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To the letter: a love story and personal history of the gulag
Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag
Orlando Figes
Allen Lane, £20;
kindle £11.99
Review: Val Nolan
One of the largest private archives donated to Memorial, the human rights group that preserves the memory of political prisoners in the USSR, is that of Lev and Svetlana Mishchenko, a couple who “met as students in the 1930s, only to be separated by the war of 1941-5 and Lev’s subsequent imprisonment in the Gulag”. Present when the accession was opened, historian Orlando Figes “had never seen anything like it”.
Though a simple transcription of the material would have been a valuable publication, Figes — an historian with a popular touch — delivers more, a rich, detailed story of terror and longing contextualised against the shredded tapestry of mid-century Russian history. Told through the eyes of two extraordinary Muscovites, Just Send Me Word depicts a Soviet Union that is less a monolithic embodiment of evil and more a grey-scale nation with “just enough freedom for a clever person to get by”.
The Mishchenko’s 1,200 uncensored letters, smuggled in and out of the barbed-wire zone by sympathetic officials, represent “possibly the only major contemporary record of daily life in the Gulag”. From them, Figes vividly reconstructs Lev’s imprisonment in Pechora, a notorious Siberian labour camp, taking care in his early chapters to build his subjects novelistically as characters.
Svetlana, a materials scientist, is a “popular, vivacious, occasionally flirtatious” girl “known for her sharp tongue”. Lev, a young nuclear physicist, is “neither tall nor powerfully built”, though he is “kind and gentle”. The couple develop a “deep and permanent affinity” on the eve of Lev’s entry into the Red Army and his first brush with imprisonment, in Hitler’s Buchenwald concentration camp.
By the time they reconnect through their smuggled missives, Lev is in the Gulag, having been tricked by Stalin’s interrogators into signing a statement that he is a German spy. “If I didn’t know that actions should be judged by their motives and not by their results, I would reproach you for your silence,” Svetlana scolds him in her first letter. However, her feelings have not changed in his absence. For ten years, she shares stories of her work and friends via “small, barely legible handwriting,” often sending two or three letters a week to keep Lev’s spirits high.
“We will get through this,” she assures him, as his own letters rise and fall with the hardships of the labour camp. His technical expertise keeps him safe from the most aggressive guards and the hardest physical tasks, but no cage in the gulag was gilded. Lev suffers alongside his barrack-mates and relates his experience with immediacy. The historian’s deceptively straightforward prose subsumes the reader into the narrative. Figes is a master of history as story and not just as facts and figures. While this volume may not give us definitive answers on, for instance, Lev and Svetlana’s ideological beliefs, that is not its purpose. Just Send Me Word presents a warm and ultimately touching glimpse into the lives of the countless millions who endured Stalin’s regime. In that, it is a remarkable success.