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

normally received a bowl of cabbage soup with a bit of meat or fish in it; and for dinner, another bowl of porridge with more tea. It was not enough to sustain someone in the hauling teams for long. Sickness and death-rates were very high. In 1945–6, more than one-third of the camp’s 1,600 prisoners were ill in the infirmary, a compound made up of isolation barracks outside the main prison zone of the wood-combine, in which at that time there was only one doctor. According to a prisoner who was then working in a grave-digging team, they were burying a dozen prisoners every day in the cemetery behind the infirmary. The working conditions of the hauling teams were so inhumane that even some of the guards became uneasy. ‘We don’t seem to care if they live or not,’ complained one at a meeting of the Party in the wood-combine. ‘We let them stand in freezing water until they get ill, and then we let them die in the infirmary if they can’t work any more.’
    Hauling team at the wood-combine .
    After three months in the hauling teams, Lev himself was close to exhaustion. He was broken psychologically. Terletsky later said that, when he first saw him, Lev ‘looked like a peasant who had been run over by a tractor.’ There was no trace left of the energetic boy who had dived into the Istra River ten years earlier.
    Encouraged by Terletsky, Lev would go to the wood-drying unit to warm himself after his shift. There were no guarded convoys inside the industrial zone – prisoners were left to find their own way to their jobs – so if Lev was working on the log-conveyor or near the saw-mill he had some time at the end of every day to stop by at the drying unit on his way back to the barracks of the 2nd Colony, where the prisoners were counted in through the guard-house. It was on a visit to the drying unit that Lev was rescued from work that was likely to kill him.
    The head of the research laboratory attached to the drying unit was Georgii Strelkov, a veteran Siberian Bolshevik of the Civil War and senior Soviet industrialist who had been the head of the Minusazoloto
Gold-Mining Trust in Krasnoyarsk, part of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry, until his arrest in 1937. Concerned by reports of starving prisoners at the Kolyma gold mines in the far north-east of Siberia, he had sent two ships with food supplies which had been intercepted by the NKVD, emptied of all food and loaded up with new prisoners instead. The NKVD did not care how many people died and accused Strelkov of wasting food. He was charged with ‘counter-revolutionary activity’. Sentenced to be shot, Strelkov was given a reprieve: twenty-five years without rights of correspondence in the Pechora labour camp. His expertise was so highly valued by the Gulag authorities in Pechora that they let him lead experimental work at the wood-combine, although, as a prisoner with a twenty-five-year sentence, he should have been engaged in heavy manual labour. They permitted Strelkov to live on his own in the laboratory, rather than in the barracks, because his presence was so frequently required to resolve some technical problem or other inside the industrial zone. He was even allowed to wear a suit instead of a uniform.
    Strelkov was strict and firm but also kind. Thanks to his authority at the wood-combine, he had been able to save many prisoners from complete exhaustion in the hauling teams by getting them transferred to the drying unit or workshops – even though his interventions often brought him problems with the camp authorities. Strelkov was not afraid. He knew that he was needed by the Gulag bosses, and for years he had managed to work the system to his advantage. In 1942, the wood-combine had received orders from the Gulag administration to find a way of turning sawdust into a yeast-based feed for animals. Strelkov was in charge of the research. After eighteen months of experimental work, the head of the wood workshops, a prisoner called