An American in the Gulag

by Alexander Dolgun

  “To tell you the truth,” Feldman said, “I’m not even sure it exists. But the rumor is that there is a prison called Sukhanovka where they take only big cases. Big guys they caught in some treason or other, or guys the Leader wants to put away or get a confession out of that he can use against one of his enemies. It’s the kind of place people talk about with hushed voices. But you see, I’ve never heard of anyone coming out of Sukhanovka. I’ve heard of. them going in there, but never coming out.”

  “Perhaps not,” Feldman said. “But you came out.”

  I tried to get them to guess what was going to happen to me next. They would not. They said I should wait till I heard whether or not I was to get a trial, what the verdict was, what I was convicted of. “But I haven’t done one thing!” I protested.

  “Is telling jokes about the Soviet Union doing anything?” Feldman shot back bitterly.

  I did not have long to wait. I think it was the fourth day. The door opened. “D. Come out.” I was taken to an interrogation room where an air force major was standing by the curtained window. For a second I thought it might be a confrontation with one of the military officers that Sidorov was always referring to. But it turned out that Kozhukhov, this “air force” major, was really MGB and, like many of their officers, wore a uniform of the regular forces as a sort of disguise, and to reduce the number of purple-striped pants that would otherwise be swarming the streets of Moscow and every other city in the Soviet Union.

  I was sure I had seen this man before. He had distinctive Eastern features, and something about the eyes gave me either a strong déjà vu or an authentic memory that made me uneasy but which I could not place.

  After the formalities of identification and so on, Kozhukhov showed me Sidorov’s collection of protocols on my interrogation. They came in four volumes. I skimmed them. I had read that stuff before. Then he gave me a form to sign, Article 206, termination of interrogation. That was a heart-warming phrase; I think I even signed with my real signature.

  But I remember distinctly that I transferred none of that warm feeling to Kozhukhov. There was something wrong about him. Yet his next words were, on the face of it, very reassuring.

  He said, “All the charges under Article 58 have been withdrawn as unfounded or unproven. You are now charged under Article 7.35 as a socially dangerous element.” That did not sound like much to me. Maybe it would mean that the embassy would have to send me back to the States, which would be fine. I asked Kozhukhov what happened next, and he said, very formally, he could not possibly know that, he was only an interrogator, and they had simply asked him to see me and show me this article for my signature. I signed and went back to cell 33 in high spirits.

  Feldman and Krivoshein burst into smiles when I told them it was 7.35. They pumped both my hands at once and laughed, and Feldman almost jumped up and down with excitement.

  “This is wonderful news! Wonderful news,” Feldman said. His eyes were shining. He said, “The very worst they can do, the very worst, is five years’ prison camp. Why, lots of guys only get five years of exile. This is great!”

  My face must have fallen because here in the cell among friends I was totally off guard. I could not believe my ears. “Five years!” I said incredulously. “Five years in prison camp for being a socially dangerous element?”

  “What’s the matter?” said Krivoshein. “It couldn’t be better, you know.”

  I thought of what Orlov had said, how the MGB never made mistakes. I had been so sure they would let me go now. Five years out of my life. For nothing. Five years without Mary. Five years seemed like eternity. The bottom had just dropped out. It was to get worse. I spent a gloomy weekend trying to get my spirits up and trying to get Feldman and Krivoshein to speculate about better possibilities, but they were genuinely irritated to find that I was not rejoicing at the lightness of my likely sentence.

  On Monday I was taken to the interrogation room again, and again it was Major Kozhukhov. He said very offhandedly, as if he were telling me it was raining out, that fresh evidence against me had turned up, and that charges 58.6, espionage, and 58.10, anti-Soviet activities, were being reinstated.

  At first I did not understand this at all. I said, “Will that affect my sentence?” Kozhukhov said, “Oh, there is no sentence yet. We are going to resume interrogation.”

  He let that sink in. I felt very cold and a bit sick. I said in a very low voice, “I’m not going back to Colonel Sidorov in Lefortovo, am I?”

