An American in the Gulag

by Alexander Dolgun

  A beige Pobeda pulled up right beside me, its back doors already open. The man on my right said in my ear, “Be quiet, now. Don’t make any noise at all, please,” and before I could even think, let alone react, I was squeezed in the back of the car between the two of them.

  I looked wildly around me at the street. The scene photographed itself on my mind. The huge world clock on the Central Telegraph Office across the street said ten past one. Beside me, coming away from the Diet Food Store, I could see the lower part of a woman’s body, and the string bag full of potatoes that she carried. These bags are called avoski. Avoska is derived from a word meaning “perhaps.” In those days, and even now, most Russians carried an avoska because perhaps they would come across a food line where you could buy some bread or cabbage or potatoes. You never knew. Perhaps. As I think back, it is as if the woman were frozen, unmoving, although of course she was walking and I could see only her legs because of the roof of the car. A blue dress with white polka dots. The string bag was full of potatoes and a pair of women’s shoes, with the toes sticking out. For some reason or other this struck me as funny, and as we drove off I giggled.

  But at the same time I had an abrupt sensation of the termination of life.

  Kharitonov rode in the front seat and looked back at me. He spoke in a very soothing voice. He said we were just going to the ministry for a little talk. “Don’t worry,” he kept saying. “Five minutes, that’s all.”

  He was really smooth. For a moment I stopped worrying. I thought, Oh, for Christ’s sake, they’re going to make a pitch to me. Money, women, all that. They want me to be an agent. This is a recruiting job. That was the only thing that made sense.

  “Here we are,” announced Kharitonov. “Do you know what this is?” We had left Kuznetsky Most, cruised along Pushechnaya, turned into

  Dzerzhinsky Square, and out of it again at the southeast corner. I looked out the window of the Pobeda as we drew up by a huge, gray stone building. It was the Lubyanka prison, headquarters of the MGB.

  I said, “Sure I know. It’s the Government Terror. The place where you lose your mind.” Kharitonov laughed a dismissing, easy sort of laugh. Before the Revolution the prison was the Government Insurance Hotel. It was called Gos Strakh, for short. Strakhkassa means “insurance office.” But strakh, also means “fear” or “fright,” so for a while the prison was called Gos Strakh, the Government Fright.

  Then, after the purges, when it was constantly swallowing people who never reappeared, people began to call it Gos Uzhas: the Government Terror. It is an imposing building. It fills one whole side of Dzerzhinsky Square. I had been by it often. It is only minutes from the embassy. The great steel doors had always been shut. But now as we slowed down they began to slide open. It was like a movie. I thought, Wait till I tell the boys about this!

  The doors were on rails and slid sideways into the walls with a grinding sound. Then they closed behind us and the doors of the car opened and we were in a big central courtyard, deserted except for us, with Kharitonov very politely saying, “Look, don’t worry, this will just take a few minutes, please come this way,” in that soothing, reassuring voice of his. The smooth bastard. At the door, he stood aside politely for me to enter first, and then skipped in front of me to lead me along the hall. There was no one in sight and the other two guys had disappeared. My mind was running pretty fast now. I thought, If he’s trying something dirty he’s being damn polite about it. And then I thought, Sure, I’m right; they’re going to try setting something up: “A little information, Mr. Dolgun, that’s all, nothing harmful about it, and we’ll be very glad to see you’re well compensated for it.”

  We turned down a narrow side corridor. It was lined with doors strangely close together. Still walking swiftly and scarcely breaking the rhythm of his stride, Kharitonov opened one door and motioned me forward courteously. “This way, please,” he said pleasantly. I walked in, still moving as quickly as we had been all along the corridors, and then suddenly came to a halt. I was in a box about four by nine feet. An empty box with a bench. I spun around. “What the hell!” I said, really angry. But I said it to a door that was already shutting hard behind me. A door lined with iron, with a peephole in it. It shut with a clank. I thought, I don’t like that sound!

