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

  The love of these three women – none of whom had children of their own – could not have made up for the loss of his mother. Yet it produced in Lev a deep respect, even reverence, for women in general. This maternal love was supplemented by the moral and material support of three of his parents’ closest friends, who all sent money to his grandmother on a regular basis: Lev’s godmother, a doctor in Erevan, the Armenian capital; Sergei Rzhevkin (‘Uncle Seryozha’), a professor of acoustics at Moscow University; and Nikita Mel’nikov (‘Uncle Nikita’), a veteran Menshevik,2 linguist, engineer and schoolteacher, whom Lev called a ‘second father’.

  Lev went to a mixed-sex school in a former girls’ gymnasium in Bolshaia Nikitskaia Street (single-sex schools had been abolished in Soviet Russia in 1918). Housed in a classical nineteenth-century mansion with two wings, the school still retained much of its intelligentsia ethos when Lev started there. Many of its staff had been teaching in the school before 1917. Lev’s German teacher was its former head; the teacher of the infants was the cousin of a famous Ukrainian composer; and his Russian teacher was related to the writer Mikhail Bulgakov. But in the early 1930s, when Lev was a teenager, the school shifted to a polytechnic curriculum with an engineering focus linked to Moscow’s factories. Industrial technicians would lecture at the school with practical instruction and experiments to prepare the children for apprenticeships in the factories.

  Sveta’s school in Vuzovsky Lane was not far from Lev’s. What would they have made of one another if they had met then? They came from very different backgrounds – Lev from the old world of the Moscow middle class, where the Orthodox values of his grandmother had influenced his upbringing, Sveta from the more progressive world of the technical intelligentsia. Yet they shared many basic values and interests. Both were mature for their age, serious, clever, independent in their thinking, with open and inquiring intellects shaped more by their own experience than by propaganda or social convention. That independence was to stand them in good stead. In a letter of 1949 Sveta would recall what she was like at the age of eleven – at a time when the campaign against religion was at its height in Soviet schools:

  It seems to me that I was more grown up than the other children at my school … Back then I was very worried about the issue of God and religion. Our neighbours were believers and Yara used to tease their children. But I stepped in, standing up for freedom of religion. And I solved the issue I had with God for myself – I concluded that without him we still can’t understand eternity or creation, and that since I couldn’t see the point of him it meant that he’s not needed (not by me, that is, though he might be needed by others who do believe in Him).

  Both Lev and Sveta were by this age the conscientious products of an ethos of hard work and responsibility. In Sveta’s case it was the outcome of her upbringing in the Ivanov family, where she was put in charge of her younger sister, Tanya, as well as many household chores, while in Lev’s it was neccessitated by his economic circumstances. He had to work his way through school to supplement his grandmother’s small pension.

  In 1932, when he was just fifteen, Lev had a night job working on the construction of the first Moscow Metro line, between Gorky Park and Sokolniki. He measured out the route across the streets and joined the digging teams made up largely of peasant migrants, who in those years were flooding into Moscow to avoid being forced by the Bolsheviks into collective farms. Lev became aware of collectivization’s terrible consequences the following summer. As a cleaner on a rabbit-breeding farm he got to know a fellow worker who had arrived from the famine-stricken Ukrainian countryside. The man wrote sad poems about ‘abandoned village homes, people dying, and corpses piled behind a fence’. Lev was struck by the poems’ emotional power but was put off by their sensational subject matter. ‘Why do you make up such terrifying scenes?’ he asked the worker, who told him: ‘I haven’t made them up. That is my village. There is a famine there and no one has the strength to bury those who’ve died.’ Lev was shocked. He had never really questioned Soviet power and its policies before. He had joined the Komomsol, the Communist Youth League, and believed in the Party. But the worker’s words sowed a seed of doubt. Later that year Lev went to a collective farm near Moscow on a school trip organized by his biology teacher, a Bolshevik enthusiast, who used one of the abandoned houses on the farm to put on a play about the ‘struggle against vermin’. The house had belonged to the village priest and his family, who had evidently been evicted during the collectivization of the village. Inside the house were the burnt remains of the priest’s books, including a bible in ancient Greek, a language read by Lev’s grandfather but no longer needed under the Soviet regime.

  When he started at the university, in 1935, Lev was living with his grandmother (then aged eighty-two) in a communal apartment on Leningrad Prospekt in north-west Moscow. His eccentric ‘Aunt Olga’3 also had a room in the apartment and lived there with her husband. Lev and his grandmother occupied a narrow, dark room: there was a single bed for him on one side and a trunk on the other, on which his grandmother made herself a makeshift bed by resting her feet on a stool. By the window at the end was a desk and, above Lev’s bed, a small glass-fronted cabinet where he kept his collection of chemical appliances and his books, mainly maths and physics books, though also classic works of Russian literature. When Sveta came to visit she would sit with Lev on his bed and talk. Aunt Olga kept a beady eye on their movements in the apartment’s corridor. A strict church-goer, she disapproved of Sveta’s visiting and made it clear to Lev that she thought something was going on. Lev would say, ‘She’s just my friend from the university,’ but Olga would stand in the hallway by his door anyway, listening for ‘evidence’.