  “No,” he said. “I will be your interrogator this time.”

  “Here in Lubyanka, then,” I said.

  “No,” he said, looking at me with a very unpleasant smile. “No, I am transferring you immediately to Sukhanovka.”

  I felt dizzy and terrified. I tried not to show it. I do not know if I succeeded. I do not remember saying good-by to Feldman and Krivoshein, although I must have been taken to cell 33 to get my things. I do remember that it was a DRINK SOVIET CHAMPAGNE van again.

  Anger helped clear my head on that cramped ride, which was a long one. I could tell from sounds outside that we were leaving the city, and by the way the speed picked up after a while that we were on the open road. The rid, e took about an hour and a half, as far as I could tell. When the van finally stopped, I heard a squealing iron gate, then a moment later my cubicle was unlocked and I stepped out into very bright sunlight. It was January, cold and clear and fine. I caught glimpses of a high yellow wall with barbed wire around what seemed a good-sized compound, and a building that looked very much like a monastery, which is what it had been for a long time. I was hustled inside. Someone, a guard, shoved me into a small closet so narrow that standing straight up I almost touched the door and the back of the closet at the same time. There was no room to crouch or sit. There was a weak bulb in a caged recess high in the gloomy little vertical coffin, and through the food slot there was a hairline of brighter light from the corridor. I wondered why they even bothered with a food slot in a ridiculous little holding cell like that. I waited an hour for them to come and get me for the usual arrival procedures of bath and searching and the rest. When they did not come and I was becoming extremely uncomfortable, I knocked on the door and called the guard. The peephole slid open. “I want to go to the toilet,” I said. The door was unlocked and I stepped into the corridor, blinking at the light. The guard motioned for me to follow him along the corridor to the toilet a few steps away. I tried to get him to talk to me, but he just put his fingers to his lips and said “Nye polozhna” in a low voice. I asked if he would at least tell me when I would be taken to my cell, but he just shook his head, no.

  Back in the closet my feet began to hurt and I tried resting my knees against the door and my back against the wall behind me. That relieved my feet for a while but hurt my knees; so I stood up again and moved from foot to foot. Soon the food slot opened toward the outside: it had no shelf and a small plate of soup was passed in. It was not much but it was delicious. I knocked in a moment and the empty soup plate disappeared and was replaced by a small plate with a tiny sliver of delicious veal cutlet and a spoonful of delicately fried potatoes, steaming hot and nicely seasoned. I could hardly believe it. I ate them in two mouthfuls and knocked, and when the guard took the empty plate I said “Thank you!” and I meant it. I had not tasted food like that for over a year. I wondered what would come next. What came next was one cup of water. Then I realized soon that there would be no more food. My appetite had been so aroused by those excellent teasers that I had given in to the kind of food fantasies that I used to suppress all the time in Lefortovo. Now I had to try to suppress them again, but those delicious salty tastes lingered insistently in my mouth and forced me to think of food. I asked for more water, and when he brought it I carefully rinsed out my mouth before swallowing, and washed away the maddening taste.

  By the time evening came, I was acutely uncomfortable. A new guard brought me a bowl of excellent hot porridge, extremely tasty, about a tablespoonful. I ate it caref
ully and then knocked and asked for the toilet. This guard spoke when he took me out. “This way,” he said. I thought that was a good sign, so coming back from the toilet I said in a conversational way, “Listen. When am I going to be transferred?”

  He said casually, “You’re transferred.” That’s all. Just, “You’re transferred.”

  Of course I did not believe it, and kept waiting to be taken to a cell. But nobody came. I became very sleepy but there was no way to get any kind of comfort. I would lean my head against the door and angle my hip to one side. Then I would sleep for a few minutes and wake up with a terrible pain in my back. I tried with my knees against the door but that was acutely painful. By morning I could not stop my knees buckling. I asked for the toilet as often as they would take me—three or four times a day—just to get a chance to sit down, although it was only a hole in the floor with footplates to squat over, and I would just let myself go down onto the cold floor until the guard, who watched the whole performance, ordered me to get up again.

