An American in the Gulag

by Alexander Dolgun

  Down a hall, into the interrogation room. Sidorov is smiling. Good. “There is a letter from your embassy,” he said.

  “I knew it! That’s wonderful!” I reached out for it. Sidorov’s manner changed sharply, and he withdrew the letter from me. “It’s nothing but a formal note of protest,” he said. “They know nothing and they are not going to know anything. They wonder if we would be able to inform them. Hah!”

  I was thunderstruck. I probably went a bit pale.

  Then something happened; a light went on; I said to myself, He’s playing with you, Alex. Don’t let him get to you. Get him!

  I said out loud, “Well, of course you don’t dare show it to me’!—I smiled broadly—“because they are about to bring about my release through higher circles and you will be embarrassed. Don’t worry.” (I enjoyed saying that, I savored the words!) “Don’t worry. It will all be over soon.”

  Sidorov was a tough guy. He looked at me with that cynical spark of his. I thought there might have been a bit of admiration in his look. Then his face darkened and he snapped. “Fuck your embassy. That’s all you are going to hear from them.

  That’s the end of it. That’s all they are good for. You are going to be here for the rest of your life, do you understand that? And even if we let you out some day, you will always be in the beam of our searchlight. It’s forever, now, prisoner. So don’t tease yourself with any dreams about help from your stupid embassy, because they can’t do anything!”

  He walked around to the back of his desk and turned away from me to let this sink in. It sank in all right. I felt terrible. Cold. Sick. But at the same time I knew he was putting on an act. I knew he was probably lying (though as it turned out he was not lying), and I knew that at all costs I must not let this act work. If he was the magician, I was going to be the kid who had his eyes on the left hand dipping into the pocket when all the other kids were watching the right hand that was supposed to have the watch and the ring in it. When he turned around again, I was smiling.

  “Well,” I said brightly, “let’s get to work then!”

  Chapter 4

  If I had known how hard that work would be I might not have been so bright. I came back to my cell from that first day, almost desperate to pick up my sleep where it had been interrupted. But when I lay down, the slot banged open immediately and the guard said, “Prisoner, you will not lie down until ten o’clock. Sit up and face the door!” By what I guessed was nine o’clock I was yawning uncontrollably. I wondered if I could last the hour. Then the slot banged open. “Prepare for interrogation!”

  I could not believe it! I raged at Sidorov when he came in. I yelled that he could not expect me to remember anything if I could not rest my brain. He heard me out with a cynical smile, and then went on with his questions. I realized that those first night-and-day grillings in the Lubyanka had been just an opening blitz. This was going to continue for ... for how long? I knew, numbly, that I was launched on the most, terrific endurance test of my life. And I made a resolution. I stared at Sidorov and said to him, silently, with a deep, deep anger, “I won’t break before you do, you bastard!”

  The secret police in the Soviet Union are known as Organi—”the Organs.” There is a faint sexual implication in the word, although they use it themselves. It is part of the national slang. As such, however, it is not a word that carries any laughs with it, except in the occasional black joke. The Organs and all they stand for, whether referred to that way or by their initials as they changed over the decades OGPU, NKVD, MGB, finally KGB—are a symbol of repression of such magnitude in the Soviet Union that the sight of their uniform with its purple stripes, the mention of a rap on the door in the middle of the night (“It was the Organs, you know”), or any actual encounter with the police themselves seems to take the will to resist right out of most Soviet citizens, and I guess to some extent that is what happened to me too, at the moment I was arrested.

  Kidnapped is a better word. When regular police arrest you, they don’t need to hide what they’re doing. They have the law and the general support of the people with them, and they can openly say, “You’re under arrest, charged with so and so,” and that’s it. But these people never did tell me I was arrested. “Come for a five-minute chat,” they said.