  The peephole opened immediately. I went right up to it. I said, “This isn’t funny, Major. Open up.” The peephole closed again, but not before I saw behind it a dark eye with dark eyebrows. Definitely not the light-skinned major. I waited to hear the bolt pulled back again. I guess I assumed the man was looking for the key or something. I waited as long as my patience could stand it, not very long. But longer than might seem reasonable.

  I was very excited. Whatever mixed and unlikely thoughts were racing through my head, all of them meant adventure and great stories to tell. Here I was actually inside the infamous Lubyanka. Lots of people told stories about Lubyanka, and lots more speculated about it. I was actually seeing it from the inside, the stronghold of the secret police of Soviet Russia, and no one else I had ever met could say the same. In fact I was giddy with excitement. I was flash-fantasizing all the things I would say when they put it to me that I should become an agent, flash-fantasizing how I would reveal to the world the sinister plans of the MGB for buying off Americans. Maybe I’d be a hero and go on tour in the States, see New York again, get back home. It literally never occurred to me that I was about to begin a prison term that might end with my death. I had no morbid thoughts at all, although of course my heart was beating fast and I was, in a sense, afraid. But afraid in the way you are before a big game: How will I do?

  I actually said to myself, “Well, here we come!”

  One thing: I knew it was something big and something important in my life.

  I supposed the guard with the dark eyebrows was going for Kharitonov. I turned around to look at the box I was in. The ceiling was high, almost three meters. The walls were brown up to shoulder height, then white-washed. Set in a recess over the door was a single bulb, screened by a heavy wire mesh. I looked back at the door. The peephole opened and closed again. Here they are, I thought, and waited for the door to open. Nothing. Silence. Then from somewhere close by a knocking sound and a muffled voice, pleading. The peephole closed. It was very hot in that box. Still nothing happened. I was getting furious. I pounded with my fists on the door and shouted, “Let me the hell out of this place! I’m an American citizen. I demand my rights. What the hell is going on here!”

  Immediately the bolt shot back. A man I had seen in the corridor just before I was shut in, a blue-chinned man with a bad complexion and heavy black eyebrows and a blue smock like a lab coat over his uniform, stepped quickly into the cell. He whispered, “Now, please! Be very quiet. It is not allowed to shout in here. There are others”—he indicated with his head toward the corridor, but I did not know what that was supposed to mean.

  But his manner was so easy and polite that it put me off stride for a moment.

  He went on in a whisper, almost confidential, as if he were respecting somebody else’s need for perfect silence, “Don’t worry, please. It will only be a moment.”

  He was like an attendant in a doctor’s office. Doctor will be with you in a moment, was what it was like.

  But then the knocking somewhere else in the corridor started up again, and a woman’s voice screaming out, “But there’s no one with my baby! What’s going to happen to my baby! Please! Please!” She was muffled by my door’s being shut again. That really slowed me down. Despite the heat I felt cold. I was going to knock and yell some more, but the door opened and the blue-chinned man said politely, “Will you come this way?”

  I thought, Okay, I’m sorry for that poor woman, but now whatever is going on with me is going to stop. I mean, they’ll see it’s a mistake, I’ll sweet-talk my way through this recruiting business in a minute, maybe I’ll even make it to the Aragvi Restaurant before North decides he’s been stood up.

  I remember the face of tha
t guard perfectly well. I saw him again years later when they brought me from camp for another interrogation, but he did not recognize me. Now he led me around a corner and motioned to another door. “Step in here.” This room was two meters by four, no window, brown walls with whitewash as before, and quite bare except for a table and a straight-backed chair. Now the guard’s manner changed. He was still polite in a noncommittal way, but there was no missing the absolute, quiet authority in his voice. The door behind us was locked. I looked up at him and thought of slugging him, but there was an eye at the peephole, and besides we were locked in.

  “What is this all about! Don’t you know you are dealing with a citizen of the United States of America! I want to know what’s going on.”

  “Be quiet,” he said. “Don’t worry, you’ll know soon enough. Now take everything out of your pockets and put it on the table.”

