Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag by Orlando FIGES Read Free Book Online

railway tracks. Women from the nearby villages came to the station to sell them food and tobacco. Others came to look for sons and husbands, asking the wounded soldiers who might know of their whereabouts or putting letters in their hands in case someone should come upon them in a hospital.
    From Murom the students continued east to the Urals and then headed south across the frozen Kazakh steppe to Ashkhabad, the dusty capital of the Turkmen Republic, not far from the Soviet border with Iran. Here the Physics Faculty would recommence its work. The journey took a month. The railway cars, each with a stove and bunks for forty people, ‘became separate communities’, recalled Sakharov, ‘with their own leaders, their talkative and silent types, their panic-mongers, go-getters, big-eaters, the slothful and the hard-working’. Sveta must have been among the quiet and industrious ones. In Ashkhabad, where lectures started in December, she needed to work hard to make up for the break in her studies before the war. She went to classes in chemistry and oscillation physics, a difficult theoretical subject for which there was no practical training, so she was buried in the library for long hours. She also worked as a dishwasher in a cafeteria to support herself and her
parents. For much of that winter and the following spring Sveta suffered from malaria, a common disease in Central Asia at that time. ‘It wore me out so much that it was even difficult for me to drink,’ she would later write. Fighting off fever, exhausted and becoming ‘quite jaundiced’, she struggled to keep going. But she managed.
    After her graduation, Sveta was assigned to the People’s Commissariat of Munitions. But with her father’s help she was transferred to the Scientific-Research Institute for the Resin Industry, then operating out of a chemical compound in Khromnik, near Sverdlovsk, where she worked in the ‘physical and mechanical testing laboratory’ as an industrial physicist from August 1942. The institute was working eleven-hour days, and Sveta found it had to find her place at first. As she later wrote,

    I was in a strange, unfamiliar laboratory and didn’t know what I should begin with, where I should perch myself. I was afraid of the machinery and didn’t know anything about rubber. So I escaped to the library … where I spent half the day reading Russian articles and reports and the other half huffing and puffing over the English language. I joined an English-language club, although I hadn’t studied it in Ashkhabad. Generally it was quite an uplifting period. After the fumes of Ashkhabad, the Afghan winds, the sand blown in from the desert as fine as dust, and the leaves that fell in August without any hint of a golden autumn, the Urals seemed like paradise on Earth – pines, birches, mushrooms, rain. I exchanged letters with the whole world … I received between 2 and 3 letters every day and I knew I’d be home soon.

    The institute was already preparing to return to Moscow, where the German threat had passed after a Soviet counter-offensive during 1942. The Red Army was in urgent need of the institute’s research expertise to boost the tyre industry. By January 1943, Sveta was back home. Much of the city Lev and Sveta had known as students had been destroyed or damaged by the war. Many of its
buildings remained unheated, the lights were dimmed and often failed completely because of power cuts, sewers leaked, and the food shops were empty. ‘It was very hard for everyone in ’43 and ’44,’ Sveta later wrote. ‘We were all cold and hungry and living in the dark.’
    Sveta’s parents had returned to Moscow with her younger sister, Tanya, in April 1942. They had aged noticeably. Anastasia was often ill with brucellosis, a painful stomach disease that left her exhausted, and at the age of sixty Aleksandr was also showing signs of slowing down. Sveta found them in a nervous state when she returned. There was plenty for