Pavel, an acquaintance (not a very close one) with whom I suddenly found a common language for the first time in 13 years. I have to admit that I would never have allowed myself if I’d been completely sober – the conversation was about humanity, happiness, work and other lofty matters. I got home at 3 a.m. And this same Pavel (not exactly in a state of sobriety himself) reproached me on the way home for having in the past played it both ways – for knowing I have you but telling him all kinds of things. I swear, I can’t remember ever having said more than two words to him. I always thought that he was devoted to Ninka and indifferent to me. If I did ever say anything to him, it was probably just something to avoid the necessity or the possibility of having a serious conversation.
Pavel was not the only man to show an interest in Sveta. At the end of the war there had been an episode that she had told Lev about in 1948. She had only mentioned it in the context of an argument she had had with her friend Irina Krauze about a mutual friend who was having an affair with a married man. Sveta had disapproved of their friend’s behaviour on the grounds that it involved a lie, and this had reminded her of a young man who
was planning to get married when I suddenly appeared on the scene and a week before the wedding we had a talk. He told me that he had never met anyone better than me and that his fiancée couldn’t stand up to any kind of comparison with me, and he was suffering terribly. I replied that I was waiting for you (this was in 1945) and asked why he was in such a hurry to get married if she wasn’t the best person for him. He should wait until he met someone else. He said that it was useless to wait. Whoever you select, there will always be somebody better whom you’ll meet one day, and, in order to be moral, once you’ve made your choice you have to close your eyes and never look at anyone else ever again. And, since he had already promised he would marry her, everything was decided. I said it was disrespectful to her. I just can’t accept such blind morality. I don’t need the kind of morality that drags you by the tail and uses force. Perhaps that’s just my youth and foolishness?
Maybe it was also that she was lucky – in knowing that she had the man she really loved, even if she could not have him yet.
Lev agreed. He did not need to compare Sveta with anybody, because it was her he loved.
As for the ‘best’ and closing your eyes for the future – of course it’s false and impossible to live like that. Objectively, there must be others who are better, the world is bigger than ‘her’, but that’s not what it is about. Which is that for ‘me’, that is ‘him’, well, it’s easier for me if I philosophize in the first person so I’ll use ‘I’ and ‘you’. The point is that you are the best for me – not because you are objectively so but because for me you are the best and I don’t need anybody else, not even the Queen of Sheba, because I love you, for all your particular qualities – even your shortcomings are dear to me – while your merits are a source of joy. At the start [of a relationship], of course, feeling comes from pleasing qualities, but then they play a secondary role … Disappointment often plays a part, or external circumstances – losing that force of attraction and so on. But when a person has known someone very well for a long time, not just for a month or a year, but over many years, this danger boils down to nothing. That’s how it seems to me, in any case. The colour of our blushes or the number of grey hairs become insignificant. Common sense won’t help with this at all, especially not mine. I love you, and that is all. And for how long? Well, it seems like it will be for ever, that’s how it seems now. It seemed less certain before, when we were apart, but now I believe, I believe, I believe. What else can I say?
Lev thought that a person who could even think in terms of finding ‘someone better’ had lost the ‘capacity for emotion’. When he wrote of ‘common sense’ he had in mind the ‘hollow-hearted reasoning’ that could make such calculations, and referred to ‘Prelude to a Poem on the Five Year Plan’, the last poem of Vladimir Mayakovsky, in which there was a line about ‘shameful common sense’:
She loves me? She loves me not?
I crack my knuckles, knead my hands, and fling
My broken fingers to the winds.
So wreath of daisies you chance upon in spring
And use to tell your fortune
Are torn and flung away.
Let me discover grey in beard and hair,
Let the silver of advancing years ring out in peals
I hope and trust that I shall never
Come to shameful common sense or reason.