  I was going to protest and refuse, but one look at his face made it clear there was no point. Very quietly, as I took off my watch and put my money and cigarettes and lighter and pen and everything else on the table, I explained to him that what was happening was in violation of international agreements, that it was a very serious diplomatic mistake that would create very serious repercussions with the world’s greatest power. And then I stopped because I understood, really, that he was just a functionary and besides he was paying no attention and I could save my breath for someone with responsibility.

  He gathered up all my things and then said curtly, “Take off all your clothes and put them on the table.”

  I was licking my lips I was so mad. I knew I had to do it, but I still protested to his disappearing back. He did not turn; he left the room and the door was locked again.

  “Boy!” I said tightly, “Boy! Just wait. Just you wait!” All the time taking off my shoes and socks, my shirt, my pants, until I stood in the middle of the hot room in my shorts.

  I think I was there an hour before anyone came again. The peephole in the door opened quite regularly, and I decided to pretend I did not even notice. It may not have been that long, but my stomach was beginning to churn and the heat was getting me down and it seemed a long time. Then the door opened again, and the swarthy, blue-chinned guy in the smock and a man in a colonel’s uniform, MGB, came into the room. The colonel had a piece of paper.

  “This is a list of the property we are keeping for you,” he said. “My name is Colonel Mironov. I am the commandant of the inner prison. If you need to go to the toilet or would like a drink of water, just call the guard.” And he turned to go. I caught his arm but he pulled away and gave me a very hard look. Before I could ask all the questions that were welling up in me, he said simply, “Don’t worry”—their favorite phrase—”you’ll be fully informed very soon,” and went out.

  The swarthy guy pointed to my shorts. “Everything off,” he said. It was clear that he meant it. I sat down on the chair and began to pull them off. When I looked up he had my jacket spread on the table and was ripping the seams with a knife. I just stared: I knew there was no point but I said, “Just a minute, there, fella. That’s my good jacket.” He went on opening the seams as I knew he would. He felt inside the lining and the lapels. He ripped out the shoulder pads.

  Then he picked up my shoes and went at the soles with his knife. He pulled out the steel reinforcing shank and put the shoes back on the floor, the soles flapping. Then he took my tie and shoelaces and belt and knocked for the door to be opened. “Can I get dressed now?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  I sat on the chair. I said to myself, Boy, this is getting to be the big time. Will they be embarrassed when they find out what a screw-up this is!

  Then the door was unlocked again and a good-looking woman came into the room in a doctor’s white lab coat over a uniform, while the swarthy guard stood with his back to the open door, looking out into the corridor. The woman had an arrogant expression. I was trying to cover myself with my hands. I was terribly embarrassed. She had a clipboard and a pencil. She asked me if I had had tuberculosis, measles, malaria, scarlet fever, syphilis or gonorrhea (I was still composed enough to be insulted by this), diabetes, mental ailments, and so on. Then she walked up very close to me and told me to open my mouth. She examined behind my teeth and under my tongue. She turned my head and looked in my ears and nostrils. She looked under my eyelids. Then she told me to stretch out my hands with the fingers spread, and turn them over. She looked in my armpits. She made me roll back my foreskin, then lift my penis and my scrotum so she could examine behind them, although she did not touch me there. Then I had to turn around and bend over and spread my buttocks.

  She did not do an internal examination. “You can dress now,” she said flatly, and left the room.

  I was taken to a brightly lit room and photographed from three sides with an old camera with a lens cap the photographer removed instead of a shutter. Then fingerprinted. Then led to another room which to my real astonishment seemed to be, and turned out to be, a dentist’s office. Two guards stood by me, making it perfectly clear why they were there, and a man in a white lab coat opened my mouth and without a word drilled out a large filling from a molar.

  By now I was victimized within the routine of search and preparation. I was red with fury, but holding it because I knew perfectly well none of these men would respond to anything I could say, and if I tried any physical protest they would stop me physically. I knew that before long I would be brought face to face with The Man. I had no idea who that would be, but I knew that I would recognize his function when I met him. I stored up scorn, arrogance, assurance, fury, a whole catalogue to dump on this poor guy, who would not have his job very long when they discovered how wrong they were.

