The administration of the wood-combine, 1950. Novikov (second from right) Serpunin (second from left) and the MVD director of the wood-combine, Boris Popov (third from left), are in the middle row. The three men on the right of the front row and the six in the centre of the back row are all prisoners.
From 1951, the camp’s security began to fall apart. Whether it was because of the growing intermingling between officials and prisoners, the greater opportunities for bribery or the massive increase in the supply of vodka is hard to tell. No doubt all these factors played a role. At a Party meeting on 6 June 1951, the commander of the guards, Ivan Koval’chuk, revealed that there had been twenty-seven individual and group escapes by prisoners in the previous three months. There were even cases where the guards – bribed with a litre of vodka for each man – had helped prisoners to escape. Some prisoners got out by jumping on to railway wagons leaving the industrial zone; others simply walked out the gates while the guards were drunk or got past them by threatening them with knives, saws and blades.
Security was particularly bad in the 2nd Colony, where Lev was a prisoner. Koval’chuk had uncovered a conspiracy of forty prisoners planning a group escape. Although the guards had known about the plan, they had done nothing to punish the conspirators. To complicate matters, a large contingent of the prisoners was on strike. They would not turn out for roll call but stayed in their barracks playing cards. They were not intimidated by the guards, who were mostly peasant boys, lamented Koval’chuk, ‘many of them hostile to the MVD themselves’. If not sympathetic to the prisoners, the guards were nevertheless unopposed to their offers of cash, a drink of vodka or a sexual favour from a female prisoner.
On 25 April, the Party leaders of the wood-combine discussed a planned uprising that had been discovered in the 2nd Colony. A group of prisoners intended to start a fire in the workshops on 1 May to facilitate a mass escape, on the assumption that the guards would all be drunk on the May Day holiday. The Party leaders took charge of security. They told themselves that the uprising was political, linked to the Cold War. ‘Our enemies in the camp are expecting a new war,’ one of them declared. ‘They are following international events and rejoice that they have allies abroad.’ On 1 May, the entire membership of the Party in the camp (twenty-five full members and twenty members of the Komsomol) was mobilized; given guns, they were posted in the workshops inside the industrial zone. For the prisoners, 1 May was a normal working day, and it passed without incident. They must have been aware of the tightening of security and decided to abort the uprising. But, as they had expected, many of the guards got drunk. In the evening there was a brawl among the guards in the club-house.
Sveta spent May Day marching to Red Square with her colleagues from the institute. ‘We had a lot of fun,’ she wrote to Lev. It had poured and they all ‘got drenched’.
People were singing: ‘Pour cold water over yourself if you want to be healthy’ and ‘Become as hard as steel’.45 I passed through Red Square at 2.30 but there was such a downpour at 2.45, when I was on Maroseika, that the demonstration had to be brought to an end. I walked home in water up to my ankles (my shoes are still not completely dry). People were laughing that the toe holes in their sandals were designed to let the water out. A hailstorm broke over part of the city. Large hailstones covered the ground by the institute and stayed there for 3 or 4 hours.
What was Sveta thinking as she marched past Stalin on Red Square that afternoon? Did she even look towards the Soviet leaders on top of the Lenin Mausoleum waving to the masses marching past? Did she ever think about Stalin? Or about the system that had taken Lev from her? There is very little about politics in Sveta’s letters. It is clear that she does not like bureaucracy or its jargonistic prose. She is scornful about ‘Diamat’ (Dialectical Materialism), which she is forced to study at the institute; is troubled by the purges in the scientific world and the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign against the Jews; and is very wary of the MVD, whose agents bother her from time to time with questions about Lev (having intercepted at least one of Sveta’s telegrams from her trips to Pechora, they were surely watching her). Yet she takes an active part in politics and public life. She volunteers for election work in the district soviet. She represents her institute at trade union conferences. She is a member of the Communist Party and writes reports for Party meetings in the institute. For someone in her senior position – engaged in a research project with military significance – it was, of course, expected that she demonstrate her loyalty through such political activities. Not to do so would have drawn attention to herself. But, judging from her letters, Sveta carried out these duties to the Party in the same conscientious manner as she did her research work: there was no divorce between them in her professional identity. Despite all her doubts, she believed in the socialist ideal of progress through science and technology, including the propaganda message of the Great Construction Projects of Communism built by Gulag labourers.
