num_pages: 352
description: A heroic love story and an unprecedented inside view of one of Stalin's most notorious labor camps based on a remarkable cache of letters smuggled in and out of the Gulag.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 suddenlythere was my name and as if it was alive your handwriting.In 1946 after five years as a prisonerfirst as a Soviet POW in Nazi concentration camps then as a deportee (falsely accused of treason) in the Arctic Gulagtwenty-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 1500 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 the great storyteller of modern Russian historians (Financial Times) 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.
language: English
title: Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag
publisher: Metropolitan Books