  And yet I knew what was happening; at least I knew part of it. Not all. No idea how much of my life was in jeopardy. Solzhenitsyn writes about the “rabbits” all over Russia. The ones who never protested. “What’s the matter with us?” he wonders in his Gulag Archipelago—a nation-state I came to know pretty well. “Why didn’t we rise up and resist?”

  Well, I think I know why not. It is because there is no legitimacy to the KGB and all its preceding versions .1n our American society, the fact that something is illegitimate makes it automatically less impressive. But an illegitimate body that is really big and powerful is much more effective in its mass and its capacity to frighten millions of people than a legitimate body. Because it is illegitimate, it doesn’t answer to anything recognizable, only to the whims and appetites of its masters; and its masters are always shadowy, indistinct people, or myths like Stalin, so huge that they have infinite power and are not answerable to any law or system or anybody.

  People adored Stalin. People want to love infinite power so that it will love them back. People knew that under Stalin millions disappeared in the middle of the night, but most of them said, “It must be for the best.” My wife’s mother was married to a KGB officer. When she first heard my story, she said privately to Irene, even though she hated her husband and had been deserted by him years before. “Well, Alex must have done something terrible or they never would have taken him!” It took her a long time to see things differently.

  I knew a pilot in the Soviet Air-Force. Peter Bekhtemirov. I met him in camp.

  He adored Stalin. One night he had had a terrible dream: The Leader had died. Bekhtemirov woke up with tears streaming down his face. He awakened his wife and told her that he had just had the most terrible dream, that Iosif Vissarionovich was dead. He shook with sobs. When he went to the base that day, he was still haunted by the grief of that dream. He confided to some of his fellow pilots what he had dreamed and how it had distressed him. One of the pilots gave him away, and the MGB charged him with an attempt to assassinate Stalin (political terrorism); a second charge was “an attempt to see an anti-Soviet dream.” He got twenty-five years. His wife got ten for not denouncing him. Nobody believes me when I tell them this, but I know it to be true.

  Anyway, the fact that the secret police can and do commit such incredible acts against rationality and humanity gives them overwhelming psychological force in Soviet streets and houses. When the hand of a secret police officer closes on your arm, it is like the hand of an evil god who needs no excuse. And you don’t resist.

  Now, after a few days with Sidorov, during which I spent as much time as I could complaining about the food and the lack of sleep, but always in as cocky a way as I could muster, and he went over and over the basic elements of my biography to see if they were consistent and to see if he could trip me up and discover if I was hiding anything, we began to get down to business. In the last days of the first week, when I thought I would die if I did not get some sleep pretty soon, he would say, “Listen, we know what you were up to. For example, you were employed as a clerk, chief clerk in the file room of the consular section, is that what you said?”

  I said, “Of course, you know all that.”

  “Good. That is correct. We know everything about you, as you will see. Now, a clerk is a very junior position. A clerk does not get invited to parties as the private guest of charges d’affaires, or to dinners at major embassies. But we have dates in here”—he slaps the folders with the back of his hand, always with the back of his hand—“of your dinner at the Australian Legation.”

  “The assistant military attaché is a good buddy, of mine. You see, I stole his girlfriend away from him, and—”

  “The assistan
t military attaché! Indeed. A young clerk is an intimate friend of the assistant military attaché! That is a bit unusual, wouldn’t you agree? Now look here. On this date, you had a private dinner with the Syrian chargé d’affaires, Mr. Baba. The chargé d’aflaires! Would you say that was normal? And here you are at dinner at the Canadian Embassy, and here at the Belgian, and here at the French? A junior clerk? Can I take this seriously? Can you still maintain you were not in fact being prepared for a very special mission? We know that you were. You might as well save a lot of time and start to tell me about it.”

  I would hold out my hand for the folders. “Show me some of this crap,” I’d say. “Let me see all this so-called proof. Let me see what you’re basing all this on!”

  But he would pull it away and say, “No, of course not! This is all operative material. You certainly can’t look at it.”

