Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag
Orlando Figes
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 1250032164
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"A book to astonish readers: never before has Stalin's Gulag been the setting for a love affair. This powerful narrative by a distinguished historian will take its place not just in history but in literature.""--"Robert K. Massie, author of "Catherine the Great"
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""Author of "Natasha's Dance" and "The Crimean War"
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""In 1946, after five years as a prisoner--first as a Soviet Union POW in Nazi concentration camps, then as a deportee (falsely accused of treason) in Russia's Arctic Gulag--twenty-nine-year-old Lev Mishchenko unexpectedly received a letter from Sveta, the sweetheart he had hardly dared hope was still alive. Amazingly, over the next eight years the lovers managed to exchange more than 1,500 messages, and even to smuggle Sveta herself into the camp for secret meetings. Their recently discovered correspondence is the only known real-time record of life in Stalin's Gulag, unmediated and uncensored.
Orlando Figes draws on Lev and Sveta's letters as well as KGB archives and recent interviews to brilliantly reconstruct the broader world in which their story unfolded. With the powerful narrative drive of a novel, "Just Send Me Word" reveals a passion and endurance that triumphed over the tragic forces of history.
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the camp there was an equally complicated process for receiving them. At the wood-combine parcels were collected from an MVD office where the guard on duty unpacked all the items and often helped himself to what he wanted before giving the rest of the contents to the prisoner. Because food and money and warm clothes were nearly always taken by the guards, Lev discouraged friends and relatives from sending them, asking only for books, though here too vigilance was required, as foreign literature
walked the length of Soviet Street, a dirt-track avenue flanked on either side by eight-apartment wooden houses and ‘sidewalks’ made of planks laid on the ground. They turned into Moscow Street, passing a large white neo-classical structure, the first stone building in the town, which had just been erected for the administration of the North Pechora Railway Labour Camp, recently relocated from Abez. There were guards outside the building but none stopped Sveta or asked to see her papers, even
was meant to show their pass to the armed guard on duty. Convoys of prisoners were counted in and out. When Sveta told the guard that she was the wife of a voluntary worker living in the settlement, he refused to let her in, declaring that her husband had to come for her. Izrailevich, who had a pass, said he would find her ‘husband’ in the zone and bring him to the guard-house. He was gone for a long time. The guard began to talk rudely to Sveta, cursing ‘northern wives’ (women with husbands who
to suffer from periodic attacks of acute pain in and around his stomach – a band the width of 2–3 fingers on a level with his 7th–8th rib, starting on the right-hand side about a palm’s width from the middle and moving to the left, a distance of 2–3 fingers from the middle … The pain is very intense, sharp and nagging, lasting for 8–14 hours without any real let-up. If he lies down on his back during an attack, the pain intensifies; if he clasps his knees to his chest, it lessens. His usual diet
All that’s left is the sky.’ Ever since he had come to Pechora, Lev had looked towards the sky. It was his only escape from the camp. He found beauty in the northern lights and the vast expanse of stars. ‘Nature has blessed this meagre Komi land with a beautiful, not just colourful, and breathtaking sky!’, Lev wrote to Sveta on 12 August. Lingering sunsets, extending into even longer twilights full of such magical colours and effects that it’s impossible to tear yourself away – you stand,