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

Boris Serov, took two jars of the promised feed to a big meeting of the Gulag bosses in Abez, the administrative centre of the Pechora camps, to mark the anniversary of the Revolution. The jars were received with a thunderous ovation from the delegates. On returning from Abez, Serov was told by one of Strelkov’s assistants that the two jars had been filled with ordinary barley flour.
    In 1946, the drying unit was in desperate need of new technicians with engineering expertise. The high-pressure steam heaters were not drying the timbers fast enough to maintain the necessary volume of supply for the workshops to meet their planned targets, and there was growing pressure from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, or MVD (which had taken over the running of the Gulag from the NKVD in March 1946), to improve their performance. Having learned that Lev was a scientist, Strelkov invited him to join the drying unit as a technician, putting him to work in the steam-room. Lev’s job was to turn the timbers to allow the covered parts to dry. The room was kept at a minimum temperature of 70 degrees centigrade, so he had to go in with his hands and face covered and could not stay more than a few minutes at a time. It was hard physical labour but, compared with hauling timbers from the river, a ‘paradise’ for Lev.
    For the first time since he had arrived in Pechora, Lev was able to keep his shoes and clothes dry. He was warm all day. He was not bothered by aggressive guards. Perhaps even more important for his morale, when he was not working in the steam-room, Lev could visit Strelkov in his laboratory. There Strelkov had organized a spacious living area, 30 metres square, in which he kept a cat (‘Vasily Trifonych’) and entertained his friends with lively conversation, cards and chess, music from a radio he had built, vodka he had brewed in the scientific flasks and precious vegetables he grew in window-boxes heated by wood-steamers he had specially adapted for the task. There were even flowers growing under heated glass –which so impressed the head of the wood-combine that he gave his imprimatur to Strelkov’s newest fantasy of developing a flower farm.
    Moving to the wood-drying unit gave Lev his first opportunity to write letters. That had not been possible before. When he had been working in the hauling teams, he would get back late to the barracks – he would be hungry, dirty, wet and cold, totally exhausted and in no state to write in the short time before lights went out following the evening meal. He had no paper or pen in any case. But
after working at the drying unit, Lev had time to write; he could get what he needed from Strelkov.
    Strelkov and his cat in the laboratory . The picture on the wall is Ilya Repin’s Volga Barge Haulers, in Soviet times a symbol of Tsarist oppression .
    Lev had resolved that he would not write to Sveta or Olga. On Sveta’s last birthday, he had despaired of seeing her again. The ten-year sentence and the convoy to Pechora must have reinforced his hopelessness. What was the point of writing to a woman he had not heard from for five years? She might be dead. She might have given up on him and married someone else. It might be awkward for her to receive a letter from a prisoner. The last thing he wanted was to put her into danger by contacting her. Lev had chosen not to interfere in Sveta’s life. A victim perhaps of that sense of worthlessness that comes from years of being a prisoner, he felt he did not have the right to claim her love.
    Then, for some reason, he changed his mind. Maybe the companionship of Strelkov and his friends lifted Lev’s spirits. Maybe, as he would himself explain it later, he ‘surrendered in a moment of weakness’ to the desire to find out what was happening to her. Lev
did not dare to write to Sveta directly, but wrote instead to Olga (‘Olya’) to ask after her:

    2 June 1946
     
    Dear Aunt Olya! You cannot have expected to get a letter like this. I