  The one place that Lev and Sveta could really be free was in the countryside. Every summer Sveta’s family rented a large dacha in Boriskovo, a settlement on the Istra River 70 kilometres north-west of Moscow. Lev would visit them, sometimes cycling from Moscow, sometimes travelling by train to Manikhino, an hour’s walk from Boriskovo. Lev and Sveta would spend the whole day in the woods, lying by the river, reading poetry, until darkness came and he had to leave to catch the last train or start on his long cycle back.

  On 31 July 1936 Lev came out by train. There was a heatwave and he was sweaty after walking from Manikhino, so before turning up at Sveta’s house he decided to have a quick swim in the river near Boriskovo. Stripping down to his underpants, Lev dived in. A poor swimmer, he stuck close to the riverbank, but the strong current carried him away and he began to go under. Catching sight of a fisherman on the riverbank, Lev cried out to him, ‘I’m drowning, help!’ The fisherman did nothing. Lev went under again and came up a second time, once more calling for help – before going under yet again. Too weak to save himself, Lev thought how stupid it would be to die so near to Sveta’s house. Then he lost consciousness. When he came to he was sitting on the bank beside the fisherman. Struggling to catch his breath, Lev caught only a glimpse of his rescuer, who was standing behind him and telling off the fisherman for not jumping in to help him. The man left before he had a chance to find out who he was and thank him properly. Lev spent the day with Sveta and her family. In the evening Sveta and her sister, Tanya, walked Lev to the edge of the village to say goodbye and see him off to the station. In the village Lev recognized the man who had saved him; he was with an elderly gentleman and two women. Lev thanked the man and asked his name. The older man replied: ‘I am Professor Sintsov and this is my son-in-law, the engineer Bespalov, and these women are our wives.’ Thanking them again, Lev went on to the station, where the public radio system was playing Saint-Saens’ Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso. Listening to David Oistrakh play the beautiful violin solo, he was overcome by a powerful sense of being alive. Everything around him seemed more intense and vivid than before. He had been saved! He loved Svetlana! And through the music he now felt that joy.

  Life was full of precarious joys. In 1935 Stalin had announced that life was ‘getting better and g
ayer’. There were more consumer goods to buy, vodka, caviar, more dance-halls and jolly films to keep the people laughing and sustain their belief in the bright and radiant future that would come when Communism had been built. Meanwhile arrest lists were being prepared by Stalin’s political police, the NKVD.

  At least 1.3 million ‘enemies of the people’ were arrested – and more than half of them were later shot – during the Great Terror of 1937–8. No one ever knew what this calculated policy of mass murder was about – whether it was Stalin’s paranoiac killing of potential enemies, a war on ‘social aliens’ or, most likely, a preventive cull of ‘unreliables’ in the event of war at a time of heightened international tension. The terror reverberated throughout society. Every area of life was affected. Neighbours, colleagues, friends and relatives could be labelled ‘spies’ or ‘Fascists’ overnight.

  The world of Soviet physics was particularly vulnerable, partly because of its practical importance for the military and partly because it was divided ideologically. The Physics Faculty at Moscow University was the centre of this split. On one side stood a group of brilliant young researchers such as Yury Rumer and Boris Gessen, who championed the physics of Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg; on the other, an older group of teachers who denounced the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics as ‘idealist’ and incompatible with dialectical materialism, the ‘scientific’ foundation of Marxism-Leninism. The ideological split was reinforced politically, the materialists accusing the followers of quantum mechanics of being ‘unpatriotic’ (i.e., potential ‘spies’) because they had been influenced by Western science and had travelled abroad. In August 1936, just before the start of Lev and Sveta’s second year, Gessen was arrested on charges of belonging to a ‘counter-revolutionary terrorist organization’; he was later shot. In 1937 Rumer was expelled from the university.

  Students were expected to be vigilant. In the Komsomol they confronted fellow students whose relatives had been arrested, demanding their expulsion from the university if they failed to renounce those family members. Many were expelled from other faculties, but fewer from Physics, where there was a strong esprit de corps among the students. It was this communal spirit that saved Lev himself, following an incident in 1937.

  Military training was compulsory for full-time students at Moscow University. They were obliged to join a reserve corps of officers that could be mobilized in time of war. In the Physics Faculty the students were prepared for command posts in the infantry. The training involved two summer camps near Vladimir. At the first camp, in July 1937, the main instructor had been recently promoted to the junior command of a regiment made up of non-university students. He enjoyed drilling the elite physicists by forcing them to run 200 metres, and then march an equal distance, repeated interminably. It was not in Lev’s character to hold his tongue when he saw petty bullying by people in positions of authority. Eventually he exclaimed, ‘We have idiots for commanders!’ The remark was audible enough to be heard by the instructor, who reported Lev to the authorities. The matter went up to the Divisional Party Committee of the Moscow Military District, which expelled Lev from the Komsomol ‘for counter-revolutionary Trotskyist agitation against the commanding ranks of the Workers-Peasants’ Red Army’. The following September Lev returned to university. Fearing that there might be further consequences, he appealed to the Divisional Party Committee to revoke his expulsion from the Komsomol. He was called to the headquarters of the Military District, where the committee heard his version of events, repealed the expulsion and instead gave him a ‘strict reprimand’ (strogii vygovor) for ‘un-Komsomol-like behaviour’. It was a lucky escape. Later Lev would discover that it was largely due to the courageousness of three friends from the Physics Faculty who had written an appeal to the committee and signed it with their own names. Lev was so well liked by the other students in his faculty that they were willing to take such risks in his defence. Their declaration of solidarity could easily have backfired and led to their own arrests, since a group of three was already enough to qualify as an ‘organization’ in the eyes of the authorities.