  I would just smile a sort of simple smile, and say, “Okay,” as if to say, If I can’t see it, I can’t tell you anything.

  He knew the name of every girl I had ever taken out. Most of my girlfriends had been Russian girls, and now I think most of them were in the MGB, or maybe it is more accurate to say they reported to the MGB and were probably pretty much under their thumb.

  I had had a very good time in Moscow after the war. The Russian girls were attracted to Americans. To begin with, we were the great allies, and then we had lots of good cigarettes and we could get nylon stockings and we had money to spend and we liked a good time. It was amazing how many of these good times Sidorov knew about, and amazing how many trivial incidents he could convert into some aspect of my alleged anti Soviet activities.

  There was a diamond buyer from New York who took me out to dinner once. I knew fur buyers and diamond buyers, and they knew each other, and they all had money to spend, and I enjoyed being taken to the good restaurants that I knew about and having them pick up the tab. And I enjoyed talk about America because I planned to go home soon and I wanted to hear all those little bits of gossip and street talk and the kind of stuff you don’t get in the papers and in Time magazine. Anyway, this man from New York, an older man, suggested that we have dinner at the Metropole Hotel, off Red Square, not far from the embassy, and that I should bring a couple of whores. “Nothing serious,” he said. “I’d just like some female company.”

  I checked around, I remember, and found that there was a sort of exchange for prostitutes in Moscow (where prostitution is still an active occupation to this day), and it was easy to make contact and the price would be, for example, fifty rubles at her place, forty at yours. And so on.

  So I got hold of a couple of girls, told them it might not amount to much but they’d get a good dinner and I’d see they at least got a tip. And they were good sports and we actually had quite a few laughs and a fair dinner, because the Metropole was classy but the food in the big hotels was never that good.

  The girls went to the ladies’ room, and Harry the diamond buyer asked me while they were gone if it was safe to take them upstairs, because he wondered if they might be MGB. I said I didn’t know. Anybody might be reporting to the MGB. But lots of people took whores to their rooms and got away with it, as far as I knew. In any case, I wasn’t interested so it was up to him. And that was all.

  Except that the conversation was recorded by a hidden microphone. Sidorov had a transcript of it, and finally made direct references to it, accusing me of trying to reveal the identity of MGB operatives!

  I am not sure that was the first piece of—concrete evidence that he laid before me, but it was one of the most ludicrous, and to give him credit I think he felt a bit sheepish about it, or maybe he was just using it to confuse me. In any case, he changed the subject pretty quickly.

  I said to him, “Anyway, your operatives are clumsy and obvious. They were following me and everybody else in the embassy all the time. We always knew it and I always knew how to give them the slip. You think you know everything about me, but there is plenty you don’t know. It has nothing to do with espionage, but you really ought to train your operatives a little better!”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sidorov said, showing a slight flush of irritation.

  I said, “Okay, I’ll tell you. I leave the embassy for lunch, right? Or to do an errand? Or to go out for the evening? A plainclothesman in the street follows me to the corner and stays with me till I start down whatever street I’m going. Now, he doesn’t want me to know I’ve got a tail, right? So he drops behind, picks up a phone and calls the booth a couple of corners ahead. ‘Watch for a blond young man, one meter eighty, eighty-five kilos. U. S. Embassy.’ Or something like that, right? So I’m supposed to think I’ve lost the tail because there’s nobody behind me. The tail is in the front now. Am I right?”

  Sidorov did not say a word. Just stared at me with those cynical gray eyes.

  I said, “Only I caught on and started watching the phone booths ahead, and as soon as I saw a guy in the phone booth a couple of blocks away I’d wait just long enough so that the guy behind had dropped off, and then I’d turn down a side street, or go into a shop and double back. I could always lose them if I wanted to.”

  I smiled at Sidorov. To my surprise he smiled back. “Please go on,” he said a bit tightly. “This is very interesting.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Your people were always annoying me when I took an embassy car out at night. They followed me around and made the lady I was escorting feel very uncomfortable.”

