Just send me word : a true story of love and survival in the Gulag /

Figes is a professor of history at the University of London and the prizewinning author of many books on Russia. In 2007, he encountered a cache of letters exchanged by two Muscovites, Leva and Svetlana Mishchenko. Figes uses those letters to reveal a wonderful, enduring love story that is also informative about life in a Soviet gulag. They met and fell in love as university students in Moscow in the mid-1930s. Their relationship was interrupted by the German invasion of 1941. Lev was captured by the Germans and endured a POW camp. Like so many other Soviet POWs, he was then accused of disloyalty by the Stalinist regime and sent to a labor camp in the Far North. There, incredibly, he received a letter from Svetlana after years of separation. Thus began a long correspondence more than 1,500 letters and messages that were uncensored and often smuggled in and out by sympathetic guards. Their correspondence displays the intensity of their feelings as well as their painful longings for reunification.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist

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. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A rich trove of letters tells the moving story of two young physics students in Stalin's Russia whose love was severely tested while separated by exile in Siberia. In this first publication of "the largest cache of Gulag letters ever found," Figes (History/Birkbeck College, Univ. of London; The Crimean War, 2011, etc.) has sifted through more than 1,500 missives to uncover a story of two people who found a way to endure over eight years of the harshest isolation and repression. After meeting at Moscow University in 1935, Lev and Svetlana, or Sveta as she is called in the letters, became kindred spirits over their shared passion for poetry and learning. With the invasion of Russia by the Nazis in 1941, Lev was mobilized to the front; he was soon captured and spent the war as a POW. However, because he spoke German, he was enlisted as a translator. With the liberation by the Americans, Lev was urged to take a job as a physicist in the United States, but he refused, returning to Moscow to find Sveta. Upon arrival, he was accused of spying for the Germans and was sentenced to 10 years in the Arctic Gulag. News of Lev's whereabouts finally reached Sveta and her family, and in an extraordinary letter dated Jul. 12, 1946, Sveta wrote to Lev for the first time at the labor camp: "How many times have I wanted to nestle in your arms but could only turn to the empty wall in front of me? I felt I couldn't breathe. Yet time would pass, and I would pull myself together. We will get through this, Lev." They managed to express a cautiously optimistic tone through the grim, lonely stretch of Lev's incarceration, and were even able to meet secretly a few times. Their devotion to each other allowed them each to survive. A heart-rending record of extraordinary human endurance.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.