An American in the Gulag Read online

  Alexander Dolgun

  with

  Patrick Watson

  AN AMERICAN IN THE GULAG

  First published in 1975

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Alexander Dolgun

  To THOSE STILL AT SEA

  And, to Patricia Blake, my friend from the moment of my arrival in the United States, who has been my guiding star in writing this book

  Chapter 1

  One day late in 1948 a young American out for an innocent walk in the streets of Moscow was accosted by an operative of the MGB, the Soviet secret police. Had he been quick to run away through the crowded streets to the American Embassy, only two blocks away, he would probably have been safe. Instead, he paused a moment to answer the agent politely. It was a fateful pause. Within seconds, the young man was a prisoner of the MGB. He would live under their shadow for the next twenty-three years.

  How it began was mundane enough. In the early thirties, when jobs were scarce and pay was meager, a number of American technicians accepted offers from the Soviet Union to work in Russia for a one-year term. One of these men was Michael Dolgun, a Polish-born New Yorker who went over in 1933 on contract to the Moscow Automotive Works. He was well paid in dollars, but it was hard to be away from his wife and two young children in New York, where he sent most of his pay. So when his employers offered to help bring his family over if he would accept a second one-year contract, Michael Dolgun accepted. Much as he disliked Moscow, he thought he could stick it out one more year if his family was with him.

  Besides, things were still pretty tough in America. But that one year stretched into two, and then four, and then 1939 came and with it came the prospect of war.

  Michael Dolgun told the Soviet authorities he wanted to return home with his family. His wife, Anna, and the two children had never been happy in their drab little Moscow room anyway. But the Soviet authorities stalled. Endless bureaucratic barriers to his repatriation appeared. Michael was not politically sophisticated. If he even knew that there was an American Embassy in Moscow by this time, it never occurred to him to go there for help. After all, he had been dealing with the same officials of the Soviet government for six years; they were his contact with the world of passports and money and travel arrangements.

  And before anything was done for him, war had come to Russia and Michael Dolgun found that in the eyes of the Soviet government, and without his having been consulted, advised, or asked to consent, he had become a Soviet citizen, and he was drafted into the Red Army. For the rest of the war his family saw little of him. They had a terrible time trying to find food in the beleaguered city. Anna and the teenage children, Stella and Alexander, yearned to go home to New York, but of course there was no way to do that.

  Alex was a Catholic boy. He had been taught plenty about hell. But the searing realities of the pit in which he spent most of his twenties would soon make all that pulpit hellfire seem insipid.

  I know about all this because I am Alex Dolgun. Retracing my steps through the inferno in order to write this book has not been a joyful experience. It has been an act of catharsis and an offering to those still in the inferno.

  Most of my story is what I actually remember, but some is what must have been. There are episodes and faces and words and sensations burned so deeply into my memory that no amount of time will wear them away. There are other times when I was so exhausted because they never let me sleep or so starved or beaten or burning with fever or drugged with cold that everything was blurred, and now I can only put together what must have happened by setting out to build a connection across these periods, a reconstruction between those points that are quite clear.

  For instance, I know that in the spring of 1950 I was packed like a human sausage into one of the infamous Stolypin railway cars, to be shipped from the prisons of Moscow where I had been tortured and interrogated to the forced-labor camps of Kazakhstan. I was emaciated and feverish. After a year and a half of enforced sleeplessness I was mentally vague. I was the only American in the crowd of Russians and Ukrainians and Tatars and others on that train. I remember vividly some events from the transfer prisons along the way. I recall a wagon heaped with corpses outside the gates of the camp at Dzhezkazgan when we arrived at four o’clock in the morning. I know that I was too weak to walk without help at that point.

  And yet the next thing I can recall is going to work in the stone quarry. There must have been a period of rest in between; I know there must have been the normal period of “quarantine” before I was given a work assignment. I know a number of things that happened during that period, because they happened to every arriving prisoner, and I can write about them with complete certainty that they happened to me. But I have absolutely no recall of the two-week period. It has been wiped out of my brain like an erased tape.

  I have an extremely good memory. I can see now the faces of men who tortured me in Moscow prisons, in Lefortovo and Sukhanovka. I recall the number of every cell I was locked in, the number of days I spent in solitary hard punishment cells, the names of hundreds of fellow prisoners. As I worked on this book, faces and names and smells and sounds came to me after twenty years of being forgotten, and they came with complete clarity and vividness, just like opening a door and finding someone you know very well but have not seen for a long, long time.

  To work on this book has sometimes been exciting because of the way in which my memory has responded to my probings. Not all the answers have been very palatable. I know that I suppressed some of the memories for twenty years because they were intolerable. But now, because the work of telling my story has become the foremost need of my life, and because I know that for the story to be credible it must have detail and texture and be very complete, even the pain of a terrible memory brings a certain reward from the simple, clear satisfaction of having been able to remember.