Like millions of other Soviet citizens, Sveta lived in a dual world of belief and doubt. In her public life she was a functionary of the Soviet system; her research on tyre production was important to the military-industrial complex, which also rested on the exploitation of prisoners like Lev. But in her private life, emotionally, she identified completely with these prisoners, and tried to ease their suffering by sending money, food and medicines. The tension between these two modes of consciousness must have caused her some anxiety. A week or so before she took part in the May Day celebrations on Red Square, Sveta had dreamed about Lev. The dream disturbed her because it was so exact a picture of his circumstances in the labour camp – conditions that she knew were terrible. ‘Levi,’ she wrote on 23 April, ‘conscience and grief are gnawing away at me.’
Whether it was because I was tired yesterday or I slept on the wrong side I don’t know, but right up until morning I dreamed that I had gone to see you, in conditions as they are now, and in my dream everything was so very real – all the people, gestures, words. They were not just familiar, but exactly as I had seen them. I woke up with a terrible longing.
Sveta’s anxiety may have been connected to the fact that at this point she had shelved her plans to visit Lev that year. On 2 April Lev had written to warn her that he had decided to apply for a transfer to the Volga–Don canal to work as an electrician on the nearly finished building site:
I’d like to follow in the footsteps of the beard [Aleksandr Semenov, who had successfully applied for a transfer to the Volga–Don]. Pros: 1. It will earn a reduction of a year. 2. The work will be more interesting, and my brain needs that. 3. It’s in the south. Cons: 1. There’s not much time left on the building phase. 2. What would happen to me then? Where would I be sent? 3. The journey. Overall it can’t be worse there for my health than it is here. But issues of a different order are worrying me more – whether we’ll be able to see each other this year and my reluctance to leave G. Ya. [Strelkov] here all by himself.
Lev wanted Sveta to approve his plan for a transfer. ‘The final word is yours,’ he wrote three days later. He was ‘very pleased’ when she gave it the ‘go-ahead’. But that jeopardized their summer plans for a meeting. On 25 April, Lev told Sveta that she should give up any plans of ‘special expeditions’ to the North until he had heard from the authorities. ‘Decisions like this can drag on for months,’ he wrote, ‘so there’s no point waiting to hear anything.’
If anything does happen, I’ll let you know by telegram – or rather somebody will let you know, since I won’t have the time, it’s usually a matter of hours rather than days from notification to departure. Because of your stubbornness [over sending parcels] … I’ve accumulated some dead weight – a wardrobe of clothes – which I’ll give to Ant. Mikh. [Iushkevich, a fellow prisoner and invalid], or try to send back to you beforehand, either through the Litvinenkos or by some other means. Perhaps – and at your discretion – it would be best to ‘re-supply’ them to Oleg. I will try to take some books with me, if it looks like
that’s possible. And I’ll ask if the rest (not all of them of course, but only the most important ones) can be forwarded to me – either directly or through you. Don’t organize any special expeditions, Svet, just do whatever is convenient for you, because it’s really difficult to guess what will happen. Let’s hope for the best.
