There was reason to hope the intimacy of the photographs might soon become more real. One of the improvements at the wood-combine in 1950 was the construction of a ‘House of Meetings’ (Dom svidanii), where, on the granting of official permission, prisoners could spend time privately with visitors. Located next to the guard-house at the entrance to the 2nd Colony, the house was really no more than a log cabin consisting of a room in which there was a bed, a table, some chairs and a small kitchen. But it was a private place: a prisoner could meet his wife there without the presence of a guard; he could spend a night with her.
At the end of June, a decree was posted in the wood-combine announcing the rules for the house: a prisoner could meet there with any visitor, it did not have to be a wife or a relative. On application to the main administration of the labour camp, every visitor would be granted a discretionary length of time, depending on the status and the conduct of the prisoner.
Sveta was determined not to miss this opportunity, even if it meant she had to travel the breadth of the Soviet Union. At the end of August, she was due to go on a holiday to the Caucasus. She had planned to travel to Erevan, Tblisi and Batumi and then spend some time in the mountains. But she now decided to make her trip there shorter so she could visit Lev before she returned to work. ‘My holiday leave finishes on the 23rd [of September],’ she wrote to him on 13 August,
the 24th is a free day, and then I need to find another six by any means I can (without pay for ‘family reasons’, ‘sabbatical leave’ or whatever); the 1st is a Sunday again, and on the 2nd I’ll be back at work. I decided that I’ll come to you no matter what (unless something extraordinary happens), and if there is any problem I will deal with it on the way. I’d prefer that to wasting any more time in the Caucasus, which could put my trip to you at risk. Do you understand, Levi? I’m still afraid of procrastination and delays.
Sveta left Moscow on 26 August. As agreed with Tsydzik beforehand, she sent a telegram from Batumi advising him that she needed to postpone her return to Moscow by six days. From Batumi she bought a train ticket directly to Pechora. Travelling first to Moscow, where she stopped at home to collect some warmer clothes, a woollen blanket and a bedsheet, she then took the northbound train to Pechora. From Batumi she had travelled 4,200 kilometres by train to be with Lev.
Sveta had permission to spend three days with him in the House of Meetings, a stretch of time that must have seemed a luxury. From the station Sveta walked directly to the main administration of Pechorlag, the same white building where she had been the year before, to get the necessary document. It seems she arrived on 26 September, because on that day Lev wrote to Nikita that he had ‘met S.’ The sheet and blanket she had brought from Moscow were evidently for the bed in the House of Meetings. Sveta recalled that Lev remained at her side for the whole time. He did not have to leave for his work shifts, as prisoners with visitors would normally have done, because the officials, with whom he got on well, allowed him to stay with her. These were blissful days for them. For the first time they enjoyed the ordinary happiness – which for so long had seemed impossible – of living together as man and wife.
Sveta left on the evening of 28 September. She wrote to Lev, probably while waiting for her train at the Pechora station. As usual, she filled her letter with mundane details, as if to distract herself from the terrible emotions she must have felt on leaving him.
Farewell, Levi.
I managed to get a ticket easily, but only for a sleeper in a combination carriage.
I was at the girls’ house – I saw Lida and Nelly [Kovalenko]. It turns out they’ve already got dark-blue ribbons, but they were very pleased with the red ones. To be on the safe side, I made a note that neither Nelly nor Tolya [Tolik] has any exercise books. And Lida isn’t studying at the moment, she’s looking after somebody else’s child. She’s planning to travel to Dnepropetrovsk with her sister, Tamara, to study at a technical school. I approved of the plan and gave them my address.
I’ll send you a description of my journey. But for now I’ve run out of energy and so I’m going to stop writing.
Somehow, Levi, look after yourself. And greetings to everyone.
She was back in Moscow early in the morning of Sunday, 1 October, and returned to work the following day. No one asked her where she’d been.
Lev wrote to her on 29 September. He wanted her to know that she had made a big impression on his friends, who had come to see her in the House of Meetings, some to thank her for the parcels and medicines that she had sent:
My darling Sveta, all the warmth has left with you – the air yesterday evening was already quite autumnal, and it snowed in the night, though it turned into slush by the morning.
I received many compliments intended for you. One of them went like this: ‘How that girl can talk! She could talk with the dead!’ (in the sense of being able to bring the dead back to life – not to be confused with ‘talking to the dead’). I. Z. [Bashun, a senior mechanic at the power station] doesn’t really get into conversations with strangers but he says he found it easy to talk to you.
And N. L[itvinenko] showed up slightly stunned a couple of evenings ago. He said that he expected to meet an imposing woman, ‘at any rate, much more imposing than you’ (me, that is), but it turns out (and both God and you forgive me for my bravery in telling this), ‘she’s just a slip of a girl’. There you go – take it as you wish. I was, of course, very pleased! Thank you, all you intelligent people!
