Het verhaal van een liefde tussen twee jonge mensen standhoudt ondanks de goelagterreur. ( )

Lev and Svetlana's fresh, youthful faces shine out from photographs taken in the days before WWII. Two intelligent, educated young people with their lives ahead of them and so very much in love. However life for Lev Mishchenko, an orphan whose parents had perished in Siberia following the Bolshevik revolution, and the independent and spirited Svetlana, would be anything but easy.

Long, enforced separations cruelly kept the two young Muscovite lovers apart for many years. Lev was initially imprisoned by the Germans at Buchenwald but on being 'liberated' by fellow Russian troops was subject to intense investigation - had these returning POW's been loyal to the Motherland during their incarceration?

'Naively, Lev clung to the belief that if he told the truth he would
be allowed to go home. He believed in Soviet justice........'.

How wrong he was. Duped into signing an admittance of treason, Lev was sentenced to ten years in a 'corrective labour camp' in the far north of Russia.

Having lost touch with Svetlana during the relentless chaos of this period, Lev had little reason to imagine a reconciliation in these bleak circumstances when

"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 suddenly--there was my name, and,
as if it was alive, your handwriting."

And so began a correspondence that amounted to 1,246 letters, 647 from Lev and 599 from Svetlana, smuggled in and out of the Gulag by outside workers sympathetic with their plight. It is these uncensored, preserved letters form the basis of this brilliant book.

Towards the end of the book Lev and Svetlana's care-worn faces shine out of a photograph. Two intelligent, educated elderly people with most of their remarkable lives behind them and so very much in love.

Those who have read anything by Orlando Figes do not need to be told of his scrupulous research and easy style of writing. Not only a love story, but a description of the Gulag 'system', in which approximately 14 million people passed through these labour camps from 1929 to 1953, with 1.6 million or so perishing in the process. ( )

A wonderful story of faithfulness, loyalty, courage and power positivism. How to surrendrr and yet fight.