Just Send Me Word
A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag
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4.6 • 7 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A heroic love story and an unprecedented inside view of one of Stalin's most notorious labor camps, based on a remarkable cache of letters smuggled in and out of the Gulag
"I went to get the letters for our friends, and couldn't help but feel a little envious, I didn't expect anything for myself. And suddenly—there was my name, and, as if it was alive, your handwriting."
In 1946, after five years as a prisoner—first as a Soviet POW in Nazi concentration camps, then as a deportee (falsely accused of treason) in the Arctic Gulag—twenty-nine-year-old Lev Mishchenko unexpectedly received a letter from Sveta, the sweetheart he had hardly dared hope was still alive. Amazingly, over the next eight years the lovers managed to exchange more than 1,500 messages, and even to smuggle Sveta herself into the camp for secret meetings. Their recently discovered correspondence is the only known real-time record of life in Stalin's Gulag, unmediated and uncensored.
Orlando Figes, "the great storyteller of modern Russian historians" (Financial Times), draws on Lev and Sveta's letters as well as KGB archives and recent interviews to brilliantly reconstruct the broader world in which their story unfolded. With the powerful narrative drive of a novel, Just Send Me Word reveals a passion and endurance that triumphed over the tragic forces of history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Drawing on more than 1,200 letters between Lev and Svetlana "Sveta" Mishchenko, and interviews with the couple, veteran historian Figes (The Crimean War) tells their remarkable tale of love and devotion during the worst years of the USSR. Having fallen in love as physics students at Moscow University, they were separated for 13 years: first while Lev served in WWII, and then after he was sentenced to a Siberian labor camp for the "crime" of serving as a translator for a German officer while a POW. Lev's letters illustrate the extreme hardships of the Stalinist camps: near-starvation, rampant epidemics, and the shattering of inmates' basic humanity, so that "in the course of time you really do become a savage and malicious animal...," he wrote to Sveta. Her letters express her extraordinary devotion and determination to visit Lev, which she managed to do four times, despite the long trek, subterfuges, necessary bribes, and dangers involved in the illegal journeys. Figes briefly relates the couple's post-gulag marriage, parenthood, and professional success, and offers much important background information, such as the economic inefficiency of the Stalinist camp system. His fine narrative pacing enhances this moving, memorable story. 8 pages of photos.
