Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag (23 page)

BOOK: Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag

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It seems a strangely routine letter for her to have written after such an intense meeting with the man she loved – as if she needed to control her feelings on the long journey home. ‘We made it to Kotlas, ’ she wrote in her ‘second letter from the road’ on 14 September. ‘The night went well … They’re not really bothering to check passengers systematically but they’re going up and down the carriages carrying out selective checks.’

Lev, by contrast, was far more lyrical. ‘My darling Sveta,’ he wrote on 16 September,

you are still everywhere with me. If something lovely comes to mind – a melody, or a piece of Pushkin or Burns or a painting – I think of you and see you, your face and eyes, and I feel easier remembering your smile. I don’t know whether it’s good that I write to you about this – I would write it for myself and not for you, but I can’t not write. Sveta, my Svet, my dear Sveta. When I hear a melody I know you like, it seems I’m listening to it with you and I grow calmer, more able to bear things. I become kinder to people. My Sveta, how wonderful it is that
there is you
, that always and in everything – in poetry or prose, in music, or even in my circuit diagrams – I see only you.

Twelve days after her departure, Lev started seeing Sveta in his dreams again, ‘only now I see you without any features or a face at
all, but somehow I know it’s you’. For several nights he had nightmares, but then, for three nights in a row, he had the same extremely vivid dream that he had dreamed in the SMERSH prison in Weimar in 1945, the dream of Sveta in a white dress.

A few weeks later, Lev read Turgenev’s
Home of the Gentry
, a novel about love denied by circumstance and the fleeting nature, if not unattainability, of happiness. Lev read until late into the night and then wrote to Sveta with his thoughts:

I understood that the most terrible thing in life is complete hopelessness … To cross out all the ‘maybes’ and give up the fight when you still have strength for it is the most terrible form of suicide. It’s almost unbearable to watch it happening in others. Unjustified hope – salvation for the weak in spirit and intellect – irritates me. But the loss of hope is the paralysis, even the death, of the soul. Sveta, let us hope, while we still have strength to hope.

‘1950. Half a century is coming to an end,’ Lev wrote to Sveta on 8 January. With the start of a new year, he was counting time. In two weeks he would be 33.

I feel like I am halfway through my life – which is fine so long as it is only halfway. How many of the remaining years will I have to cross off for old age? These calculations have meaning only if there are no ‘ifs’ – any one of which could put a stop to my personal calendar in an instant.

For the moment, Lev’s priority was to survive the freezing temperatures: ‘Biting frosts are setting in. It was minus 47 yesterday, and the day before it was minus 49. Today it has “thawed” a bit to minus 36, but the temperature is dropping again now.’

The population of the Gulag reached its peak in the early 1950s. According to official statistics, the labour camps and colonies of the Gulag system then contained 2,561,351 prisoners, a million more than in 1945. Although this was only 2 per cent of the country’s total labour force, the Gulag’s actual contribution to the Soviet economy was far more significant. Gulag labour was especially important in the mining of precious metals in cold and remote regions, where free workers were very expensive, if not impossible, to employ. It also played a major role in the so-called Great Construction Projects of the late 1940s and early 1950s that came – officially at least – to symbolize the post-war achievements of the Soviet system: the Volga–Don canal; the Kuibyshev hydroelectrical station; the Baikal–Amur and Transpolar railways; the extensions to the Moscow Metro; and the vast new complex of Moscow University on the Lenin Hills, one of seven wedding-cake-like structures
(‘Stalin’s cathedrals’) in the ostentatious ‘Soviet empire’ style that shot up around the capital in those years.

Sveta was impressed by the new university, whose main building, by far the tallest in the city, could be seen from almost everywhere in the centre of Moscow. ‘It’s like an entire town lit up at night and the contours of the main building are illuminated really beautifully,’ she wrote to Lev. Whether Sveta knew that the new complex had been built by Gulag labour is doubtful. She would express the same naive enthusiasm for many of the other Great Construction Projects of Communism that, unbeknown to her, were built by Gulag prisoners. Lev, too, was impressed by the propaganda image of these vast building sites. In the club-house of the wood-combine, where they sometimes showed films, he saw a documentary about the Volga–Don canal, and ‘for the whole hour,’ as he later wrote to Sveta,

I had no other thoughts or feelings but a sense of pride and admiration for the power of the human mind and the systematic and harmonious transformation of thousands of ideas into a tangible marvel. The film had a lot of shortcomings, of course, a certain haste and patched-together quality in particular, but even so it made an enormous impression.

