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

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 received an unexpected letter from Sveta, his sweetheart. Over the next eight years, the couple exchanged more than 1,500 messages and managed to arrange secret meetings, with Sveta smuggled into the camp. Their correspondence, recently discovered, is the only known real-time record of life in Stalin's Gulag, unmediated and uncensored. Orlando Figes draws on Lev and Sveta's letters, KGB archives, and recent interviews to reconstruct the broader historical context of their story. The book presents their account of survival and connection against the backdrop of Stalinist repression.