Sveta longed for Lev. ‘For some reason, I’ve been seeing you in my dreams all week,’ she wrote to him on 5 March. ‘It didn’t make me all that happy, because, although I could see you, I wasn’t able to touch you (Alik says this about God, whose existence he finds conceivable, apparently), and you were moving away from me the whole time.’ Lev too had dreams about her. He could hear her voice but not see her. He could see a letter she had sent but could not touch or open it. He saw her not only in his dreams ‘but also in reality, relentlessly, and it’s really getting bad’.
Lev was seeing Sveta all the time. When he was on his shift he was often thinking about her and having conversations with her in his head. He was irritated by the attempts of his shift coworkers to talk to him. ‘Nikolai [Lileev] has had to switch to the night shift,’ Lev wrote to Sveta, ‘and I’m feeling liberated from the need to account for my thoughts (“What are you thinking, Lev?” What a stupid question!).’
Lev was busy with repairs at the power station at the start of 1949. The previous autumn he had designed a steam-heater for the engine but when it was delivered after the New Year it turned out they had made it the wrong size, so it had to be sent for repairs to the main workshops. On 18 January, he had his first day off in more than half a year. ‘There will be more free days,’ he wrote to Sveta, ‘although the good they bring me is not much.’
After the departure of Terletsky, Lev found little comfort in his friends. He was becoming more self-sufficient and did not want to became close to anyone. ‘I like being on my own at work,’ he wrote to Sveta on 19 January. ‘People come to talk with me of course, but that doesn’t bother me as long as I’m not made to feel awkward out of a sense that I need to repay their friendship or kindness by opening myself up to them, which I absolutely cannot do with Nikolai [Lileev] or anybody else who thinks he is my friend.’ Lev was alienated by the banter of the barracks, where without Terletsky he felt more isolated than before. ‘Today was an idiotic day,’ he wrote on 20 January. ‘In the barracks there are so many stupid, wild things done, so many jokes and pranks, that I can’t help but get annoyed and wonder how it’s possible for someone like A. A. [Semenov],35 with a normal mind, to go along with them, especially when these practical jokes are at the expense of someone present at the time.’ He felt unable to join in when the other prisoners fooled around. He was irritated by their drinking and singing, even by their noisy games of dominoes in the barracks after work. While Lev would be lying on his bunk, trying to read Anna Karenina, his fellow prisoners would be creating havoc around him. Sometimes, however, he too enjoyed the party. ‘The people in our barracks are having fun today,’ he wrote to Sveta on 25 January. ‘There’s no particular reason. The floors and windows are all shaking with their dancing and the sounds of their guitars, and surprisingly the best musician turned out to be Aleksandrovich. I take my hat off to him!’
Three weeks later, there was a quieter party, for Strelkov’s fiftieth birthday. Lev came with Lileev to drink tea with him in the laboratory. ‘It was a sad day,’ Lev wrote to Sveta, ‘and I could not bring myself to wish him happy birthday. He understood, of course, why we had come but said nothing.’ Strelkov continued to be ill, with scurvy and increasingly acute attacks caused by gallstones. Nothing could be done by the doctors in the infirmary, who lacked the expertise to carry out the difficult operation he required. Lev felt sorry for Strelkov, as he explained to Sveta:
Nobody has done as much as him for the production of th
e wood-combine, and not only has he received no thanks but the people who have benefited from his work are trying to keep quiet about it so as not to reveal that their own work is being done for them by others. The local bosses don’t lift a finger to help him beyond his individual ration, which he should get anyway because he’s ill.
There were even sadder celebrations on 17 April, the twenty-fifth birthday of Strelkov’s daughter, Valya, who lived in Moscow with her husband and her son, whom Strelkov had never seen, and Strelkov’s wife.
Only 25! And if G. Y. [Strelkov] lives to see her she’ll be 37! – under 40! But will there ever be such a meeting? It’s really hard for him and sometimes when I’m leaving him his misfortune and pitiful situation are enough to make me weep … It is getting to the point where I want to bang my head against a wall and grind my teeth from impotence and indignation at everything that has been done to him. He’s a wonderful person even though we often argue (quite civilly, of course).