  Walking was difficult and painful, and yet a relief.

  It never occurred to me that I should keep a calendar, so I made no scratches. I remember examining mosquitoes clustered, immobile, in the dust around the corners at the top of that box, and wondering if they were dead or hibernating. I remember that the third morning I began to force myself to keep count of the days, but there was nothing to scratch with anyway, although I might have made lines in the dust around the mosquitoes with my finger, but I did not bother. I could not believe it when the morning of the fifth day arrived. I would lose consciousness and wake up to the intense pain in my kneecaps, extending through all the muscles of my legs. I realized of course what they were doing to me with those tantalizing tiny bits of food, and went back to earlier Lefortovo disciplines of taking tiny bites and chewing them a long time to make them last. They had no impact on my yawning stomach. The saliva flowed at a terrible rate whenever the food came, and I developed a kind of compulsive swallowing reflex. Five days I was kept in that box. On the fifth evening I was taken to a cell, shaking, my legs terribly swollen, my knees a total agony. A folding bed was pulled down from the wall and I was given a clean blanket and pillow. But the pain was too great to sleep for more than a few minutes, until it was early morning. My feet and lower legs had gone numb, and as sensation returned to them they at first prickled lightly and then began to be very hot and to ache all over with a deep, dull ache.

  I was overwhelmed. I could believe that nobody ever came out of this hellish place. I could not collect myself and recover my one-day-at-a-time attitude which had gotten me through before. I came near to panic. I forgot all my survival devices. I just could not believe this was happening to me and yet I saw that it was. The element of fear was profound and very debilitating.

  It was a Friday night when I arrived in the cell. I think some time toward morning I must have regained some of my composure and control over myself. I realized that it was a weekend and that I would probably be left on my own. I still had my measuring string, which I had kept rolled in my pocket. It was too light and flimsy ever to be discovered in a search. Even if I turned my pockets out, I could tuck it up in an upper corner of the pocket in the same motion as turning the linings out, and it was never discovered and never taken from me. I began to tell myself to get organized as soon as the bread and hot water came in the morning. The bread was good but small, perhaps 400 grams. I forced starvation out of my mind and began to measure the little cell. It was exactly 1.56 meters by 2.09, just long enough for the two narrow beds that were made of heavy wood reinforced with iron and hinged to the wall like horizontal doors. The cell was designed to contain two people, then. Between the beds, and under them if they were ever both down (mine never were), was a narrow table one meter long, an inch thick, and only six inches wide, somewhat the shape of an ironing board, mounted on one-inch pipe sunk in the concrete floor. At opposite corners of this little table and bed support were round stools on pipes, a hand-span below table height, less than eight inches across. That was what I had to sit on during the day. Try it. If your buttocks are not well-cushioned it is painful. I was not allowed to sit on the table.

  The bed, when it folded up into the wall in the morning, had a spring lock, which was opened again with a key at ten thirty at night. The cell was cozy, not cold. The window was large, frosted, and locked with heavy bars and mesh. It was closed. The guard opened a small panel above it for a few minutes each morning, and later in the year as the weather warmed up a bit, I could smell the pines outside. Most of the day the cell was stuffy and by morning, especially if I had been allowed to sleep, the air was so heavy it made my head ache.

  There was an iron pail with a fitted iron cover. No sink or toilet.

  At ten thirty the block commander came with a key and opened the bed and silently indicated that I should help lower it. It was very heavy. If I had left my hand accidentally on the stool or table as it came down it would have crushed the fingers. The straw tick was clean enough. You had to sleep facing the door, of course, with your hands outside the blanket, a standard prison regulation. In the morning the guard ordered me to push the bed up into the wall, and watched until it was up and the lock clicked shut.

  These were monks’ cells. Somehow I later found out there were sixty-eight of them in this old stone building, still providing mortification of the flesh, as they had for centuries, though with a different purpose in mind.

