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

them to worry about: they had not heard from Sveta’s brother since he had left for the front (he had been captured by the Germans and imprisoned in a concentration camp on the Baltic Sea island of Usedom), while Tanya had been assigned as a student ‘volunteer’ to Stalingrad in September 1942. 6 Meanwhile they had Aleksandr’s younger brother Innokenty (‘Uncle Kesha’) and his wife on their hands. The Leningrad couple had been in Moscow since the beginning of the war and would not return home until the siege of Leningrad was lifted in 1943.
    From the family apartment on Kazarmennyi Pereulok Sveta had a long tram journey to the institute on the Highway of Enthusiasts, where she worked in an old laboratory on the third floor with windows looking out on to the factory smokestacks of east Moscow. The place depressed her. Many times she thought that she should run away or take a research post elsewhere, maybe even in another town, but she was ‘afraid of losing touch with Lev’. Moscow was the only point of contact they had, the place where she hoped he would return.
    Although she had not had any news of Lev, she had good reason to believe that he was still alive: in 1942 the NKVD had visited his Aunt Olga to ask if she had heard from him. They went through
the belongings in his room, which was still being kept for him as someone who was serving in the army. Some of the spies who had been recruited by the Germans in Katyn had evidently entered Soviet territory and been arrested. Under interrogation one of them must have mentioned Lev and recounted the incident when he had spoken with the captain in German. The NKVD was probably working on the assumption that Lev was spying for the Germans in Moscow. After Sveta returned to the capital they summoned her for questioning practically every evening. They knew that he would come to see her if he was already in the Soviet capital. Claiming that Lev was a spy, they tried to force her to cooperate with them in catching him, threatening serious consequences if she refused. It was frightening to be summoned to the Lubianka, the NKVD headquarters; the memory of the Great Terror was fresh in people’s minds. But Sveta was not easily frightened. To defend her relationship with Lev, she was ready to defy the Soviet authorities. Eventually she got fed up with their badgering and, in a moment of characteristic bravery and headstrong foolishness, told the NKVD men to leave her alone. ‘Getting a bit angry because these same relatives [code for NKVD men] kept pestering me, I said that I was not yet your wife and that the matter would only be cleared up when we met – not just for an hour but for good,’ she later wrote to Lev.
    Sveta was meanwhile writing to the military authorities asking them for any information about Lev. News came shortly after her twenty-sixth birthday, 10 September 1943. ‘All my relatives had come for my birthday,’ she later wrote to Lev.

    My father’s brother from Moscow and his family were there, his brother from Leningrad with his wife, my cousin Nina with her husband and their baby, and so on. Everything was great and everybody was having a good time. We drank to the health of all those who weren’t with us, of course. And then everything happened all at once – a message came about the death of Tanya (Uncle Kesha intercepted it and didn’t show it to Mama for a long time).

    Tanya had died of appendicitis in a military hospital in Stalingrad. Later more bad news arrived: Aunt Olga had been notified officially by the military authorities that Lev ‘had gone missing’ at the front. It was the kind of terrible announcement that struck fear into millions of families still recovering from the terror of the thirties, when so many people ‘disappeared’. Those three words (‘propal bez vesti’) could mean almost anything: capture by the enemy (equivalent to treason under Soviet wartime law); worse, ‘desertion’ to the other side (a crime by