Book review: Just Send Me Word by Orlando Figes

By JOSHUA KING
Published on 26/05/2012 00:00

Love and the Gulag: A remarkable tale of devotion comes to light after more than 50 years

I went to get the letters for our block and I was not at all jealous of those who received letters, because I didn’t expect anything for myself. And then suddenly – my surname! And, as if it were alive, your handwriting!”

So began, in 1946, an eight-year correspondence between Lev Mishchenko and Svetlana Ivanova, two Russian sweethearts torn apart by war. The letters between Lev, imprisoned in the Pechora labour camp high in the Arctic Circle, and Svetlana, back in Moscow, paint an intimate portrait of their lives and show the immense suffering and resilience of young men and women under Stalin’s regime.

Orlando Figes’ reputation was tarnished last year with his admission that he anonymously rubbished his academic rivals’ work on Amazon. With this, however, he has re-established himself as a foremost authority on the social history of Russia. He uncovered the vast trove of letters from which this book is drawn while in Moscow, working in the archive of human rights organisation Memorial. In three unopened trunks he found more than 1,500 letters sent between Lev and Svetlana during Lev’s internment at Pechora, a haul Figes called, “the only major real-time record of daily life in the Gulag that has ever come to light”.

In summer 1941, Lev Mishchenko, a physics student, volunteered for the Soviet Union’s western front. He would not return for 13 years. He left behind Svetlana Ivanova, his girlfriend from university. The pair vowed to keep in touch and tried to write to one another whenever and however possible. By Christmas, however, he had been captured by the Nazis, who saw his worth as a bilingual academic, and tried in vain to mould him into a spy.

After years of being shunted between labour camps in Eastern Europe with no opportunity to establish contact, Lev had almost given up hope of ever hearing from Svetlana again. In 1946 he escaped, right into the hands of his own side, the Red Army. After a brief show trial, he was condemned to ten years’ hard labour in Pechora. His supposed crime? Acting as an agent against the Soviet Union – the very thing he had point-blank refused to do for the Nazis, putting his own life on the line. He certainly endured hardship in the camps in Europe, but this paled in comparison to the sheer length of time he spent imprisoned by his own comrades.

Nobody can be sure how many men, women and children passed through the Gulags but the number likely ran into the tens of millions. Their plight has, until now, only been documented in works of fiction and memoirs of survivors. As Figes explored in his 2007 work The Whisperers, the passing of time means that memoirs and oral history are never as accurate as contemporary accounts, but Lev and Svetlana’s cache of uncensored letters is an honest and accurate record, unscathed by fading memory.

By focusing so closely on just two lives, Figes illuminates the darkness of the whole regime. Lev and Svetlana’s story may appear to be one of helplessness – two people swept along in the cruelty of a brutal, almost malevolent, regime – but really, it is one of hope. In their own way the couple subverted what was happening in their country, preserving their love in spite of fractious circumstances.

Writing at a rate of nearly two letters each week, Lev and Svetlana had the help of friends inside Pechora to send their correspondence illicitly. In an act of utter defiance and devotion, Svetlana even managed to smuggle herself into the camp to see Lev.

Were it not for his education at Moscow University, Lev’s story might have been drastically different. It was there he met Svetlana and, later, his scientific background would let him escape the worst hardships of the camp. He was put to work, in relative comfort, running the camp’s power plant rather than forced to haul logs from the frozen river. It may have saved his life.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Gulag’s great chronicler, painted a haunting picture of suffering in his works The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He drew the eyes of the world to a unknown horror. Lev’s experience was different from that of Solzhenitsyn’s “zeks” (Gulag inmates). Although he endured unimaginable hardship in his own, frozen hell, his love for Svetlana gave him small hope.

Figes spent two years transcribing and translating all the letters he found at Memorial. Even then, visits to Pechora to check records, transcriptions of other prisoners’ writings and interviews with people mentioned in letters were needed to complete the rich tapestry of Lev and Svetlana’s lives.

In early 2008 he visited Lev and Svetlana at their home in Yasenevo, a suburb south-west of Moscow. Their 14th-floor apartment was a far cry from the power plant but their commitment to one another remained as steadfast as it was during Lev’s darkest days in the Gulag. Svetlana suffered from heart disease and a number of small strokes had left her in a wheelchair. Lev took care of her. They spoke at length about their experiences and the impact their past has had on their children, Nikita and Anastasia. Later that year, Lev died aged 91; Svetlana followed in January 2010. After a lifetime of love, scarred by 13 years of enforced separation, the Mishchenkos were buried next to one another in the Golovinskoe Cemetery, Moscow.

Just Send Me Word is a genuine love story set against a backdrop of exceptional suffering and hardship. The endurance and commitment displayed by Lev and Svetlana toward one another, deftly documented by Figes, dwarfs that found in many a work of romantic fiction. As they say, you couldn’t make it up.