Over the next weeks, as Lev and Sveta settled back into their routines, they began a conversation about how they would spend the four years until his release. Sveta started it, outlining her ‘ideal life’ for the coming winter, which entailed a lot of skating, skiing, swimming and music. ‘I can’t decide,’ she wrote on 14 October, ‘if it’s bad to think of things that are purely for pleasure, to dream of spending time with no purpose.’
Because right now what I really want more than anything is to be healthy for our life in the future. Conditions are hardly going to be easy and I’ll need to be strong and resilient. Maybe that’s just an excuse for laziness. I usually prefer outings that have a purpose (picking mushrooms and berries or reaching a specific destination) to aimless wanderings. But now I have only one goal: to wait for you. The word ‘wait’ is too passive: heartache drains my energy and stops me from getting on with life. Something you once said just popped into my head: ‘I wouldn’t go anywhere without you.’ That’s true, Levi. But I want the world to be good and interesting for you, even without me in it. That will be a real victory for me because then I will stop worrying about you. It’s not good to count on only one person (the same as having just one child).
Lev replied with one of his most passionate letters. It was written in the first three days of November.
I agree with you that the world is a good and interesting place no matter who is in it, but only in the most general sense. For none of it is true insofar as it relates to you, Sveta. Svet, the world is unquestionably good, but it’s so much more beautiful when it is lit up by you that I wouldn’t want – and would never want – to look at it without the illumination you bring to it.43 Do you really want me to enjoy the world in the dark, or at best in the half-light after you have gone away? ‘Not to count on only one person’? Sveta, Sveta, if it hadn’t been you writing that, if it weren’t just your endless selflessness (there’s no other word for it), if I’d received your letter from anybody else, I would have stopped writing. While I agree with the general theory, it’s an example of faulty reasoning.
‘That will be a real victory for me because then I will stop worrying about you.’ If only you’d written it in the conditional, Sveta.
It cannot happen, and it cannot happen because it would mean the end of everything that’s still human inside me. It would be moral suicide, not victory. Whose victory, and over whom? Yours, over yourself? In this sense, to claim a victory over yourself is nonsensical, and for somebody or something to vanquish you inside
me is impossible – because of age, temperament and our shared and ill-fated past. And why would you try to argue me into such a hollow ‘victory’? It’s cruel, not kind. Has there really been so little spoken, written and sung over the last thousand years by human beings who have a heart and soul? Svetlye, I don’t need these false consolations; you would be better off, seriously, simply spending the winter skiing, at the swimming pool, and in the country, taking care of yourself.
Sveta replied:
My darling Lev, I received your letter of 1–3 November yesterday. Levi, I didn’t manage to express myself correctly and I don’t even now know the best way to say what I mean – only God forbid that I should want somebody (or something) to vanquish me inside you. When I wrote about victory, I meant our victory. Not victory over us but victory over everything cruel that we’ve had to face, over the burdens that have made us stumble and caused us pain. I don’t want the pain to make you forget even for a moment all the good in the world – the earth and the sun and the water and, most importantly, people and relationships. I don’t want this joy to subside, and I want us to be young for a long time. Reasoning – any reasoning – doesn’t come into it. Levi, if the world is lit up already, then I hope it stays as bright, despite the laws of physics and regardless of the distance from the source of light. And in reality there is no distance, since the source is your attitude towards others, which means it’s always within you … Nevertheless, I’m right about not counting on just one person, Levi. Life should be taken on so firmly that not even the greatest sorrow can change this attitude, as long as it’s not a small-minded attitude from below but a wise, almost Tolstoyan, attitude from above. In that case it’s far from the destruction of what’s human; on the contrary, it’s what makes us human. I’m frustrated that I can’t express myself better; you might as well tear this letter up. I feel compassion for someone who loses his zest for life on impact with it (maybe love as well as compassion), but I have the greatest respect for those who remain on their feet (if they do so not out of flippant bravado, but through willpower, intelligence and character) … I come across more bravely in company than I truly am, but I try to keep going and I think that’s how it should be. Oh, I give up; I can’t do it. I wanted to write a nice, humorous, cheerful letter and tell you that your letter was like a song to my ears, but instead of that I’ve got angry with myself almost to the point of tears for my inarticulate mumblings. Well, what’s there to say about the weather? Only that it’s horrible.
10
‘My darling Sveta, the New Year has started as a continuation of the old,’ Lev wrote on 4 January 1951. ‘We spent New Year’s Eve quietly and modestly in the barrack, where thanks to Lyosha [Anisimov] there was a bushy Christmas tree, which was decorated fairly respectably by a collective effort.’ As they counted 1950 out, Lev was thinking there was one year less until the date of his release.
For the moment, as he struggled with the minus-40 temperatures of January, Lev could think of little else except Sveta. ‘My darling,’ he wrote on the 13th,
I still haven’t sent you the letter from yesterday but once again I’m drawn towards paper – for no particular reason, just to find a place to write your name: there’s no room left for it inside my head, where I’ve been repeating it incessantly in every intonation and in every permissible and impermissible grammatical form … I’ve tried to busy myself more with work so as not to think so much about Your Ladyship, and I’ve managed fairly well – so there you go.
