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    Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag
    Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag
    Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag
    Audiobook10 hours

    Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag

    Written by Orlando Figes

    Narrated by James Langton

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    About this audiobook

    "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, author of Natasha's Dance, 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 22, 2012
    ISBN9781452678009
    Author

    Orlando Figes

    Orlando Figes is the author of many acclaimed books on Russian history, including A People’s Tragedy, Natasha’s Dance, The Whisperers, The Crimean War, Revolutionary Russia, and The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture. His books have been translated into over thirty languages. He is a professor of history at Birkbeck College, London University.

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    Reviews for Just Send Me Word

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      Non-fiction! Years of letters between Lev, a political prisoner in the Gulag, and Sveta, his girlfriend. It’s an amazing story and a glimpse into a world most of us can’t even imagine. Figues does a great job of weaving the letters together and providing them with context while letting Lev & Sveta’s words stand on their own.
    • 5/5
      Lev and Svetlana's fresh, youthful faces shine out from photographs taken in the days before WWII. Two intelligent, educated young people with their lives ahead of them and so very much in love. However life for Lev Mishchenko, an orphan whose parents had perished in Siberia following the Bolshevik revolution, and the independent and spirited Svetlana, would be anything but easy.Long, enforced separations cruelly kept the two young Muscovite lovers apart for many years. Lev was initially imprisoned by the Germans at Buchenwald but on being 'liberated' by fellow Russian troops was subject to intense investigation - had these returning POW's been loyal to the Motherland during their incarceration?'Naively, Lev clung to the belief that if he told the truth he wouldbe allowed to go home. He believed in Soviet justice........'.How wrong he was. Duped into signing an admittance of treason, Lev was sentenced to ten years in a 'corrective labour camp' in the far north of Russia.Having lost touch with Svetlana during the relentless chaos of this period, Lev had little reason to imagine a reconciliation in these bleak circumstances when"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."And so began a correspondence that amounted to 1,246 letters, 647 from Lev and 599 from Svetlana, smuggled in and out of the Gulag by outside workers sympathetic with their plight. It is these uncensored, preserved letters form the basis of this brilliant book.Towards the end of the book Lev and Svetlana's care-worn faces shine out of a photograph. Two intelligent, educated elderly people with most of their remarkable lives behind them and so very much in love.Those who have read anything by Orlando Figes do not need to be told of his scrupulous research and easy style of writing. Not only a love story, but a description of the Gulag 'system', in which approximately 14 million people passed through these labour camps from 1929 to 1953, with 1.6 million or so perishing in the process.