With Lev hoping for a transfer south, Sveta planned to join a touring group on a camping holiday in Tuva, Siberia, during the summer. She was looking forward to a holiday but worried that she would not have the time to visit him. ‘My conscience has been troubling me,’ she confessed on 22 June. ‘Why am I itching to go to Tuva when I need to be with you?’ The Siberian trip would take a month, her entire holiday, whereas a vacation in the Caucasus, where she had gone the previous year, would give her time to travel to Pechora at the end. A week later the camping trip fell through, leaving Sveta free to visit Lev, who by this time had learned that there was ‘no need for labour on the Volga–Don [canal]’, nor on any of the other building sites, such as the Khakovka hydroelectric power station in Ukraine, where he would have liked to be transferred. Sveta shared his disappointment, but she was pleased that she could come to see him now. She wrote on the evening of 29 June:
Levi, I really want to go to sleep, but even more than that I want to tell you right away that my fate has been decided, though not as you proposed – that option never even entered my head. So as not to hold things up, I’m not going to go to Tuva, it’s settled, and I’m relieved because I’ll be nearer to you.
Lev was genuinely disappointed that she was giving up a vacation. ‘Don’t think I’m glad you’re not going to Tuva,’ he replied on 7 July.
There might have been one evening, when I’d just found out your plans for Tuva, when I was a little bit low – I’ll admit to that. But then afterwards it was quite the reverse – I always wanted you to have the holiday and was ashamed that I could have thought about it any other way.
Sveta now proceeded with her plans for Pechora. She would come in August, following a trip to the Caucasus, when again, as in 1950, she got a four-day extension to her holiday allowing her to travel to Pechora before her return to work. ‘My darling Lev,’ she wrote on 15 July,
I received permission from the director yesterday for the four extra days, so if nothing goes wrong, everything will work out fine. The travel voucher is for seven days. I’ll be home on the 9th–10th, which means I’ll be with you on the 13th or 14th, and be back at work on the 20th.
Sveta arrived in Pechora on 15 August and stayed, it seems, with the Arvanitopulos, where she received this note from Lev:
Welcome, Sveta. While we congratulate ourselves, this time maybe less joyful than the last. First of all, for almost a month now they’ve been allowing meetings only in the central guard-house and not in the guard-house of the colony, that is not ‘at ours’, like last year and not the way it was for I. S. [Lileev, Nikolai’s father] and Litv[inenko]. So it’s unlikely we’ll be able to say everything we’d like, what with the compulsory attendance of one of them [a guard]. All the more reason, therefore, not to ask for more than one meeting, especially since your time is so limited and you have to be back by the 20th, as you warned. Do you really have to go tomorrow if there has been no change to the dates of your leave? Maybe take B. G. [Arvanitopulo] with you; he might be of help in getting the meeting moved to our guard-house, and since there’s only going to be one, perhaps getting it extended to more than 2 hours. But I’m not very hopeful about it. Restrictions have now been tightened here, generally speaking. And you won’t recognize a single person charged with carrying them out. So, Svete, be prepared for the worst and try not to get upset in front of them. Take no notice of them. In any event you’ll be able to tell me about your trip and also about my aunts, Uncle N., E. A. [Aunt Katya] and A[leksandr Ivanov], and all the others, including Alik …
Lev had made toys for Sveta to take back for the children of family and friends before the start of the school year on 1 September:
Incidentally, about the three trinkets – you might want to give them to Alka for the beginning of the school year (or whenever’s best), to Alenka [Semashko, Nina’s eleven-year-old daughter] for her birthday, and the third as you see fit (or in case you lose one along the way). I’m afraid they only look well-made, and in truth I feel self-conscious about their being shown to someone who can tell. Although you won’t notice anything without my explanations, there are enough flaws in each one that they’d never be accepted by the Quality Control Department. They’re suitable as toys for children, however – only you have to give them with the condition that they won’t cry if they lose them.
Sveta must have succeeded in getting to see Lev more than once, because she was still in Pechora (though no longer with the Arvanitopulos, it appears) when she received this on the 17th:
Good morning, Svetlye.
Don’t forget to drop in on B. G. [Arvanitopulo] while he’s at home – a courtesy visit, among other things. I forgot to pass on K. S.’s46 request yesterday, if there’s any condensed milk in the local shops and you have the time to drop in, would you buy about 4 tins and bring them with you when you come to see me? I’m asking because it’s difficult for him to pass on the message any other way. Maybe you could even ask Viktor to buy them and then you’ll just need to bring them with you.
