An American in the Gulag

by Alexander Dolgun

  He ducked his head and said in a whisper, “Don’t worry. It will be all taken care of soon. Don’t worry, now.”

  I said, “Well, I’d like another drink of water please.”

  He did not answer. He locked me in. In a moment the food slot opened and there was the metal mug again.

  Whenever I asked for the toilet I was taken immediately, without question. It is difficult to say how long this went on. It seemed to be more than a day, but I now know that it was not, that sometime in the evening of the day of my arrest they came to get me and take me for interrogation. No food was offered, but strangely I was not in the least hungry.

  The guard opened the door, finally, and told me to step out and to follow him with my hands behind my back. We went through several corridors. I began to feel a huge surge of excitement again. I was certain that this had to be the encounter that would explain everything and bring this fantasy to an end.

  We came to a corridor, with doors more widely spaced than in the cell corridors. The guard knocked lightly on one and opened it without waiting. Inside I was struck by a huge barred window with dark brown curtains. I could see that it was black night outside, though the curtains were closed. I was very curious about the passage of time and so I was staring at the curtains to get some sense of the outside world, when a voice said, “My name is Colonel Sidorov; I am your interrogator.”

  He was standing behind a very large desk on the far side of the room. There was a shaded lamp on the desk, and bright overhead lights that gleamed on his face. Sidorov was relatively tall, nearly six feet, with a kind of amused, easygoing, slightly cynical expression on a long face that would have been handsome except that it was covered with pockmarks, and I found it a bit hard to look at at first.

  “Sit down,” Sidorov said, motioning to my right. Opposite his desk there was a small wooden table with a hard chair behind it. About eight feet separated the table and the desk. I sat down and took stock of this man before I said anything. I had had enough time in the cell to get my anger under control, and I was determined to play this with as much control as possible. If they think they have me, I said to myself, they’ve got some surprises coming. The man I looked at was about thirty-seven or— eight. Trim and erect, with a lieutenant colonel’s two stars on his shoulder boards and a large dark-blue diamond-shaped pin on the lapel of his military jacket. He sat down behind the desk and opened a file and read for some time without speaking. I had time to see that there was, in addition to the lamp, a phone on the desk and a couple of signal buttons on a sort of electrical panel behind the desk. There were a couple of outlets in this panel, and one wire led to the desk.

  Sidorov read the file folder for a few minutes, looking up at me from time to time with this amused expression which put slight crinkles in his well-fed face. Pretty soon I felt I had the situation cased well enough. The next time he looked up with his cynical half-smile I smiled back and said, “Well, I’m glad to meet someone in authority at last, Colonel Sidorov, because it would be just as well to get this little mistake straightened out before someone gets really embarrassed.”

  Sidorov’s expression only changed a hair. His smile came a millimeter closer to a real smile. He held up a finger at me indicating that I should wait a minute, and went on reading.

  I said, “Look, I’m sorry to interrupt your reading, but I think you should hear what I have to say, don’t you?”

  He put down the files. He said, “Yes, yes! That is what we are here for. At least that is what I am here for. Do you know why we have brought you here?”

  “That’s the point,” I said calmly, still smiling at him to show how confident I was. “I’m here for no reason at all. There is no reason why I should be here and it will be very embarrassing for your government if I am not released right away. When the United States Embassy finds out..

  But Sidorov interrupted this speech with a wave of his hand. “Think!” he said sharply. Not angrily. He still had that amused look. More like an algebra teacher who knows you are just a whisker away from the right answer and wants to encourage you.

  “Think about it for a moment. Look, I’m sure if you can just think a little bit you’ll understand why you are here. Then you can tell me about it and I will be glad to, as you say, hear what you have to say.”

  I had a sudden idea. My accent in Russian was not too bad, but I let it slip a little below its normal level and said hesitatingly, “Maybe I am not understanding you very well. Could we get an interpreter? My Russian is not too good, I’m afraid.”

  Sidorov’s eyebrow went up for a moment. Then he stepped to the door and spoke to the guard. While we waited he read through the file folder, which was quite thick, nearly three inches, and pulled out a cigarette. I pulled my cigarettes out and said in halting Russian, “Would you like to try an American cigarette?”

  Sidorov hesitated a moment. He said, “Of course Russian cigarettes are much better” (which is definitely not true) “but just to be polite, yes, thank you.”

  I said, “I am sorry, sir, but I did not understand everything you said.”

  He just smiled and took the Chesterfield I offered him and lit mine and then his own.

  Quite soon a young junior lieutenant arrived with a stenographer’s notebook. Quickly, and in a more serious style, Sidorov told him to tell me I was charged with espionage against the Soviet Union. My face must have shown shock when I heard the words in Russian. But I waited for the interpreter. Then I said in English, pretty emotionally at first, “There’s been a terrible mistake! Tell him I’ve never engaged in any such activities. I’m a file clerk at the American Embassy, for heaven’s sake. He’s got the wrong man!”

  The interpreter’s English was not really up to the task. With a strong Ukrainian accent, he translated this as “There has been a terrible mistake. I always engaged in such activities with a file clerk at the American Embassy. He is the wrong man.”