  Chapter 2

  One day late in 1948 a young American out for an innocent walk in the streets of Moscow was accosted by an operative of. the MGB. That is where the book begins, so I come back to that day—to the early hours of that day, between one and two in the morning, when I stood outside the apartment of my fiancé, Mary Catto, trying to say good night. I was in love with Mary Catto. She worked at the British Embassy. I worked at the American. Both of us were in junior positions, but we were a lively, outgoing couple and we had a lot of friends in the Moscow diplomatic community. As a result, we were invited to a lot of cocktail parties and theater outings and dinners that a twenty-two-year-old like me would not normally have been asked to, even though I was chief of the consular file room.

  People knew Mary and I were in love. They made friendly fun of the difference in our accents and called us Mr. and Mrs. Haff-and-Hawff. I was out very late with Mary that night. We were very close and very loving, but we had not slept together; that would wait until we were married. It was one of those nights when saying good night is almost impossible. We stood in her doorway with our arms aro
und each other, very happy, very dreamy, and completely innocent of what was going on around us.

  I remember that I felt a kind of dramatic urge—I was really crazy about her and I had that need you get for expressing yourself with a lot of power—and so I said to her, “Darling, suppose something should happen to me and I should disappear for a few months.” There was a look of genuine alarm on her face. I was enough of a kid, I’m afraid, to enjoy it: it meant I was really important to her. She must have thought I might be going on some embassy mission I couldn’t talk about. That was the impression I tried to give. Mary didn’t say anything. She just looked at me terribly seriously.

  I said, “Would you wait for me?”

  “I would wait forever, Al,” she said. “I love you, and I would wait for you.

  Are you serious about this?”

  I said, “Listen, forget it. We’re going to the Bolshoi tomorrow night—no, God, it’s tonight—and I’ve got to get some sleep. I just had to know how serious you are.” She held me very tightly. It was probably half an hour more before I left her and walked back to the American Embassy residence with my head full of romance.

  Now, I am not superstitious or mystical in the least, but that remark to Mary about disappearing for a while, and the dream I had later that same night, were both undeniably real and prophetic.

  I was on a bus, in Moscow, returning to the embassy from some errand, and I noticed that a man was watching me intently. In reality Ambassador Bedell Smith had warned us recently that there were indications of increasing harassment of American personnel. This was the time of the planning of NATO and the firm Western response to the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia, and I suppose it was felt that this might have some negative results for us Americans in Moscow. Anyway, we were used to being tailed by the MGB, and in my dream I recognized this as a tail, but it seemed more serious than usual. Then as we neared the embassy I realized there was more than one man watching me closely. I tried to act nonchalant, and as we came close to the embassy bus stop I stood up and pressed the button and waited by the side door of the bus. Three men got up and stood behind me. I leaped down from the bus and began to run toward the front door of the embassy. They ran after me. I was pulling away from them, but something was wrong with my knees. They felt weak and began to buckle. The three men began to gain on me. I stumbled and fell, forced myself up again and fell again, and they jumped on me. At that point I guess I woke up because that’s all there was to the dream. It upset me a little but not immensely. I knew that there was always a danger in the city. Ambassador Smith had said never to go out alone at night and maybe I was reacting to having been out alone that night, I don’t know.

  It did stay with me, though it was vivid enough to remember and to tell to the girls in the file room when I went to work. One of them told me there had been another Russian woman at the embassy already that morning, asking for something. I say “another” because, not long before, a poor desperate soul whose mind had snapped came in and claimed she was the wife of Edward Stettinius (Roosevelt’s last Secretary of State) and that there was a warship waiting at Leningrad to take her home and why weren’t we looking after her. And just as she had been followed when she left by one of the shadowy men who were always in Mokhovaya Street in front of the embassy, so we watched as this second woman left the embassy the morning of the thirteenth of December, and the Soviet duty cop at the gate gave a slight nod to a man down the street who fell into step behind her.

  They would pick her up. We knew that. We had all been followed, though never interfered with. I even had developed a considerable knack for losing my shadows. I laughed and said to one of the girls that morning, “Those MGB are everywhere, you know. For all you know, I’m one!” And everybody laughed at that.

  Before coming to work that morning I had picked up one of my guns. I have always been crazy about guns, and at this time I had a collection of three nice pistols— a Walther 9-mm.; a Japanese .22 revolver, small enough to fit into the palm of your hand; and a really beautiful prewar Spanish automatic, I think a .32-caliber gun, with a handsome brown bone handle that had a little recess in it with a sliding marker to indicate how many of your nine shots you had fired. This was the one I took to work that morning to oil with typewriter oil, because I had no decent gun oil at the residence.

  I also had a Luger-shaped air pistol that fired darts, and that gun became an issue later on. It’s a good thing I remembered to take the Spanish gun out of my pocket and leave it locked in my desk at the embassy when I went out for lunch, or there would have been a very big issue over guns—I am sure of that.