But it doesn’t matter if you’re not able to.
Well, Sveta, that’s all for now. L.
Later that day a note came by hand with confirmation of a meeting arranged for that evening: ‘Well, all right, Sveta – after seven. (They do a check at 7.) It’s possible to arrive at 7 and wait. I hope everything is going to be all right.’
Sveta left the next morning. Lev had given her a bunch of flowers grown on the allotment to take home. She was back in Moscow three days later:
So I’m home, Levi. The people on the train were fine, although it was a crush – well, the more the merrier – and somehow we all managed to get some sleep … We arrived at about 1 o’clock. I ran home to take a shower; then I had some lunch and was asleep by 4 o’clock. I got up at 8 but haven’t really woken up since then and soon I’m going to bed again. I found two of your latest letters and one from Oleg, which is a cry from the depths and addressed to you … Not a single person had flowers on the train, of course. I carried mine all the way home, although I couldn’t put them in water while I was travelling – they partly had to go on the side luggage rack and partly on the floor just under the seat … Well, Levi, that’s all for now. Look after yourself.
The day after she left, Lev wrote to her:
My dear Svetin, it always seems so much bleaker without you when I have to get up at an ungodly hour; just now I went to switch over the substations, and I can see and hear you everywhere. There was a fair amount of work to do today and I did it all as though in my sleep. Tomorrow I’m on duty on my own, so it will be hard for me to write and even harder not to be thinking about you. But I’m feeling fine, all the same, my darling.
As before, Lev was buoyed by Sveta’s visit. ‘I’ve felt fine over the last few days,’ he wrote on 23 August. ‘The work is easy and I’m not being annoyed by anything, and if I do growl from time to time it’s only for form’s sake and not out of annoyance.’
Sveta, by contrast, found herself deflated after her return. ‘It’s been exactly a week since I arrived home and just as long since my last letter to you,’ she wrote on the 28th.
The Moscow climate is having a bad effect on me. First, it’s stuffy everywhere – in the cinema, at work, in the underground, on the train, on the tram. Second, all I want to do is sleep. Third, my head is somehow empty. It’s unlikely that the climate is to blame for that one. What is to blame, if not the head itself, is the fact that I’m tormenting it with impossible questions. Even on the train back, everything was gnawing at me: what should I do – say a firm ‘no’ [to a new research project at the institute] and put paid to my ‘scientific’ career? Or try to summon up the strength to do it? I know
I have to try, but I can’t see any realistic chance … So I’m walking around every day with a headache and full of apathy for the work going on at the laboratory.
Sveta was feeling so discouraged that she even thought of giving up photography. ‘What a wretched person you are, Sveta,’ Lev replied on 12 September, ‘always looking for something else to scold yourself about.’
I haven’t seen any recent products, of course, and they may well be bad. But if they turn out to be good, you still won’t be pleased –you’ll say it’s an accident and that the next photographs are bound to be poor. Anyway, I’m hoping that you’re not going to neglect photography and that I’ll get some samples of your work. I would prefer to have pictures where you’re in the passive mode [being photographed] – those you’ll have the least use for, so, you see, my selfishness is moving contrary to your own interests [to take the photos] here – but I like your other work as well. You can send your pictures to me without fear – I won’t show them to anybody, even if they turn out well … I want them to be just for me.
That autumn, Sveta worked long hours, writing up reports for the All-Union State Standards (which monitored the quality of manufactured goods), inspecting factories in Leningrad and joining labour teams to help bring in the harvest at collective farms in the Moscow area. Her administrative burden increased further when Tsydzik became ill and went into hospital for the early months of 1952. Sveta had a bad attack of hives and could hardly hold a pen. ‘Hives are not a skin disease at all,’ she wrote to Lev. ‘They’re painful and unpleasant. The only comfort is that it’s not cancer, it’s not tuberculosis, it’s not etc. etc.’
Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag Page 23