  The episode brought Lev and Sveta together. Their relationship had cooled in the middle of their second year at university and they had not seen each other for a while. It was Sveta who had made the break, suddenly withdrawing from their circle of friends. Lev did not understand. Since the previous summer they had seen each other every day, and she had even asked him for his photograph. Many of their friends were getting married, and Lev must have hoped that they might soon be married too. Then, without warning, she had moved away. Looking back on this period, Sveta put it down to her ‘black moods’ – the depression from which she would suffer for much of her life. ‘How many times,’ she would later write to Lev, ‘have I reproached myself for spoiling things between us and – God knows why – tormenting you.’

  Once she saw he was in trouble, Sveta came back to Lev. For the next three years they were inseparable. Lev would meet her on her way to the university in the mornings. He would wait for her at the end of lectures, take her back to Leningrad Prospekt and cook for her or go with her to the theatre or the cinema and then walk her home. Poetry was an important element of their relationship. They would read together, send each other poems and introduce each other to new poetry. Akhmatova and Blok were Sveta’s favourite poets, but she also liked a poem by Elena Ryvina which she recited to Lev one evening on a walk through Moscow’s streets. The poem spoke of fleeting happiness:

  The glow of your cigarette

  first fades, then burns afresh.

  We pass along Rossi’s4 street,

  where the lamps burn in vain.

  Our rare encounter is shorter

  than a step, a moment, a breath.

  Why, dear architect,

  is your street so short?

  Sometimes, if Lev had to work late and could not see Sveta, he would pass by her house at night. On one of these occasions he left this note:

  Svetka! I came to see how you are and to remind you that tomorrow, which is the 29th, we would like to see you at our place. I decided not to just barge into your apartment because it’s late – half past eleven – and two of your windows are already dark, and two others are dim; I might wake everybody and give them a fright. Come and see me if you’re free. Greetings to your mother and to Tanya.

  In January 1940, Lev’s grandmother died. Sveta was by Lev’s side when they buried her in the Vagankovskoe cemetery.

  The next month, Lev became a technical assistant at the Lebedev Physics Institute (known in Russian as FIAN). He was still in his final year at university but he had been recommended by Naum Grigorov, a friend from the Physics Faculty who had just started at FIAN, and this was a chance to break into research. Named for Pyotr Lebedev, the Russian physicist who first measured the pressure exerted by light reflected or absorbed by a material body, FIAN was one of the world’s leading centres of atomic physics, and in the vanguard of its research programme was the cosmic rays project, in which Lev became involved. Because he was studying during the day, Lev often worked the evening shift in the laboratory. Sveta would stay late in the library and then walk the 3 kilometres from the Physics Faculty to FIAN on Miussky Square. She would sit on a bench in the courtyard and wait for Lev, who usually appeared at about eight o’clock to walk her home. On one occasion Lev was so exhausted that he fell asleep in the laboratory and did not wake up until after nine. Sveta was still waiting for him on the bench. She laughed when he told her he had been asleep.

  Lev on Mount Elbrus, 1940.

  That summer Lev went on a scientific expedition to Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus. High up in the mountains FIAN had a research base where Lev’s group could study the effects of cosmic rays closer to their entry point into the earth’s atmosphere. Lev spent three months at the base. ‘We climbed up and reached our shelter quite quickly yesterday,’ he wrote to Sveta. ‘I feel splendid, I’ve got a ferocious appetite and a host of unforgettable memories.’ Sveta, mea
nwhile, was on summer leave from the university and was working at the Lenin Library, which was then being built in a modern concrete block near the Kremlin. ‘Do you know, there’s a lovely square in front of the library now, and it’s all been planted with shrubs and flowers,’ she wrote to Lev. ‘Who’s going to give me a bouquet of flowers for my birthday?’ Lev was due to return from the Caucasus on 1 September, ten days before Sveta would turn twenty-three, and he always gave her flowers on her birthday. Until then she would have to make do with letters.

  3 August 1940

  Levenka,

  My first impulse when I got home today was to ask if any letters had come for me, but they all began to tease me about you, so I pretended that it was Irina’s postcard I was waiting for. But then Tanya said – with so much emphasis – that there was no postcard from Irina that I knew there must be something from you, so I followed her from room to room (all the doors are still left open in our house so you can go round the rooms for as long as you like)5 begging her to give me your letter. Mama eventually took pity on me and gave it to me.