  Lunch was to be with Captain North, assistant military attaché at the Australian Legation. Bert North was a friend of the special kind you get only after you’ve had a fight with him. Before Mary and I started going together, North used to take her out, and after she left him for me he was jealous and aloof until one night at a cocktail party in the British Embassy residence, about a year before this. He got terribly plastered and invited me outside for a fight. As we started down the stairs, he lost his balance and fell and cut his head. I half-carried him into a washroom and started to wash the blood away, and he started to embrace me and said I was his best friend and he never really meant to hurt me and a lot of drunken and sentimental stuff like that. Afterwards we became quite good friends and saw a lot of each other, and the rivalry over Mary was forgotten.

  It is not easy to get good food in Moscow restaurants, but I was a specialist by now, and so was North, and we had agreed to meet at the Aragvi, a really fine Georgian restaurant on Gorky Street. It would be a twenty-minute walk for me. I left the embassy a few minutes after one. I walked out of the drive at the front of the building, and when the duty cop looked at me, I winked at him. “Catch another spy this morning?” I asked. He gave me a stony look and turned away.

  It was a bright, sunny day. The American Embassy was opposite the north wall of the Kremlin then, and as I crossed Gorky Street and looked to my right I could see the lines of people in front of the Lenin Mausoleum, and lots of strollers out in Red Square at lunchtime. There was no snow in the streets, although it was nearly Christmas. The colored domes of St. Basil’s were brilliant in the sunshine.

  I turned left along Gorky Street, threading my way through the crowds of people in front of the Council of Ministers building until I crossed the first street and started passing in front of the Diet Food Store, which is a high-class market. When I was just a young American kid scrounging the streets of Moscow during the war, a bomb fell near the Diet Store and people were lying all over this area, dead from the blast, with almost no visible injury—women, mostly, their string bags of cabbages and potatoes strewn about in the road. The woman cashier was sitting upright at the cash register, but her head was in the open cash-register drawer. I often thought of that grisly scene when I walked by the Diet Store, and I thought of it again that afternoon. But only for a moment, because shortly after I passed the store I heard someone call my name, loudly, from a short distance behind me.

  I realized he had called me several. times, and was half-running after me. But he called me Alexander Mikhaiovich, a distinctly Russian form of address, and nobody ever called me that, so I hadn’t paid much attention. Now he ran to catch me, and put his arms out as if to embrace me, and said in a much louder voice than made any sense for a guy two feet away, “Kiryukha [old buddy]! How wonderful to see you, it’s been such a long time!”

  I was completely mystified. I wondered if it was some nut. I had never see this tall, grinning, good-looking man before. I was sure of it.

  He kept talking loudly, and took me by the arm and pressed me toward the edge of the sidewalk, by the road.

  “Such a surprise, such a surprise, how wonderful we should meet again. Let’s just come over here out of the way of the people so we can talk!”

  I wondered if he was mad, with this crazy grin and loud voice. I said, “Look, you’re very much mistaken. I have never seen you befor
e in my life.” I was trying to free my arm without being rude. I still hadn’t caught on. I said, “Please, you’ve got me mixed up with someone else.”

  By now we were at the edge of the road. He dropped his voice and said, “No, I don’t think so. Your name is Alexander Doldzhin, isn’t that right?” Many Russians pronounced my name that way, as if it were dole-gin, like the drink, with the accent on the gin.

  I said, “That’s right, but who are you?” I was beginning to feel just a little uneasy. I don’t know to this day why I didn’t catch on faster and just start running. Especially after that dream.

  The tall man reached in his pocket and pulled out an ID card in a blue and red folder. I opened it. His photograph was on it, and the name Kharitonov, S. I., Major, Operative Detachment, MGB—the Ministry of State Security.

  I felt cold. But his manner was totally affable. He said, “Oh, don’t worry, it’s nothing important, we’d just like to talk to you for five minutes at the ministry.”

  I was going to get out of there. I pulled out my own ID card and said pretty brusquely, “Look, I am an employee of the United States Embassy. I am not allowed to talk to any Soviet officials without permission. I’m sorry.”

  Kharitonov took the card. “You’re the man,” he said quietly. I held out my hand for my card. He just stared at me and slowly dropped his hand to his side without returning the card. That gesture turned me to stone. It was like a curtain going down. I hesitated one fatal moment, thinking, I better get that card back. Then I knew I couldn’t and I tensed to run. I looked left for traffic on the street. I thought that he wouldn’t dare shoot with all those people. And then before I could move, my elbows were seized from behind, firmly, by two pairs of hands. The men attached to those hands moved in close. I was trapped.

  Kharitonov said in his broadcast voice again—for the benefit of the passers-by, I realized now—”Well! Here’s luck! Here comes my friend with his car. We can take a drive and have a little chat.”