  I was furious at this stupidity. I yelled at Sidorov in Russian, “No, no, for Christ’s sake. This guy’s no good. I said I’ve never engaged in any such activities! I…” Then I realized I had trapped myself. I think I even spoke Russian better than this Ukrainian kid who was supposed to be an interpreter.

  Sidorov smiled quite a broad smile this time, showing a good deal of gold. He nodded a dismissal at the junior lieutenant. “Vsye,” he said. “That’s all.” And the kid left the room.

  “Let’s not waste any more time, Citizen Doldzhin,” he said easily, still smiling. “You say we have made a mistake. I tell you we never make mistakes. You say you have never engaged in any espionage activities. I tell you that we can prove it very easily.” He picked up the file. Then I saw it was really two soft-backed file folders, one on top of the other.

  He said, “It’s in here. Places, dates, names of accomplices. All here. We have quite a file on you. Really! It’s quite a file. So don’t worry.” (Again!) “Don’t worry about its being a mistake!”

  Then he leaned over the desk and looked at me very sternly and said in a very quiet voice, “The MGB does not make mistakes, my friend. We Never Make Mistakes.”

  He thrust a piece of paper at me. It had an official stamp on it. It was an order for my arrest. It stated that under Article 58, sections 6, 8, 10, etc. of the Soviet Criminal Code I was charged with espionage, political terrorism, anti-Soviet propaganda, etc., etc. But the most impressive single thing about this document was the signature: Rudenko.

  General Roman Rudenko was the chief prosecutor of the Soviet Union. I was shaken, and yet impressed with my importance at being charged by the top brass. It began to look both preposterous and serious to me. I wondered if the embassy knew what had happened to me. They must have missed me by now.

  “I would like to make a telephone call,” I said. Sidorov smiled a tolerant smile, and shook his head.

  “Look here,” I said loudly. “In my country even a common criminal is allowed to telephone his lawyer. I want to phone the embassy and get a representative
over here! I want..

  “It really does not matter very much what you want now,” Sidorov said paternally. “You should have thought about that before you undertook to be a spy in my country. Because that is no common crime, and you do not have the privileges of a common criminal.

  “However,” he went on, still in an easygoing way, “maybe something can be done about that in the morning. It is too late to call there now, and I am required to get some basic information from you.”

  I took a big breath. I guessed I might as well resign myself to a night in Lubyanka. Besides it would make a better story: How I Was Interrogated by the MGB. I said, Cheer up, Alex, old buddy. They’ll be here to get you in the morning. Might as well enjoy it while you can. I nodded my assent to Sidorov.

  “Where were you born?”

  “New York City. East 110th Street.”

  “How did you get to the Soviet Union?”

  “My father came here in the thirties on contract as a specialist at the Moscow Automotive Works. Later he brought the family over. He was drafted into your army during the war, and. I got a job at the American Embassy. That’s all. I’m going to get married soon and go back to the States.”

  Sidorov wrote all this down. At the last he said, “Yes, we know quite a bit about your relations with women here in Moscow, but I think that your marriage seems pretty unlikely now, wouldn’t you agree?”

  I found myself wondering again if this was just a setup for an approach about doing some work for them. Get the candidate thoroughly intimidated and then suggest that there is a way out if he will be cooperative. It made me madder still to think this might be in their minds. I began to harden myself to deal as coolly and in as controlled a way as I could with whatever they threw at me, and never to get mad again as I had with the interpreter. Stay on top, I thought. So instead of bridling at his taunt about marriage, I just smiled and waited for the next question.

  He kept me at it all night. Everything he asked I answered fully and easily. It was all straightforward biographical stuff about school and friends and family and where we lived and so on. There was nothing to conceal and I thought it would make life easier until the embassy representative arrived if I just went along with this craziness.

  I knew a lot of time was going by, but I was surprised all the same when I could hear doors opening up and down the corridor and caught a few muffled remarks from guards moving by to indicate that it was morning. There was still no light through the curtains, but in Moscow, close to the longest night in the year, it is still dark until seven o’clock at least. Sidorov came over to my, table with the paper he had been writing on and said, “Please read these protocols, and if they are correct, please sign at the bottom of each sheet.”

  I said, “What the hell is a protocol?”

  “This is what we call the original notes I as an interrogator make on the interrogation. We can then refer to them later, as the weeks go by ...” He paused to let this take effect. “To see if you are consistent and so on. You sign to show your agreement that the notes reflect our conversation accurately. You see, we intend to be perfectly fair and straightforward in this procedure.”

  I read the notes. I thought, You bastard, you’re trying to scare me. I won’t let you, I signed the notes with a signature that bore no relation to my own except that it said Alexander Dolgun, in English script, which is, of course, opaque to a Russian who knows only the Cyrillic alphabet and the Russian script. Sidorov scarcely glanced at the signature. He went back to his desk, pressed the button for the guard, and picked up his tunic from the back of the chair.

  The guard opened the door and took me back through the maze of corridors to the cell and locked me in. I suddenly felt exhausted. I had only been in bed about three hours the night before. I wondered what Mary had done when I did not show up for the opera. It was Prince Igor. I wondered why the embassy had not got through to me by now. There had been a touch of reassurance in Sidorov’s tone when he talked about perhaps making a telephone call in the morning.

