Laces Tied in the Age of AI

Seventeen, and twenty-five years

In January 1951, Susanna Pechuro was a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl in Moscow. With a few friends she had started a literary circle, reading the poets their school left out. Over time the talk moved on to harder things, and the circle became a secret student group with its own written programme. Sixteen young people were arrested in the case.

In February 1952 she was sentenced to twenty-five years in labour camps. Three of her friends, who had led the group and were all about twenty, were sentenced to death. They were shot in March 1952.

She did not expect to come home.

That last phrase stays with me. Not “how do I get out?” but “what kind of person am I going to be in here?”

The nights

Before the sentence came more than a year of questioning, much of it at night.

What she could still own was her mind. Generations of prisoners had passed down rules for surviving a cell, and she followed them.

Later, in the camps, she kept a small volume of Blok's poems with her for years, and a copy of Dante's Divine Comedy that a dying neighbour gave her. Once she learned a whole physics book by heart, a subject that had never interested her, just to be learning something.

Don't go to seed

Hunger, cold and no sleep. Digging into frozen ground in winter, building houses, clearing tree stumps. And in the middle of it, the rule I keep coming back to.

“Go to seed” is an old English phrase from the garden. When a lettuce goes to seed, it bolts. It shoots up, flowers, turns bitter and stops being what it was grown to be. Said of a person, it means letting yourself go.

One undone lace. A missing button you stop replacing. A morning you don't wash. None of it matters on its own. Together, it is a person slowly giving up the daily care that keeps them a person.

For her this was never about looking neat. It was a line she refused to cross, because she had seen where it led.

So tying her laces was resistance. Small, daily and private. Nobody could take it from her unless she handed it over.

Eleven prisons, seven camps

She was moved through eleven prisons and seven camps. Each move tore her away from the friends she had made, and she says this was the hardest part.

What carried her was people. The women in her first cell taught her the craft of staying human.

And she and her friends held each other to a rule of their own.

From waiting to living

With twenty-five years ahead, the easiest thing would have been to wait. Wait for release, wait for life to start again. She saw where that led too, and turned it around.

Her purpose

In transit she met child prisoners, thin and worn out, some of them barely in their teens. They kept coming to sit on the edge of her bunk.

A prisoner with nothing became a teacher. That gave her days a reason.

The close

Her sentence was cut to nine years in 1954, then to five. On 25 April 1956 she came home to her parents. She was twenty-two, in poor health, and free.

Coming back was hard. Her eyesight was poor, so friends read her textbooks aloud to her and she passed her school exams. The university turned her away, so she studied history at another institute, raised two daughters, and spent decades recording other prisoners' stories. This is how she described that time.

They took her friends, her youth and her health. They did not take her.

I want to be careful here. Losing a job is not a labour camp. Nobody is starving me or keeping me awake for months. Her story is hers, and I'm not comparing pain.

But one question from her life follows me into mine. Who am I when the thing that defined me is taken away?

AI is changing work. For some people it has already taken the job, and with the job goes something harder to name: the identity, the routine, the sense of being useful. “What do you do?” suddenly has no answer.

The trap

I notice it in myself. The pull is to do the old things harder. The same moves, the same plans, expecting the old results in a world that has changed. That, to me, is going to seed. Not the undone lace itself, but the slow refusal to see where I actually am.

Name it, tame it

Name it: this is loss. Not laziness, not failure. Loss.

Tame it: what is really happening? The world changed. My worth didn't vanish. The old road to it did.

Then act. One small thing, today. For me that means tying the laces: getting up, washing, getting dressed as if the day matters. Keeping my mind busy, learning something for its own sake, the way she learned a physics book by heart. Helping someone, because for me that is where a sense of control comes back.

I used to hear “this is my life, there won't be another” as giving up. Now I hear a decision. Stop waiting for the old life to come back, and live this one like a human being.

The world changed. I tied my laces.

Her story is told from her own testimony. This is my personal reflection, not medical or professional advice.