Just Send Me Word

Summary

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—Lev Mishchenko unexpectedly received a letter from Sveta, the sweetheart he had hardly dared hope was still alive. Miraculously, over the next eight years, the lovers managed to exchange more than 1,500 letters and even arrange for perilous secret meetings in Pechora camp itself. Their recently discovered correspondence, smuggled in and out of the by workers and officials, is the only known real-time record of life in Stalin's gulag.

Unmediated and uncensored, the letters lay bare the couple's private thoughts and everyday struggles—in gray, postwar Moscow, as Sveta strives to forge a life that Lev can return to, and in Pechora, where Lev is torn between the wish to reassure his beloved and the desire to create and enduring record of one of Stalin's most notorious labor camps.

Orlando Figes, Just Send Me Word  (New York: Metropolitan Books, registered trademarks of Henry Holt). 300 pages  

Personal Opinion

It is a very good read; a vivid portrait of life in the Gulag through the many letters of a loving couple. Many lessons can be learned from the way these thoughtful and intelligent people chose to face their reality. This is a story of real love, injustice, despair and separation in Russia under Stalin’s rule.

A quote from Sveta on love: “Give and don’t reach out for its return—this is the key to opening all hearts."

My score (1-5):

About the Author:

Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. Born in London in 1959, he graduated with a Double-Starred First from Cambridge University, where he was a Lecturer in History and Fellow of Trinity College from 1984 to 1999. He is the author of many books on Russian history, including A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924, which in 1997 received the Wolfson Prize, the NCR Book Award, the W.H. Smith Literary Award, the Longman/History Today Book Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (2002) was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (2007), which is featured here. Crimea: The Last Crusade (2010) and Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag (2012). His agent is Rogers, Coleridge and White. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. A list of his foreign publishers is available here. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. 

Source: OrlandoFiges.com

Orlando Figes (born 20 November 1959) is a British historian on Russia, who was a Lecturer in History and Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge from 1987 to 1999, before taking the Chair as Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He serves on the editorial board of the journal Russian History, writes for the international press, broadcasts on television and radio, reviews for the New York Review of Books, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Figes is known for his works on Russian history, in particular A People's Tragedy (1996), Natasha's Dance (2002), The Whisperers (2007), Crimea (2010) and Just Send Me Word (2012). A People's Tragedy is a study of the Russian Revolution, and combines social and political history with biographical details in a historical narrative. In 2008 the Times Literary Supplement named A People's Tragedy as one of the 'hundred most influential books since the war'.

Source: Wikipedia