An American in the Gulag

by Alexander Dolgun

  One day during the second week he turned up with the checkbook from my New York bank. It had been in my jacket pocket. He asked me how much was in my account and before I thought better of it I told him it was all my savings, but I did not tell him how much. In fact it was, as far as I can recall, well over a thousand dollars. He pointed out, in an imitation affability that was almost slimy, that the food was so bad in Lefortovo that I would be much better off if I could buy special food. He said he could arrange it if I would sign all the checks. I asked why I should sign all the checks and he said that was so he could withdraw small amounts on my behalf from time to time and not risk keeping a large amount of money around. I did not believe him at all, and perhaps he did not expect me to. Anyway, I think before he brought out the checkbook I had been getting a bit tired of the different-signature-every-time game, but now I resolved never to sign anything with a legitimate signature, and of course I refused to sign the checks.

  Again, characteristic of the day and night swing, he took that easily enough in the daytime and abused me about it at night.

  The serious part of the interrogations began to focus on my acquaintance with military personnel. He kept stressing my friendship with Captain North and my acquaintance with other embassy military people, as if that proved something. And after a while he began to suggest that I was well acquainted with a good many Soviet officers too, wasn’t I? I said that the only other contact of any significance had been when everyone was getting drunker than hell on the night Victory in Europe was declared and some Soviet Navy officers invited us to drink with them in the bar of the Metropole. Which of course we did. Sidorov seemed interested in that, and went on to suggest that I had made some very interesting military contacts, knew at least one man very well indeed, and had tried to do some recruiting.

  “We know it all, you know,” he would say, always slapping the hand-sewn files with the back of his hand. “If you do not admit it, you will be in very serious trouble. Now think about it.”

  I would, of course, deny it.

  He would then go into some other area for a while, but after a pause or a meal break for him, while I was kept awake by an officious guard, he often reopened with, “Now, I’m going to give you one more chance to tell me about your attempt to recruit a certain Soviet officer into your, espionage network,” or something like that, always working toward the idea of an individual. I was puzzled by this because from the way he put the questions I knew he was doing something more than just fishing. He had something on his mind. There must have been some event that he had in mind and was distorting, either purposefully or because he believed that it would lead somewhere. And for a long time I was at a complete loss. I just could not think what he was getting at. Then I had a sudden memory of an event that would be very hard to explain, was in fact partly illegal, had brought me what seemed at the time precariously close to the MGB, and for reasons I still can’t understand had dropped completely out of my mind. I had to do some fast thinking. Up to now I had told Sidorov the truth about everything. If he knew the details of this event and I lied about it or denied it, then it would seem worse than it really was. If I told him all about it and he didn’t already know, then I’d be giving something away unnecessarily. I decided to play for time. I had to think it over very carefully. What had suddenly surfaced in my memory was a trip I had made in the summer of 1946. In the course of it I was caught trespassing, with a pistol in my possession, on the grounds of the dacha of the party secretary of the Ukraine. The man I had gone to visit in the Ukraine was a former friend of my father’s, named Michael Kovko. The name of the party boss of the Ukraine, in those days, was Nikita S. Khrushchev.

  Chapter 7

  Michael Kovko was a Ukrainian who had worked with my father in New York in the twenties and gone back to the Soviet Union in 1929. During the Second World War he was badly wounded and was sent back to Moscow as chief of trophy arms, or something like that. He stayed in the army and because he was an expert on cars and trucks, he was sent to Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, to run various peacetime transport pools and look after the maintenance.

  Somehow, in 1945, Michael Kovko found out my father was in Moscow and came to see him. He was a captain by then. We all met at my father’s apartment and had dinner and talked about New York. After that he visited my father fairly often, and I saw him several more times. He was very strongly impressed with my working for the American Embassy. I’m not sure exactly why, but he looked on me with some exaggerated respect. We took a liking to each other. He was only visiting in Moscow for a few weeks. He said several times, “Why don’t you come and visit sometime?

  Meet my wife and my children, see the Ukraine,” etc., etc. Very sincere, I thought at the time, and I resolved to do it if the chance ever came.

  When Michael Kovko left Moscow to go home to Kiev, I forgot all about him for the time being. But in 1946, with this crazy optimism beginning to blow up all over the city, I thought of Michael Kovko one day and decided, just like that, very impulsively, that I would go and see him when I got some time off from the embassy.

  My current girlfriend thought it was a great idea for an adventure. Her name was Dina; she was a graduate of the Moscow Foreign Languages Institute, and very bright and ready for anything. Dina was my first lover and while I was not in love with her the way I later came to feel about Mary, I had a terrific time while we were together and I will always remember her—with certain mixed feelings, as will become clear later.