How could Lev be so impressed? He knew that Gulag labour was being used on the Volga–Don canal, if only because one of his fellow prisoners, Aleksandr Semenov, the head of the Electrical Group, had applied successfully to be transferred to its building site as an engineer. Lev’s political views had surely changed since his arrest by SMERSH in 1945. He had no more illusions about Communism or Soviet justice. Yet he still believed with pride in the progressive force of Soviet science and technology, even within the Gulag. His own conscientious efforts to improve the working of the power station were a mark of this belief.

The Gulag was a vast archipelago of labour camps and construction sites, mines and railway-building sites, a slave economy that
cast a shadow over the entire Soviet Union, yet few people were even aware of its presence in their midst. The post-war years saw a gradual merging of the Gulag and civilian economies. Every year about half a million Gulag labourers were contracted out to the civilian sector, mostly in construction, or wherever the civilian ministries complained of labour shortages; about the same number of free labourers were paid to work in Gulag industries. The Gulag system was increasingly compelled to resort to material incentives to motivate even its forced labourers. The population of the camps had become more unruly and difficult to control with the post-war influx of Red Army servicemen, foreign P O W s and Ukrainian and Baltic ‘nationalists’ hostile to the Soviet regime. These prisoners were not afraid of violence. Unless they were rewarded, they were likely to refuse to meet their targets.

In 1950, the North Pechora Railway Labour Camp was reorganized as Pechorlag (Pechora Labour Camp) and charged with constructing a second railway track between Kotlas and Vorkuta. The temporary single track that had been built in such a hurry during the war years was unable to cope with the massive increase of coal production in the Vorkuta basin or with the needs of Pechora, which had become a major industrial centre thanks to the production of the wood-combine.

The building of a second track was a challenge for Pechorlag’s bosses. Heavy manual work would be required to clear the forest, dig the embankments, prepare and lay the sleepers and the tracks. Thousands of new prisoners would be needed for the labour camps and colonies along the line. Productivity at the wood-combine would have to be ramped up to meet the increased demand for sleepers, barracks and other building components. The Gulag bosses were under intense pressure to complete the railway within a year. Without new incentives, they had no chance of getting it done in less than two or even three years. The prisoners were simply too demoralized.

At a series of meetings in January 1950 to discuss the failure of the wood-combine to fulfil the plan in the previous year, all the usual
reasons were given: shortages of raw materials and energy, poor organization, lack of expertise among the prisoners, etc. But the bosses noted in particular an ‘alarming increase in prisoners failing to meet their norms’ and ‘increasing refusals by the prisoners to work’.

To speed up the building of the railway the Gulag authorities put in place a new system of material incentives, including the payment of wages. The idea of paying prisoners had been introduced by a government decree in November 1948. The decree allowed a few selected camps to pay money ‘bonuses’ of up to 30 per cent of what workers in corresponding civilian sectors received. From the spring of 1950, these bonuses were extended throughout the Gulag (except for the special regime camps).

The wage system was instituted at the wood-combine on 1 May. General labourers were paid 90 roubles a month, skilled workers double that amount.
⁴⁰Under the new system, the wood-combine would have to make a profit to keep receiving money and supplies from the Gulag administration in Moscow. Nobody was sure whether the projected rise in productivity would be sufficient to cover both the wages of the prisoners and the costs of their food minimum, which continued to be guaranteed. Even the leaders of the wood-combine had their doubts, despite the billboards they plastered everywhere – in the club-house, the workshops and the barracks – to advertise the scheme. In the 11th Colony, one of the remote forest camps where the wage system had been tried out earlier, there had been a rise in productivity, but not enough to compensate for the expenditure, since many prisoners were still not working any harder than before. For the prisoners there were two main problems with the money system: it was difficult to stop the guards from stealing their wages or taking their money in bribes; and there was nothing much to buy. The kiosk in the remote colony had a few tins of sausage meat, some boiled sweets and little else,
though vodka and tobacco could be purchased easily on the black market.