Spring came late to Pechora in 1949. There was snow in May, and the first warm days did not arrive until mid-June. The long cold winter put an extra strain on everyone. With the river still frozen, timber could not be brought in to the wood-combine. There were frequent power cuts because the power station relied on burning wood. In the saw-mill and workshops machines could not be powered and lay idle; workers had to resort to hand-tools, and the wood-combine fell far behind its quota so that the Gulag authorities reduced food deliveries. Throughout that winter there were chronic shortages of warm clothes, boots and gloves for the prisoners. Many became ill as they were forced to work for longer hours in freezing temperatures to make up for the shortfall in output. In the 2nd Colony, where Lev was a prisoner, one in ten prisoners was estimated to be sick during the first quarter of 1949, but only 1 per cent were allowed to be ill officially on any day.
Lev was concerned for Konstantin Rykalov, a political prisoner and wood-chopper at the power station, a large man who had been a boxer in his youth but had been worn down by the hardships of the camp, eventually becoming incapacitated with an acute form of TB which made it hard for him to breathe. Lev was fond of Rykalov. He described him to Sveta as ‘an educated man, strong, honest to the point of pedantry, and, despite the two years he has spent here, an incorrigible searcher after truth’. Lev went to see Rykalov in the infirmary:
I found him dressed and relaxing in the corridor, complaining that for exercise he’s been chopping wood and quickly getting exhausted. ‘But where on earth is your axe?’ I ask. And he replies: ‘I came across a really bad knot in the wood so I hit it a bit harder and the axe handle broke in half. They’re going to make a new one.’
Rykalov was working to regain his strength and hoping to become an electrician at the power plant with the help of Lev and Semenov. He would visit Lev in his lunch breaks:
Two or three days ago, feeling ashamed by his reproach that I don’t go to see him any more, I paid him a visit and we spent the evening drinking tea. I listened to his reminiscences over a packet of photographs and, although it was all a little alien to me, I didn’t begrudge spending my time that way – firstly because he’s unquestionably a fine fellow with a good heart, who is interesting for his likes and his abilities, and is quiet; and secondly because he’s lonely here, and I know that he finds it easy to talk to me, and this brings him some relief, which makes me feel good because I’ve helped someone. That’s me analysing it now, but at the time I was simply having a nice time.
Rykalov became a stoker in the boiler room of the drying unit, but he could not cope with the heavy work and seriously injured his back (the former boxer had overestimated his physical capacities). Refused access to the infirmary, Rykalov was put into a punishment block after he had been caught smoking in an undesignated place. Given only bread and water, he became very ill and had to be released on the request of a doctor. He was taken to a special zone of the infirmary for TB sufferers and given lighter work duties inside the industrial zone.
Visiting Rykalov in the infirmary, Lev was struck by the kindness of one of the nurses there who was, ‘it seems, not a native here but who inherited the post or has family’. There were many exiled nurses in the infirmaries of Pechora. On 20 April, Lev wrote to Sveta about a medical assistant in the sick-bay of the transit camp called Nina Grin,
a woman in her forties who will be in her fifties when she ends her work trip [i.e. sentence] here. But I think her real name ought to be Grinevskaya. When the patients ask for something to read she gives them Scarlet Sails or Gliding on the Waves.36 The patients all love her.
As Lev had evidently guessed, Nina was the widow of the writer Aleksandr Grin (or Grinevsky), whose romantic seafaring fantasies, much read and liked by Lev at just this time, could not have been more removed from the grim realities of the Gulag. After her husband’s death in 1932, Nina had qualified as a medical assistant and worked as a nurse in Feodosia in the Crimea. During the war the Germans sent her to a concentration camp near Breslau. For collaborating with the enemy, she was given ten years in Pechora by the Soviets in 1945.