  To travel in the Soviet Union at that time you had to have an official permit for each particular trip, and even Soviet nationals had a hard time getting them, to say nothing of foreigners who had no pressing reason to travel. I thought, what the hell, I’ve never seen any other part of Russia, I want to go, and I’ll do it without a permit, somehow. Dina was all for this. She backed me up. So I started going to the railway stations to look at timetables and watch and listen and see what I could pick up. The stations were packed with people and bundles. Soldiers, mostly, but all kinds of other people, most of them poorly dressed with their belongings wrapped up in rags. You seldom saw a trunk or suitcase. A lot of people were sleeping on benches or even on the floor. Whole families would be huddled together. I saw mothers passing out some pretty meager rations of black bread and cabbage and stuff to their kids. I saw people dressed in clothes from all over the Soviet Union—not fancy national costumes, of course, but you could tell that you were in the center of a huge cultural way-station, from the mixture of clothes and faces and from the dialects and languages you heard spoken.

  I started talking with people casually, letting on I was about to go on a trip. I even tried to brazen my way through the ticket office to see if I could lie about a permit and pick up a ticket, because Russians are very sloppy about their bureaucracy, and there are lots of mistakes and slip-ups. But I never got anywhere that way.

  However, I did learn that a good many people were traveling without permits, and that the way to make arrangements was to find a sympathetic-looking trainman or conductor and offer him a few rubles to fix you up. I was brash enough to just go around the station accosting conductors, until I found a guy who was very easygoing about it and said sure, he could get me on a train, it would cost me a few rubles, etc., etc., and he’d look after me very well.

  But he warned me I’d better bring my own food because food was scarce and rationed. I would not be able to get food on the train.

  Dina and I were immediately excited. It had taken me more than a month to work it all out, find the right trains and the right station and all the other details, and now we had it, and I claimed my leave, and we got set to go. I packed a big suitcase with clothes and food—canned bacon and fruit and other heavy things, and a bottle of whiskey. I decided to take my two pistols with me in case we got to go into the countryside where I could do some shooting. Dina lived in a small room of her own, and early in the day on the tenth of July, I took a car from the embassy and brought all this stuf
f to Dina’s place. Then I returned the car and went back to Dina’s on the bus. I was careful to give the MGB the slip when I was out, with the car. They were pretty close behind me going down Petrovka Street, and then I whipped into one of my courtyards, faked a turn back onto Petrovsky Lane through another archway, and when they started out through an earlier archway, as I was sure they would, I whipped right around and backed out into Pushkin Street on the other side of the block. I took a good look to see there was no MGB in sight and headed off for Dina’s, in the clear as far as I could see. I knew those blocks perfectly because I had lived near there for a while during the war and I had been all over them on foot.

  The conductor had told us how to get into the rail yards by a back way, and had set a time to meet him on the loading platform, a long way from the station proper. There were always cars going around Moscow with government drivers in them, alone, between errands or chauffeuring officials somewhere, and you stood a good chance of being able to bribe one of these poorly paid drivers to take you almost anywhere in the city, so that’s what we did. I was naive enough not even to worry, at this point, about the MGB, although the driver I flagged could just as well have been an MGB as a civil-service driver, for all I knew. The agreement with the conductor was 200 rubles when we shook hands on the deal, and another 300 when he got us on the train. I was sure he would keep his end of the bargain, because 500 rubles was a very good tip to a Russian workingman in those days, but it was not too hard at all for me to put that much by because I had no expenses and a very good salary. I overestimated his honesty and his good will, though. He promised me a good coach and ended up shoving us on a cattle car. I yelled “What about your promise!” and so on, but he just kept shoving us on and shouting that the train was about to pull out (it was after dark, about ten or ten thirty at night), and sure enough the whole long train shuddered with a long, reverberating rattle the way they do and we could hear the engine huffing and puffing and the cattle car was already pretty heavily populated. “Take it or leave it!” the conductor shouted. We went ahead and climbed on. It was all part of the adventure.

  This car had obviously been modified for human transport, and I don’t remember whether there were other clandestine travelers like ourselves aboard or not, but evidently the Soviet Union was putting every bit of rolling stock it could find into getting displaced persons back to their homes without disrupting the good coach service for government officials and army—officers. There were lots of ordinary soldiers on the car; many of them still had their rifles with them, which proved to be a blessing later on.

  It was a nightmare scene in that cattle car. It seemed as though hundreds of ragged bodies had been packed into it. People lay around the car on two layers of wooden shelves. The shelves were crawling with bedbugs and lice, but I had a can of DDT powder and Dina and I made a sort of island of DDT for ourselves.—Everyone else had sacks and paper parcels. I think ours was the only suitcase. I wondered if we would be robbed. We agreed that one of us would always stay awake. That was not so hard. The rocking car, the crying women, the stench of bodies that had not been washed for a long time, the bugs, the coal smoke, the wind rushing through the slots, all helped us both keep awake almost all the time.

  To try to get through the first night in a reasonably good mood, we drank the whole bottle of whiskey. Next day we were hung over and dying of thirst. The train seldom stopped. When it did I was able to go and fill the empty whiskey bottle and an army canteen with hot water, and we made instant coffee and ate our canned meat and other things, while the others on the train ate dry black bread and looked at us with hostile eyes. We were three nights on that train. The last night, going through the Ukraine, the train was attacked by bandits trying to get stuff from the passengers on the train. We could hear shots several times in the night as the soldiers used their rifles to keep those bandits off.