Still, Lev was pleased to be earning money. It allowed him to repay what he saw as his debts to his aunts, Uncle Nikita and other relatives who had sent him parcels and so to feel less like the helpless ‘child whom people spoonfeed’ when, in his view, it was his job ‘to care for them’, as he had explained in his early letters to Sveta. In July, Lev sent some money to Aunt Olga. ‘They are threatening to turn us into capitalists by moving to a system of cash accounting,’ he reported happily to Sveta. Later in the year, he sent Sveta 200 roubles he had saved so that she could give them to Aunt Katya for a short stay in a sanatorium.

Another concession to the prisoners was a resolution passed by the leaders of the wood-combine in the spring of 1950 allowing them to grow their own vegetables on allotments. Lev and his friends in the Electrical Group organized a ‘collective farm’, where they grew lettuces, radishes, peas, beets and blackberries, all rich vitamin sources. Strelkov, the ‘chairman’ of the farm, took a ‘fatherly pleasure in it’, Lev wrote to Sveta, ‘and enjoyed listening to us praise the vegetable garden and his cooking’. He even rigged up lights to guard the crops when it got dark, though Lev was sceptical of this effort, and thought that thefts would be reduced by only ‘1 per cent at best’. Strelkov and his ‘farm-hands’ also grew nasturtiums and asters under glass and bred rabbits in the basement of the power station (they made electric heaters for the pens), allowing them to cook up delicious rabbit stews. ‘We’ve belatedly started doing some work in the vegetable garden,’ Lev wrote to Sveta in mid-October.

The harvest is small and not very profitable but it’s gratifying, especially for G. Y. [Strelkov]. He still has some tomatoes ripening on his window sill and, apart from those, we’ve got nothing left in store but potatoes (of which, by the way, there’s no shortage at the moment). All the other fruits of the earth have been eaten. There was even rhubarb and spinach – like Western Europe on Komi soil. Nikolka [Litvinenko] gets great comfort from it all. He’s currently switched
over to rabbit breeding – there’s no regulation against it yet – so there’s a group of six long-eared souls living in the station’s basement which N. is intending to put into a stew … I’m not a part of that enterprise, just observing the creatures with great pleasure. The object of our attentions at the moment is our cat Mitka (not the one that lives with G. Y. but the one in our barrack), who has picked up some kind of illness which mostly affects his eyes – they’re watering … For want of a vet, we’re treating him ourselves, giving him vitamin C to drink and washing his eyes with boric acid. He deserves good care: he’s a consummate mouser, his behaviour is beyond reproach, and he has a wonderful nature.

There were other small improvements at the wood-combine. Bigger barracks were built for the prisoners. There was a new club-house in the settlement, now accessible to all the prisoners, with a library, a radio tuned to national stations, a ping-pong table, and a place for playing cards and dominoes. A post office and small shop were opened near the guard-house, where prisoners could buy bread and sometimes even butter, sausage, sugar, vodka, tobacco and fabric for clothes, though deliveries were unreliable (the shop had 600 metres of towelling but nothing warmer to sell to the prisoners). ‘Why send me sugar, when I can buy it here. And toothpaste and soap – there is everything here now,’ Lev wrote to Sveta. With the help of the voluntary workers, he could also buy things from the growing number of small shops in the main town, where there was a slightly wider range of food in tins, dried fish and occasionally vegetables, tea and coffee cubes.
⁴¹

Strelkov and Lev (back row) with Lileev (left) and Litvinenko outside the laboratory
.

Pechora itself was rapidly developing, offering new working opportunities and even entertainment for the prisoners. In 1949, a Palace of Culture was opened in the town centre. Built entirely by the prisoners, the classical colonnaded building contained an auditorium in which all the furniture was made by the carpenters of the wood-combine. Films shown in the auditorium had separate screenings for the voluntary workers and for the prisoners (marched to the palace under armed guard). There was a resident orchestra and, from 1951, a resident theatre company made up of prisoners. Gulag bosses derived prestige from these ‘serf theatres’ and ‘serf orchestras’, and they bargained with one another for the best musicians and actors. There were also football teams composed of prisoners and voluntary workers from the different sectors of the town (a railway-workers team, one for the shipbuilders and another for the wood-combine). These teams played matches at the new stadium near the Palace of Culture. When bigger matches were held between a team from Pechora and one visiting from another Gulag town, prisoners were marched to the stadium to cheer on their team.

Five prisoners of the Pechorlag football team
.