  . I stretched out on my side on the narrow wooden bench and put my head on my arm and closed my eyes, thinking I might as well sleep until something happened. I yawned hugely. My eyes were burning a bit. I managed to get into a comfortable position, at least a position less uncomfortable than sitting on a hard chair. I yawned and yawned. Then I became aware of my heart beating. It seemed to be fast and hard. I felt surges of anger rise up, and then I would get them under control..

  “Calm down!” I kept saying. “Relax! We’ll get this all cleared up in the morning.”

  But I believe that even at this early stage there must have been some deep, lurking suspicion in a distant part of my mind that I was kidding myself, that things were worse than I would allow myself to be conscious of. In any case, that blessed mechanism that finally releases you from the day and lets you sleep just did not work, that first morning in the Lubyanka. And in the end I gave it up and spent the next few hours striding up and down in my cell, going all over it again in my mind.

  Chapter 3

  The second day in the Lubyanka began with a sort of quiet commotion in the corridor outside my cell. The sounds were muffled because of the carpeting, but I could hear some footsteps and hushed voices and the sounds of the bars of the food slots going back, and soon my own went back and a mug of hot tea and a loaf of bread were placed on the shelf inside.

  In Lubyanka they serve a complete loaf. It is small, dense, rectangular, and, by comparison with that served in other prisons, quite tasty. On top of the loaf were two pieces of sugar—one whole lump and a half lump. The tea was not real tea. It was colored water with a very faint smell of some leaf substance to it.

  Although I had not eaten since breakfast the previous day my stomach was tight and I was not hungry at all. I put the sugar in the “tea” and drank it slowly and pondered my situation. I looked at the bread and thought it did not look very appetizing and that soon I would be eating bacon and eggs or steak at the embassy and I could do without that crap.

  An hour went by and then another. I stretched out on my side on the narrow bench and tried without success to doze off. Then I paced up and down again, beginning to get a bit resentful at the embassy for not having gotten me out of this mess by now. After a while I knocked on the door and asked for the toilet. I squatted over the hole in the floor and was relieved to find I was functioning all right. Then about half an hour after I got back to the cell the door opened again, and a guard. I had not seen the day before took me along the corridors, cluck-clucking as we went, and left me again with Colonel Sidorov.

  I was astonished at how fresh he looked. I thought he could not have had more than four or five hours sleep, even if he stayed in the Lubyanka. He, had shaved and had a clean shirt, whereas I had slept, or tried to, in mine, had not washed, felt the stubble on my face, which I hated because I always shaved very meticulously, smelled my armpits pretty strongly, and had a powerful desire to brush my teeth.

  His manner was still quite straightforward and he still had that amused look. He said—we would go on with the biographical details. I asked about the phone call, but he put me off. He asked about my sister, Stella, who had left Russia two years before, and about our passports and all kinds of simple stuff that puzzled me because I figured the MGB must know it all.

  Now for some reason this second day of interrogation is less clear in my mind than what happened afterward. It is a jumble of questions of the most ordinary kind of family stuff. Where were my parents born? What relatives did I have in the United States? Where did they live? Etc., etc., etc. I answered it all. Sidorov kept on writing everything out in longhand. We worked at it all day. I remember seeing the light fade behind the curtains, along about what must have been four in the afternoon or four thirty. We did not get through very much material. He had to write it out, and then he would bring it over to me to sign from time to time. It was a slow process.

  In the middle of the day sometime he just got up abruptly and
left the room. I was taken to the toilet and then came back and sat restlessly in the room while the guard leaned on Sidorov’s desk and watched me impassively. I know that I was in quite a puzzled state of mind. I was still certain that someone would come for me soon, but I could not understand the delay. I determined to play a waiting game for at least another twenty-four hours, if that proved necessary, before... Well, before what? What could I do? Until the embassy came to get me out, I had to play out this dumb game of Sidorov’s. Except that, of course, sooner or later he would get to the point in his questioning, and presumably it was then that we’d start destroying this crap about my being a spy. I thought, Well, if he doesn’t get to the meat and potatoes by tomorrow morning, I’ll press the issue then. No point getting him mad sooner than I have to. And I may not have to.

  When I went back to the cell, shortly after it got dark, there was a plate of cold soup on the food slot shelf, and shortly after I was locked in they brought some thin hot porridge and another cup of so-called tea. I drank the tea. That was all. Still no appetite. And still no ability to sleep, although by now I was feeling really ragged. Beat. And then, to my astonishment, around nine thirty or ten—although I was guessing because I never saw a timepiece of any kind—they took me back to Sidorov.

  I had gone through the first pack of Chesterfields. Then, although I was nervous and wanted to smoke a lot, I thought I’d better ration them to myself. I smoked during the sessions with Sidorov, but I never offered him any more of my Chesterfields. My mouth felt really foul now, and I was beginning to smell pretty bad, because the temperature in my cell was quite high and I had had no chance to wash myself. Sidorov looked fresh, again, and must have slept between five or six o’clock, when we quit, and whatever time of night it was now.