English Letters Send Hope to USSR

The Cold War couldn't keep the letters from a warm-hearted English couple from bringing hope to an imprisoned man's family in the USSR.

Before glasnost, the Soviet Union was closed from the outside world. "The Iron Curtain" is more than a figurative way to express the divide between East and West - it is a description that encapsulates just how severed the USSR was from Western Europe.

However, the story of an English couple who wrote letters to the family of a Russian political prisoner is suprising and touching. While Marina Aidova waited for her father, Slava, to come home from the prison camp in which he was interred, she and her mother began to receive letters that made their wait less desperate and their lives less bleak. The Russian family and the English couple corresponded for 15 years, and to avoid the Soviet censors from blacking out their words, they talked of "everyday" things - which, for the two families, was both very different and an area of similarity.

Slava was released, and Marina never met her friends in England. But Marina credits the letters with saving her mother from having a nervous breakdown during Slava's imprisonment.