Another nurse in the transit camp was Svetlana Tukhachevskaya, the daughter of Marshal Tukhachevsky, who had been tried in secret and shot as a spy in 1937. After the arrest of her father, Svetlana was sent with her mother, brothers and sisters to Astrakhan, and then, when her mother was arrested, she was placed in an orphanage, where she stayed until 1941. In the chaos of the first days of the war she ran away from the orphanage but was tracked down by the NKVD and sentenced to five years in Pechora. She was taken off the list of prisoners and hidden in the infirmary by one of the doctors, a repressed German national named Agata Rempel, who saw that Svetlana, a beautiful young woman, then aged twenty-four, and the daughter of a famous Soviet marshal, would not survive if left to fend for herself among the prisoners. Svetlana worked in the infirmary and lived in various houses in the town, where she was taken in by voluntary workers who concealed her whereabouts.
On 2 July 1949, the Party leaders of the wood-combine met to discuss how to carry out an MVD decree (No. 10190) calling for stricter isolation of the prisoners. Nothing had been done to implement the decree since it had been issued in March 1947. There were no systematic searches of the prisoners and their barracks, so all sorts of things were smuggled in and out of the prison zone. There was still no proper segregation between the industrial zone and the settlement of free workers. The guards at the main guard-house were corrupt and took bribes to let goods and people through. Many of the guards were in cahoots with the prisoners in the black market: a prisoner called Liashuk was a skilled tailor who made clothes for many of the guards; another, Kozarinov, was a cook who made them meals. There was even a black market in ‘government secrets’ (official documents) stolen from the headquarters of the MVD inside the settlement and sold to the prisoners, some of whom got hold of their personal files and forged alterations to the articles of their sentence or even changed the date of their release.
The upshot of the meeting was a new system of passes; stricter controls on visits; more searches of the barracks; the prohibition of military uniforms (which were still worn by some prisoners); the ending of dry rations (which could be used in an escape); the repair of the perimeter barbed-wire fence (which had several holes in it); the clearing of the bushes between the fence and the windmill (where axes, pliers, saws and other tools had been thrown from the bushes into the barracks zone); the increased manning of the watch-towers (three of which had been left unguarded for several months); and finally, after a year of discussion, the construction of a fence and new guard-house between the settlement and the industrial zone.
‘How it’s going to work out this year with the visit I just don’t know,’ Lev wrote to Sveta. ‘The new procedures offer no comfort.’ Once again, Sveta was determined not to be put off from trying to see Lev: ‘The decision made little sense last year, but victors are never judged.37 I’ve been coping so far, but fortune might not always smile on the brave.’
This year there were added complications. The institute did not have the funds to send her on a trip just to Kirov, but Tsydzik did not want to lose her for a month by letting her inspect the factories ‘along the entire route’ – in Omsk and Sverdlovsk and Kirov – which would justify the costs but jeopardize the institute’s fulfilment of the plan, because Sveta was needed to direct the latest research projects in the laboratory. By 4 July, Sveta had secured a work trip to Omsk and Sverdlovsk, from where she hoped to travel on to Pechora, but nothing was for sure: a colleague, who had got the Kirov trip, was being slow in going there, and Sveta could not leave until she had returned.
Three weeks later, Sveta’s colleague had still not left for Kirov, and she was now resigned to coming out to see him during a week’s holiday in the autumn, ‘which up to now has been a lucky time’. Lev had warned her that the tighter rules were restricting visits to ‘between 30 minutes and two hours with the usual “dressing” [code for: in the presence of a guard]’. Litvinenko’s mother had visited in June. Even after paying bribes, she had been given just three meetings of three hours on her own with Nikolai. Lileev’s father had been no more successful, receiving only two meetings of the same duration with his son. In a coded letter, in case it fell into the hands of the authorities, Sveta asked Lev to send her more details about the risks and chances of success of bribing guards with vodka (‘vitamin C’)38 or money (‘vitamin D’) to gain more time or privacy. ‘Wives are more interesting to me than mothers,’ Sveta wrote, underlining her desire to see Lev in a situation where they might be on their own, ‘but then I’m purely interested in the practical issue of where meetings can take place.’ In his equally coded reply, Lev warned Sveta not to build up expectations of achieving much by paying bribes:
Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag Page 19
