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

A heroic love story and an unprecedented inside view of one of Stalins most notorious labor camps, based on a remarkable cache of letters smuggled in and out of the GulagI went to get the letters for our friends, and couldnt help but feel a little envious, I didnt 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.