  In the morning, after breakfast, the door was opened and the guard said one word: “Opravka.” Toilet. I had to take the bucket to the toilet and dump it there and rinse it out. The toilet was one of eight doors in the short corridor, four on each side. The others were cells. In the toilet, to rinse out your bucket, was a barrel of chlorinated water and a mop.

  When I was taken back to the cell I began walking and counting again—I was almost across the border of France by now—but walking was slow and difficult because, with the stools and the table and the cramped size of the cell to begin with, I could make only two steps to the end, a half-step sideways around the end of the table, two steps, a half, and so on. I still have a habit of walking two steps, a half step. In Sukhanovka I had to face the door while walking; so I walked into France, at least part of the way, looking over my shoulder.

  When Monday morning came I was taken out at nine thirty, through a frigid wooden corridor with frost on the walls, into another building where the interrogation rooms were. I thought as I walked and counted, If everything else about this place is horrible, what in the world will the interrogation be like? Kozhukhov gave me no time to speculate. As I came into the room he tripped me with his foot and sent me tumbling to the floor. He laughed a kind of coarse, coughing laugh. As I tried to get up on my hands and knees, he put his big, jackbooted foot between my shoulder blades and roughly shoved me down again. I turned and stared at him. Wide Mongol cheeks and a constant cruel leer. He said harshly, “You will find that Sukhanovka is nothing like the Sunday picnic you had in that kindergarten called Lefortovo! Now, get to the table and start answering questions fast because I have no intention of fooling around like some of my colleagues.”

  I said to myself again, Well, here we come.

  * * *

  1Just as this book was going to the typesetter, I received news that Igor Krivoshein has been able to leave the Soviet Union, and is living in France again. I said, “It could not really be any worse than what I got.”

  Chapter 12

  The human mind has a number of safety valves, and most of mine have worked well and often. I am not even sure safety valve is the right expression, because while there is the release of pressure that comes with jokes and memory devices and fantasy, there is also the suppression of things that you cannot tolerate very well when you are weak or needful. I suppressed for a long time, working on this book, my suicide plans in Lefortovo, under Sidorov. I suppose, in the sense that such suppression relieves pressure, there is a kind of safety valve function. In any case
, it is certainly the most difficult kind of labor for me now to dig down into my memory for the terrible experiences, and when people ask me about prison and especially about camp, and I have to tell stories of some kind, the ones that surface quickly are usually funny—funny characters or narrow escapes, and so on. But the perception of myself as someone who twice coolly and deliberately planned the destruction of his own life is something that I “forgot” until I had to deal with it. I was able to keep it “forgotten” in reviewing the Lefortovo experience; I cannot do so in the case of Sukhanovka. Even though the actual planning and preparations were to come a long time after these first few days in the most feared, legendary horror prison of Russia, the memory of what I planned there surfaces the moment I see the geography of the cell, and with it the memory of my earlier plan in Lefortovo, which was less elaborate.

  It was a contingency plan, and it was not accompanied by much emotion when I worked it out. In fact, the words plan and worked it out are too sophisticated. What I decided, very simply and straightforwardly, was that if Sidorov got to be too much for me and I became convinced that I was going to break down and become a tool for him to use as he pleased, to fabricate whatever humiliating lies he wanted, or if I became convinced that one day I would lose the strength and the will to keep up the disciplines and strategies of survival that I had developed and that therefore I was going to die anyway, I would simply step up on the iron cot during the break between peephole visits and throw myself headlong off the bunk in a dive of the kind we used to call “the dead soldier” when I was a kid, with my arms firmly at my sides, in a way that would bring me down head first onto the cast-iron toilet. The lid, of the toilet would be off. The edges of that cast iron were rough and sharp enough so that sitting on it with my almost-disappeared buttocks had become a pain made bearable only by the joy of tapping messages next door, and I was sure that my skull would be caved in by the impact and that I would die quickly, unconscious at the very end.