Love conquers all

Anyone who has ever written a history book will feel a twinge of envy on reading the preface to Just Send Me Word:

We opened up the largest of the trunks. I had never seen anything like it: several thousand letters tightly stacked in bundles tied with string and rubber bands, notebooks, diaries, documents and photographs…

It was a unique family archive, the property of Svetlana and Lev Mishchenko, and it contained, among other things, packets of their love letters.  

The two had met as university students in Moscow in the 1930s, but their relationship was cut short by the outbreak of war. Lev joined the Red Army in 1940, fought near Moscow but then fell into German captivity. Upon returning to the Soviet Union in 1945 he was arrested — a common fate for Soviet ex-POWs, who were automatically considered traitors — and he remained in the Gulag until 1954.

For 14 years they lived apart. Svetlana remained in Moscow, finished her studies and took a job at a research institute. Lev was condemned to live behind barbed wire in barracks in Pechora, in the far north of Russia, where he worked in a wood-processing plant.   

During that time, they wrote one another more than 1,200 letters. Many were sent via camp-smuggling networks, thus by-passing the censors. Unbelievably, they then preserved the letters for 60 years, creating the only known Gulag correspondence collection of such size and scope. What historian or history-lover could resist such a treasure trove?

Orlando Figes didn’t resist. Instead, he helped organise the transcription of the faded, yellowed, almost illegible and partly encoded letters. He consulted the very elderly Lev and Svetlana, both since deceased.  He visited Pechora and its archives. He then faced a choice: analyse the correspondence for its unusual historical content, or tell the love story of Svetlana and Lev.