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

evidence of espionage for the Germans. Beaten into a confession, he was sentenced to be shot. For two months he sat in a prison in Kiev waiting for his execution, before his sentence was commuted to ten years’ hard labour in the camps. Terletsky almost died on the convoy to Pechora. He was put to work in a team collecting firewood and scraps from the riverbank and hauling them by cart 500 metres up the hill to the power station, where the
wood was fed into the steam engines producing energy for the wood-combine. Terletsky could not handle the heavy work. The stokers at the power station, seeing that he was dying from exhaustion, took pity on him, allowing him to rest while they did his work for him. It was a lucky break: at the power station Terletsky was spotted by the head of the Electrical Group, Viktor Chikin, a prisoner himself, who was impressed by his intelligence and got him put into his team of electricians at the power plant.
    In the bunk next to Lev’s was Aleksei (‘Lyosha’) Anisimov, a fellow Muscovite and student of the Moscow Institute of Transport Engineers. He was a shy and quiet man, much liked by Lev, who described him as ‘a wonderful fellow’ in his letters to Sveta. Anisimov had been arrested in 1937 and given fifteen years for ‘anti-Soviet activity’. The 2nd Colony was mostly made up of ‘politicals’ like Lev, Terletsky and Anisimov. Many (eighty-three to be precise) had been caught in the German zone of occupation and arrested as ‘spies’ or ‘collaborators’ on their return to the Soviet Union or else had been swept up in the mass arrests that accompanied the Soviet reinvasion of these territories in 1944–5.
    The other colonies at the wood-combine were populated by different categories of prisoner. The 1st Colony (located in a separate sector outside the industrial zone) was made up of ‘special exiles’ ( spetspereselentsy ), workers sent by administrative order to the Gulag, of which there were about 500 in the camp in 1946. The 3rd Colony (by the river) was made up of criminals and other prisoners who had been singled out for punishment. ‘It is next to us but much stricter,’ Lev would write. ‘Prisoners are sent there if they break the rules, and the next step is a penal convoy.’ Conditions in the 3rd were ‘appalling’, according to a report by the camp administration looking into riots in the colony in 1947. The prisoners had no bedding, the basins were broken, and there were rats.
    Lev was assigned to a general labour team, hauling wood from the riverbank to the wood-combine. The work meant dragging heavy timbers up a hill to the log-conveyor, where, with the help of capstans, winches and cables, they were hauled up to the saw-mill.
It was back-breaking work which involved standing in freezing water for hours at a time. In the summer, when it was light all night, the mosquitoes were unbearable. Before the prisoners went to work they would cover up their hands and faces with bits of cloth.
    Like the rest of his team, Lev received the standard uniform: a cap with ear-flaps, a wadded pea-jacket, heavy cotton trousers, gloves and winter shoes made of the same material as the jackets. There was no fur or lining in the shoes and no way of drying them in the damp and airless barracks, so his feet were always wet.
    The twelve-hour shifts started before dawn; prisoners received rations of 600 grams of bread a day if they fulfilled the quota, but only 400 grams if they did not. To fulfil his daily quota Lev had to haul a minimum of 60 cubic metres of timber (enough to fill a small garage) from the river to the wood-combine. If he exceeded his quota, he got 800 grams and, as a bonus, ‘a rye-flour pie with a filling that had no particular taste or with no filling at all’, as he recalled. Every morning the prisoners were given a bowl of thin porridge, a cup of tea, a lump of sugar weighing 15 grams (it was measured carefully) and a piece of herring; for lunch, they