  It was five o’clock in the morning when the train pulled into the Kiev station, or what was left of it after the bombardment it had suffered during the war. There was almost no roof, no storage space, no waiting room—just a platform and rubble and some temporary shacks for ticket offices. But Dina and I were still full of adventure, even though we were pretty tired, and she agreed to wait in the station with the suitcase while I went off to find Michael Kovko. This was the kind of guy I was: I had not written to Kovko to tell him we were coming. After all, he had said come any time. And so at daybreak I set out through the rubbled streets of Kiev with my address book. I had to walk because there was no public transportation running, and I think it was about 6 AM. before I found my way to his building on Levanovsky Street and climbed several flights of stairs to his apartment and knocked on the door, feeling a little rude about it, but kind of high from the successful trip and the strange brush with the bandits in the night and the sensation of being in a totally new place with an extremely good-looking girl as my traveling companion.

  I knocked on the door and rang the bell several times, and then I heard his voice. “Who is it?”

  “It’s Alex!”

  “Alex? Alex?” The door opened against the chain. “Alex! Alex Dolgun! Come in! Come in!”

  Michael Kovko was in his underwear. He smiled amiably at me and wiped sleep from his eyes.

  “Listen, my wife’s at the dacha with the kids. The place is a mess. I’ll make some coffee. Come into the bedroom and tell me what you’re doing here while I get dressed.”

  I started to follow him, saying, “Well, I’ve got a girl with me and..

  And then I stopped because I was so shocked by what I saw in the bedroom. I immediately felt for the little Japanese pistol in my pocket, thinking, If I have to ... Kovko spoke as if he thought I was embarrassed about announcing my girlfriend. “That’s wonderful, don’t be shy, tell me about her,” and so on. But what had shut my mouth for the moment was the sight of the uniform he was pulling on. It was the uniform of the MGB.

  He looked up and saw me staring at the purple stripes. “Yeah,” he said, “disgusting, isn’t it? Well, they needed a good car-pool man, and they offered to make me a major, and it’s not so bad. Same job as the army. Better rank, better pay.”

  I thought, Boy! The sight of that uniform is pretty potent stuff.

  Even though he was an old family friend, the presence of the symbols of that huge illegitimate and unanswerable force had made me want to reach for my gun. I watched while Kovko belted on his own gun and straightened up his room, and he listened to the story of our trip and chuckled at the audacity of it. Then he said he would go and get a car, and we would pick up Dina right away and drive out to his country place where the family was and spend a few days in the woods.

  Despite Kovko’s affability and frankness of manner, I could not lose a feeling of caution. The MGB uniform nearly overcame human trust. I found myself thinking, If he’s trying to trick me I’ll shoot him, what the hell.

  “Come on,” he said, “let’s get your girl.” We went out and walked a few blocks until we came to a large building. “MGB headquarters,” he said casually. “Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll tell them you’re my brother-in-law. Don’t show any papers or anything.”

  I kept my hand on the gun in my pocket. We walked right up to the checkpoint. Surrounded by MGB! I thought heroically, Well, I’ll take at least three of them before they get me. It was a giddy feeling Kovko told them I was his wife’s brother and they issued a pass, just like that. We whisked right through the garage and I never had time for even a little gunfight.

  “That’s our prison,” Michael Kovko said casually, waving up at a stone wall beside the car pool. The garage crew treated him very respectfully.

  “I’m taking a car for the weekend,” he told them, and I want you two to bring a truck to get some furniture to go to my dacha.”

  No questions asked. He sent the two young MGB off to the apartment in a Studebaker truck to pick up some chairs and things, and he and I took a green BMW and went to the station to get Dina.

&n
bsp; Like many Russians with means, which includes middle and senior bureaucrats and army officers above the rank of captain, Kovko spent part of the summer in a couple of rented rooms in a small village near enough to rivers and woods to go hiking and picnicking. They called it a dacha but it was closer to a rooming-house. I began to relax once we got into the country, and Dina seemed completely at ease and surprisingly unaffected by the appearance of my friend in his uniform of the dreaded secret police. So that was fine.

  We spent long evenings talking and drinking wine, and Dina and I would slip away to bed before Michael and his wife, and then in the morning I would leave her sleeping and Michael and I would take his shotgun and his Tokarev pistol and go off to the banks of the Dnieper River for some shooting. I retained enough caution and good sense not to show him my own pistols, but I always had one with me, the little Japanese .22 in my pocket. Kovko was impressed when I shot a couple of birds with his Tokarev. I was impressed with the Tokarev. I had seen lots of them on officers’ belts, but I had no idea what solid, accurate weapons they were.

  Sometimes we would take a rowboat across the Dnieper and climb the high bank and roam around the woods on the other side. What we did not know at the time was that these woods were on the outskirts of the dacha being used at the time by Secretary Khrushchev.

  At noon or early in the afternoon, we would go back to the village and Valentina, Michael’s handsome young wife, would be in the kitchen with Di, and we would have cold soup and radishes and cakes and tea, and sleep part of the afternoon and maybe go on a picnic for the evening meal, and day by day things became more relaxed and I stopped being nervous about Michael’s affiliation with the MGB.