  Sidorov shook his head.

  “You don’t believe I knew?” I said. “Okay. M6-3839. M6-5514. M3-7921. Do you know what those are?” (I was making those up; in fact I had memorized license numbers whenever the MGB cars followed me at night, but I only remembered one now, because it had turned up several times.)

  “Look,” I said, “if you don’t believe me, write this down. M7-2895. Check it out. See if it’s not one of your cars.”

  Sidorov looked at me for a long time, quite seriously. He wrote the number down. He got up and walked around for a while and thought about it.

  I resisted the impulse to brag in detail about how I lost a car that was following me. I might want to use the same techniques later, I thought. The block between the Bolshoi and a branch of the Moscow Art Theater was honeycombed with intricately connected courtyards, opening onto the street and to each other through narrow archways. I had studied these yards and knew every possibility. I could lead a tail down Petrovka Street, going away from the Bolshoi, and before I got to the corner of Petrovsky Lane, where the theater is, I would suddenly wheel left into an archway. It was dark in there and slow going if you weren’t absolutely sure of yourself. I would turn off the lights because I didn’t need them. My followers would find themselves in alleys too narrow to go through. I would jerk left or right and end up going back onto Petrovka through another arch, going the opposite way, or right through the block and out onto Pushkin, or zig and zag to make up the turns necessary to put me out on Petrovsky opposite the theater, while my pursuers were probably still backing out of some cul-de-sac. I compressed this into one sentence and just told Sidorov, “While you’re checking, ask him if he was ever able to stay on my tail: then you’ll know if he’s honest or not, because he never could.” Sidorov tried to get the upper hand back. He said loftily, “Of course all of this is known to us. I was just waiting until you would admit it, I knew you would and you have. But since you have admitted all o these incriminating things, why not admit that you were engaged in espionage?”

  “There’s nothing incriminating about giving your guys the slip. They were annoying me. I was trying to have a nice time with a girl. You can’t feel relaxed with a girl when there is a car full of MGB following you all the time.”

  “And why not, if you have nothing to hide?”

  “Do you like being followed when you’re out with girl?”

  Sidorov’s smile dropped. He knew I had overheard him talking to his mistress on the phone in the interrogation room. He used
to phone her almost every day—sometimes to say he’d be working that night, sometimes to make a rendezvous. I am sure he never thought I’d be audacious enough to make even this kind of oblique reference to it. He sat there staring at me with his hands on his desk. Then he unlocked his drawer and pulled out a Tokarev revolver and placed it on the desk pointing at me. This must have been a night session. He would never have done that in the daytime.

  He got up and walked to my left, to the far corner of the room, holding the gun very lightly, but always pointing the barrel at me.

  He said, “I don’t think you understand your situation, you stupid son of a bitch. If I wanted to take you out right now and put you up against the wall, that would be it. I may do that. Unless you stop being so stupid. You’re so stupid you keep giving yourself away and you don’t even know it. This business of the cars. Every time you wanted a car you took it. Just took it! Do you think I don’t know that a junior employee can’t do that sort of thing? Do you think I am blind?!!”

  There was no point in explaining a thing like this, because a Russian with Sidorov’s experience would never be able to understand the attitude of an Amen can kid who just takes the old man’s car if the keys are in it and he knows he won’t get into trouble because nobody bothers to check on such things. There were always half a dozen cars in the embassy yard. A couple of new Dodges with their fancy postwar crosshatch grilles and a beige Studebaker unlike any car I’d ever seen before, with the cab sitting on top of the body instead of being part of it and windows all around. And if I wanted a car, I just climbed in and gave the guy at the gate a wave as if I had an assignment. A car made even a drab, heavy city like Moscow a lot of fun to be in. To Sidorov, cars went with authority and official business. It was simply not comprehensible that you would use them for playing around. Unless you were somebody very highly placed.