Wartime sweethearts sent to the gulag for falling in love

Russian women who fell in love with British sailors from the Arctic convoys bringing aid to the Soviet Union during World War Two were later accused of espionage and sent to prison camps.

Shunned as pariahs after their release, the survivors are only now beginning to speak about these wartime affairs that destroyed their lives.

The women knew that the secret police were deeply suspicious of anybody with a foreign boyfriend. But they thought it was safe enough to go out with British sailors, whose ships braved German air and sea attacks to bring arms and equipment to Russia through Arctic seas from 1941 to 1945.

With the start of the Cold War they discovered that they were tragically wrong.

Yelena Ivanova, a dark-haired girl from the port city of Archangel on the White Sea, was a librarian who worked in a local medical institute when she met a sailor called Eric Campbell. He was a radio operator at the British military mission in Archangel, keen on football and, going by an old photograph, was exceptionally good looking.

Yelena still remembers a football match between British and Russian teams in Archangel's football stadium. Eric captained the British side and, when it won, was given a bunch of flowers. He immediately ran to where Yelena was standing on the sidelines and handed her the flowers.

Yelena recalls another occasion when she and Eric were kissing on the staircase of a wooden house when her hat fell off her head. The next day he gave her an elastic band for her hat and they both laughed as she put it on.

In 1944 the two had a son, whom they called Edik, though he was officially registered as Eduard Erikovitch. Soon afterwards Eric was transferred from Archangel, though he still sent parcels and a final telegram saying: "I love you."

By Yelena's account he was a generous, witty, cultured man who helped her with her English. But, despite the wartime alliance between Britain and the Soviet Union, she was worried that a friend who knew about her affair would tell the NKVD security police.

The last British convoy sailed in 1945 and the Cold War was soon underway. Yelena was arrested as she worked in her library in October 1946. Her mother told her later that her son Edik, who was by then three years old, had stood all evening in front of a portrait of Stalin in their house asking: "Grandfather Iosya, why did you take my mother?"

Accused of spying, terrorism and anti-Soviet activity she was interrogated for five or six hours every night until she finally broke down. She confessed: "I told Eric important information about political and economic life. I illegally spread rumours that the north [of the Soviet Union] was to be rented to the British for 20 years."

Yelena was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Her letters from Eric were burned. She was sent to a camp in a convoy of prisoners surrounded by guard dogs and only received a plate of soup a day. After working on a building site as a bricklayer she was sent to a camp for dangerous criminals, called Taishet, in Siberia. While cutting wood in the forest, a pine tree fell on her and her injuries left her partially deaf.

Yelena was released after nine years and returned to Archangel. A photograph taken on her return shows a shrivelled, wary face. Family friends, terrified of being associated with an "enemy of the people", avoided her. She got work as a librarian but never married and remained very poor.

Her son was also discriminated against and, unable to get a proper education, worked all his life in a timber mill until he died four years ago. Yelena wrote about Edik's death to his father but the letter came back marked "Addressee left".

The two were finally put in touch again by Bill Lowes, a veteran of the Russian convoys, who found that Eric was a retired professional footballer.

"It is difficult to express my feelings when Bill told me about your awful years after the war," he wrote to Yelena. "I really knew nothing about the hardships you had because of me."

Yelena Ivanova said she no longer wanted "to remember the time that brought so much sorrow to myself and my family." But she finally told her story to Olga Golubtsova, a journalist from Severodvinsk, a naval port north of Archangel, who spent years investigating the miserable fate of the Russian girlfriends of British sailors. She gives an account of the lives of 14 women in a little book, published in Severodvinsk, entitled War and Love English-style.

At first few of the women wanted to speak. Kapitolina Pamfilova, the daughter of a sea captain, did not tell her son Stepan that his father was a British technician called Thomas Macadam until he was 52 years old. She at first thought she had escaped arrest, but in 1951 she was detained and sent to Siberia for three years as "a socially dangerous element".

The love affairs of the girls were carefully monitored by the Soviet security police. "The worst of it was that in the war years many girls reported to the NKVD," says Kapitolina. "We were summoned there and we were scared that they would arrest us. They wanted to make spies out of us and we had only love on our mind."

Olga Golubtsova located one woman, whom she calls Tonya Trofimova, who confessed that she had indeed been recruited by British intelligence. A saleswoman in a shop in Archangel, she went to parties in the hostel of the British mission. She received chocolate, cigarettes and money as well as a dress, stockings and a blanket from different boyfriends.

In return she was asked about the NKVD, popular attitudes to the British and how people lived. First arrested in 1946 for stealing luxury goods from her shop she was later charged with spying and denounced all her friends, of whom eight went to prison.

Only a few of the affairs ended without disaster. Vera Tsirul, the daughter of a famous general, was an interpreter who fell in love with a member of the British mission called Jimmy Morrison. When other women started being arrested she burned all his pictures and letters but believes it was only her father's powerful friends who kept her out of jail.

Why were the girls not more conscious of the potential dangers in Stalin's Russia of having a foreign sailor or soldier as a lover? Olga Golubtsova says the reason is simply that they were blinded by love and saw their boyfriends as heroes from an allied country in the war.