There was a lot of work for Lev to do at the power station. Two German ‘reparation generators’44 had turned up in Pechora unexpectedly, ‘probably en route for somewhere else’, Lev supposed, and he was involved in fitting one of them to supplement the output of the power station at the wood-combine. The second generator was being fitted at the power station in the town. The rapidly developing industries of Pechora urgently required more electricity. Before 1951, the wood-combine had provided much of the town’s needs, even though it was itself buying in supplies of electricity from Cheliabinsk, because the power station in Pechora was too small to meet demand. There were frequent struggles over energy between the town (where the Gulag bosses wanted constant heat and light for the comfort of their homes) and the wood-combine (where fuel was needed to fulfil the production plan). The arrival of the German generators would relieve the wood-combine ‘of the need to feed the town,’ as Lev explained to Sveta on 7 April, ‘so there will be fewer conflicts, because without the new engines power-cuts would become unavoidable’.
Meanwhile the power station was closed down for three weeks of repairs following an accident in January. The wood-combine fell behind the plan for the first quarter of the year. In heated arguments the bosses of the labour camp sought to blame one another for the failures, which could bring the wrath of the MVD in Moscow down upon them all. When energy supplies were finally restored, production was ramped up in a desperate attempt to make up for lost time, but this only led to further accidents and stoppages. On 9 May, the ‘safety officer’ of the wood-combine reported no fewer than twenty-nine ‘serious accidents’ – with thirty-six fatalities –since the beginning of the year: safety regulations were ignored and there was ‘chaos’ everywhere, he said. A dozen men were killed in the 5th Colony when a lorry carrying seventy men to work skidded on ice and overturned. Two men in the 3rd were crushed to death by timbers falling from a railway truck. ‘We’re living and functioning just the same as always,’ Lev wrote sarcastically on 10 June.
For many of our uncles [MVD bosses], the construction project is a kind of game. The managers energe from their offices once a week or so and arrive in their cars (a journey of 1 km), have a walk around and shout: why the hell is it going so slowly?! Nothing is getting done! – something along those lines but in more pungent language. Nobody gives any practical instructions, such as how exactly to speed things up. The uncles of a slightly lower rank stand around looking interested, now and then making helpful comments that are too imprecise to apply and so are pointless. None of the engineering managers take the trouble to think about the cause of the problems (the main one – unfortunately unfixable – being that they didn’t think the project through when they should have), and all of them apparently consider that the very fact of their visit has given us the necessary supervision and assistance. Ah, those good-for-nothings!
Seven of these ‘good-for-nothings’ were sacked in April and later arrested after being found guilty of mass theft and fraud by a special MVD inquiry. They had stolen and sold off privately 8,000 metres of rigging gear, 200 kilograms of tomatoes, seven boxes of butter, six of sausage and fifty-seven mattresses. Responding to the scandal, the Party leaders of the wood-combine resolved to be more vigilant.
One of the first victims of the new campaign was Boris Arvanitopulo, the head of the power station, with whom Sveta had stayed on her visits in 1948 and 1949. Arvanitopulo had a history of trouble with the authorities. In March 1950, he had been hauled before the Party leaders of the wood-combine and given a ‘severe reprimand’ (strogii vygovor) for ‘distancing himself from the responsibilities of management’, that is, for fraternizing with the prisoners and sometimes getting drunk with them. Arvanitopulo was reprimanded six more times the next year, once for ‘accommodating unauthorized persons’ in his home (possibly a reference to Sveta), and in January 1951 he was blamed for the accident at the power station. Now he was charged with the ‘theft of socialist property’. He had paid for a wardrobe to be made for his wife, Vera, in the furniture workshop and had tried to smuggle it out of the industrial zone by bribing one of the guards with 300 roubles. There were calls for him to be sacked and sent before the People’s Court. The Party chairman and deputy director of the wood-combine, Zotikov Serditov, wrote a formal denunciation to the MVD in Moscow, and Arvanitopulo was dismissed. He continued to live with his family in Pechora but went in search of work in other towns, where he was unwanted, because of the black mark against his name. Lev felt bad about it all. �
��It is a catastrophe,’ he wrote to Sveta. ‘Vera cannot feed and bring up their two children as she should. It’s true she has a trade – she is a cook –but how she is to manage is not clear (though it is too early to talk about that yet) … Boris is holding up but Vera (whose greed caused all this) cries all the time.’
Arvanitopulo was not the only member of the administration to have close associations with the prisoners. Vladimir Novikov, the head of production, was often seen playing dominoes in the barracks, and Ivan Serpunin, the chief economist, counted many prisoners among his friends. A group photograph of the administration’s members at around this time shows a combination of MVD and Party officials, voluntary workers and prisoners. The striking thing about the photograph is how relaxed everyone looks. Despite their different ranks in the Gulag system, there is no real hierarchy in their seating arrangement and little sign of tension among them. The MVD director of the wood-combine appears at ease in the centre of the group with prisoners sitting at his feet and standing in a cluster behind his back.
Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag Page 22