  A shower was next, too hot and no way to cool it down, and only a small bit of soap that smelled acrid and unpleasant. Somehow I knew I should take this shower seriously, so I used up most of the rotten-smelling soap and washed my whole body thoroughly, even though the shower was so hot it made me gasp. I was in very good physical shape at this time. My weight was 186, very trim, five feet nine and a half, thirty-two inches around the waist. My stomach muscles were hard from exercise, and my shoulders and biceps even harder. I was an amateur acrobat, very good at walking on my hands, played a lot of sports, boxed a bit, and for a couple of years I had been doing the Charles Atlas Dynamic Tension muscle-building course, although I had never been a ninety-seven-pound weakling, like the guy in the comic book ads.

  When I got dressed again after the shower, all I had left was my shoes, with the soles slit open and flapping as I walked, my light-gray navy surplus gabardine pants, good heavy material, my navy surplus shirt with epaulets and a hemmed slot in one of the two pockets, two packs of Chesterfield cigarettes, and fifty-three wooden matches. My comb had been taken, but it wouldn’t have been much use anyway, because the shower room had no mirror in it, and neither did the toilet when I asked to be taken there. In all the time I spent in prison in Moscow I never saw a mirror.

  Once, much later, I was taken into an officer’s toilet in Lubyanka and there was a large mirror on the wall, covered with a black cloth.

  After my shower I was taken over by another guard. I followed his black boots along the carpeted corridors till we came to an old cage elevator, very whiny and full of clanks and rattles, and went up about three floors. Then I remember a thick metal door with a barred window, and an officer who already had a file on me. This officer assigned a cell number to me and we moved off down the corridors again. During this trip, from the shower to my first cell, I became aware that I was, in fact, in a huge prison. I would catch glimpses of long gloomy corridors, lined with doors, each door with its peephole and food slot with a sliding metal panel. All the corridors were carpeted and almost the only sound as we moved along was the guard’s clucking of his tongue—the signal used in Lubyanka to let it be known that a prisoner was under escort. Between clucks I could hear the guard breathing through a stuffy nose. All those metal doors we
re gray, battleship gray, and the effect of the gloom and the silence and the gray doors repeating themselves down the corridors until they merged with the shadows was oppressive and discouraging.

  But I still could not take this thing seriously. I knew it was a mistake, and the question was, How soon would they find out their mistake and let me go? When we came around a corner and I was put into another windowless box I felt a bit nonplussed because I thought I was on my way to see someone in authority and get this thing straightened out.

  This box was about four meters long and one-and-a half wide. The ceiling was high and the air was hot. Along one side there was a narrow wooden bench. Above the door was an intense naked bulb, about 150 watts, I thought, in a heavy link-wire cage. The guard was closing the door when I said, “What happens now?”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “everything will be fine.” I walked up and down in the stifling cell.

  After a while I became completely parched in the heat under that glaring bulb, so I knocked on the door for the guard. The peephole opened immediately. I said, “I’m very thirsty. Please give me some water.” I remember that I was already modifying my tone and speaking quietly.

  He was back with the water in a moment. A pintsized metal mug. I drained it and took courage from the speed with which he had brought it, and asked for more. In a minute he was back with a refill.

  Ten minutes later my bladder began to feel pretty full. Up till now I had not felt any physical needs, no hunger, no toilet needs, nothing until the thirst hit. In fact I think I had gone a bit numb. I may have been more frightened than I like to think.

  Anyway, I knocked on the door again, and again the peephole opened immediately. “I need to go to the toilet.” The peephole closed and I heard the bolt being drawn back. The toilet was in a room across the hall, a trough urinal on the wall and a couple of holes in the floor with metal footplates for squatting over. The guard was new to me. I knew better, but I thought, what the hell, and on the way back to the cell I said quietly, “Listen, do you know what’s going on here? I’m completely mystified. I don’t know why I’m here.”