Just send me word: A true story of Love and survival in the Gulag
By Orlando Figes, Penguin, Rs 699

“Only you and I will know/ How you got me through./ Simply — you knew how to wait —/ No one else but you.” — Konstantin Simonov in “Wait for Me”, 1941

Literature about the Soviet Gulag system has often focussed on its more prominent victims like Isaac Babel or Osip Mandelstam. Even Anna Larina’s This I Cannot Forget gains from her position as Nikolai Bukharin’s widow. Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag Archipelago and, recently, Anne Applebaum’s Gulag used the memories of ordinary gulag survivors, giving the necessary human dimension to that vast, institutionalized instrument of terror and control. Among Memorial’s records is the voluminous correspondence of Lev Mishchenko and Svetlana Ivanova — two “insignificant” Russians, caught up in events outside their control — whose epitolary love story forms the basis of this book, along with the interviews Figes conducted with both near the end of their lives.

Lev Mischchenko and Svetlana Ivanova met as young students at Moscow University in the mid-Thirties. As Figes writes, “it was not love at first sight: both agree on that. Lev was far too cautious to fall in love so easily. But Svetlana had already caught his attention.” They came from very different backgrounds. Lev’s parents had both been shot in the first bloody years of the revolution and he had been brought up by a grandmother and various women relatives. His upbringing had given him a gentleness and genuine respect for women. Svetlana, bright and sharp-tongued, belonged to the world of the Moscow intelligentsia. Yet they shared many values and interests and had a streak of independence, which would stand them in good stead in the years to come. At this time, neither was a critic of the Soviet system. Their relationship deepened in those years of the Great Terror when life seemed full of “precarious joys”, and there were opportunities for chaste walks in the woods outside the city and reading poetry together. (Their mutual love of poetry would come through in their letters to each other.)

The “Great Patriotic War” separated them. Lev joined up, even though he was shaken by the outbreak of the war, and what it meant for him, his life, his relationship with Sveta (as he called her). Captured early on by the German forces, he was sent to various prison camps, most famously, Buchenwald. Imprisonment did not dampen Lev’s spirit; he resisted the pressure to change sides and join the forces of General Andrei Vlasov, as well as his American rescuers’ blandishments to defect to the West. But because he knew German, he did occasional translation work for the German forces.

That was enough to label him as a “fascist collaborator”, in the renewal of the terror in the Soviet Union, after the war. Tricked into a confession, condemned to death, Lev’s sentence was commuted to ten years, to be spent in Pechora, part of the notorious Vorkuta network of camps 100 miles north of the Arctic circle. Here he was saved from the exhausting work of hauling logs by his technical skills and the kindness of the head of the laboratory Georgii Strelkov, an Old Bolshevik serving a long-term sentence.

At first, Lev resolved that he would not communicate with either his aunt, Olga (his only living relative), or Sveta. He had not seen her for five years, and the chances were she might have married someone else; receiving a letter from him might make things difficult. Then he changed his mind, but wrote first to his aunt, enquiring about Sveta, but not daring to write to her directly. As he wrote “I am writing to you and not to her because I do not want to burden her. Let her live her life without my complicating it”. By now, Sveta had given up all hope of ever seeing Lev again, but she missed him to the point where she succumbed to one of the bouts of depression that would trouble her throughout her life. No sooner had Olga told her that Lev was alive, than she wrote the first of what would become the couple’s main channel of communication for the next decade. Lev’s response was immediate: “Sveta, Svet can you imagine what I’m feeling now? I can’t put a name to it or measure the happiness I feel”, and ended with the passionate exhortation: “Don’t send anything except letters — letters — letters !”

And so it began. Figes allows the couple to tell their own story, with copious quotations from their letters, and provides the necessary connective narrative. The letters provide a parallel picture of Soviet life — in the prison camp system as well as the tribulations of daily living in a shortage economy. Both were careful when writing, using code words like Vitamin C (for bribing the guards), and “umbrella” for the gulag itself. Remarkably, these letters are unique in that they do not appear to be censored. Lev found various means to write beyond the single letter permitted prisoners, and there were people who were ready to smuggle these in and out of the camp — mostly voluntary workers, former prisoners who were free to go in and out. The gulag, with all its casual and institutionalized brutality, had not sucked the humanity out of everyone.

Over the years, their letters became a mutual record of their separate lives. Lev tried to give Sveta a picture of life in the camp, although he often softened certain details. Her letters to him gave a picture of her life. Both were aware that they were taking terrible risks. Had Lev’s clandestine lifeline been discovered, he could have been shot or sent to a camp where the conditions were even worse. Sveta worked for a research institute, with connections to the military: she could have suffered the same fate as Lev had she been found out. Although they began to loathe the Soviet system, neither Sveta nor Lev was a dissident in the political sense. Lev could take pride in Soviet showcases like the Volga-Don Canal, even though he knew that it had been dug by camp labour; Sveta could still enjoy the celebrations of Moscow’s 800th anniversary. But their determination not to let the system come in the way of their relationship could perhaps qualify them as moral dissidents.

Sveta’s support widened from letters to parcels of books, clothes and medicines. But, above all, it was her letters that sustained Lev. In the physical and moral wasteland of the gulag system, at times he expressed his sense of hopelessness: “Sveta, if only fate had been more generous, if only it would smile on us…I don’t know what will happen in the future..but I want to believe we’ll have one.” Both wrote of their future hopes and dreams — she was depressed that she might be too old to have a child if and when he was released. (Eventually they would have two children together.)

Their courage was tested to the utmost, when Sveta decided that she would try to visit Lev — something unheard of and clearly illegal. (Rare family visits were allowed in the gulag, but only for family members). Against all odds, she managed the journey of almost 4,500 kms. With the help of her boss (she too did not lack for sympathizers) and her own ingenuity, she was able to spend a single night with him. Her success gave her confidence, for subsequent meetings when they could be together for a few hours. They were both grateful for the help they received in this hare-brained enterprise. After the first visit she wrote: “Lev thank everyone again for me. I’m unable to express myself in words, but maybe they will understand me all the same.”

Svetlana and Lev’s story had a happy ending, unlike so many others whose lives were broken by the arbitrary cruelty of the Stalinist system. Lev was released in 1954, and received an amnesty shortly afterwards. When Figes visited them in old age, they presented a contented “Darby and Joan” picture of domestic happiness, which belied their tumultuous past. When asked by Figes what made Sveta fall in love with Lev, her answer was simple and sincere: “I knew he was my future from the start. When he was not there, I would look for him, and he would always appear by my side. That is love.”