idea. But Sveta decided against it in the end, on the grounds that she lacked experience of mothering and did ‘not know how children grow’.

  Meanwhile she loved it when Alik came to stay with her. His naughtiness reminded Sveta of her own childhood:

  Alik is capable of waking me up at 6 o’clock (after he himself has already had a good night’s sleep, of course). He loves to make noise, forgets to wash his hands, plays happily with a bicycle that spends most of its time upside-down, and climbs fully dressed into a wash tub full of soap suds. I don’t know whether I’d be upset and angry if I’d been a goody two-shoes myself, but I remember all too well how we made the apartment ours, turning all the chairs over, crawling under the beds and tables. And nobody yelled at me, even when I was jumping around and broke my tooth on the headboard or cut my head against the radiator (maybe Yara was told off, but I wasn’t). You see, I’m quite a poor mentor and childminder, since I rely on heredity and the natural course of things in the belief that it’s simply not possible for anything truly bad to grow out of something so small and glorious. But the worst thing is that I’m a ‘theoretician-childminder’, far removed from practical experience.

  By coincidence, Lev was also playing the role of ‘mentor and childminder’. On 5 October, the day Sveta arrived back in Moscow from Pechora, Lev had received a visitor:

  A young girl came to the power station and I said, ‘Are you coming to see us?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, come on then.’ Looking suspiciously at Nikolai Bogdanov [a mechanic at the power station], she asked me: ‘Why aren’t you dirty, mister?’ And, taking hold of my belt, she led me around the generator room and began to ask whether the machines were resting and why there were so many clocks everywhere and whether there would be light if the furnaces weren’t stoked. We quickly became friends and I learned that her name is Tamara Kovalenko, she comes from the Vinnytsa region, and her father works at the stables.

  Tamara was eleven years old. She had an older sister called Lida and a younger brother, Tolik (Anatoly). They were ragged, shoeless children neglected by their mother, who worked as a laundress, and always hungry, because their father spent most of the household income on vodka. The Kovalenkos were among the 500 ‘special exiles’ in the wood-combine, many of them living in the barracks of the 1st Colony, just outside the prison zone, but children like Tamara were free to roam around the labour camp. They were never stopped or searched by any of the guards, so they could run errands for the prisoners, who gave them sweets and money or made them wooden toys in the workshops. The town children would search for toys near the prison-zone perimeter, where prisoners sometimes threw them over the fence. These anonymous gifts were found in many homes around the labour camp, where they served as a reminder of the prisoners’ longing for their own children, winning human sympathy for them.

  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 whi
stle 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.28

  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 21/2 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.29

  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’.30 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.