An American in the Gulag

by Alexander Dolgun

  It was not a good concept after all, because by the time I began to feel seriously that I might have to use it I was far too weak to have any assurance of launching myself sufficiently accurately at that ring of rough iron with enough force to do the job completely, supposing I did manage to hit the rim at all.

  Here in Sukhanovka the prospect was much more serious and the plan much more elaborate. The bed that was let down every night with the block commander’s key was terribly heavy. In the first few days, before I was dehydrated with fever and stunned with sleeplessness and exhausted by starvation, I was actually able to lift it back in position when the guard ordered me to do so in the morning. It was a hard, grunting job to lift it the first few inches, but then when it passed the forty-five-degree mark it was not too bad, and I could bang it into its spring latch without much difficulty. Later, and not much later either, I could not help the block commander lower it at night and I could not budge it off the stools it rested on in the morning. At some point I realized that if I could find a way of unlocking the bed myself, I could use it as a weapon for my self-destruction.

  Each day I was taken once to the toilet and ordered to carry my bucket, which contained a twenty-four-hour collection of urine. In the toilet I was given a tiny scrap of coarse paper to use as toilet paper. Instead of using it, I washed myself and palmed the paper. Then, back in the cell, I hid the paper and slowly began to accumulate quite a few of these little scraps. I had decided that I could make a chewed papier-mâché out of them and use it to block the hole the latch sprang into, so that when the bed was put up, the latch would appear to spring, but the bed would be actually staying in position only because it was vertical. I had noticed that it stayed balanced in the vertical position before it was latched. Having prepared it before the guard put it up in the morning, I would then wait until he was safely out of sight, pull the heavy iron and wood frame toward me until it was just barely balanced on its hinges and tending to continue outward in its arc to fall down on the small round stool, then, before it could get moving, quickly kneel and place my temple on the stool so that the hundred pounds of wood and iron following down would instantly crush my skull. It was not pleasant, of course, to make such a plan and to begin to hoard paper in aid of it, and yet it gave me a small but psychologically necessary handhold on some element of control over my future. And it gave me access to an escape route if what was happening got beyond the point where I could bear it.

  I have mentioned fever. It was something like malaria, and I don’t remember now where it came from, but I think it had been a recurring problem when I was a child. Very soon after the brutal Kozhukhov once again began the long review of my personal history, I woke up after a short half-hour’s sleep one morning and realized that my cheeks were hot and my lips dry. I asked for the doctor. She came—middle-aged, tired, long face, sympathetic eyes—and shoved a thermometer under my arm. It read over 40º C—nearly 105º F—and I was very frightened. The doctor told me sadly there was nothing she could do for me but give me aspirin. I was stunned when I realized that meant no relief from interrogation.

  In fact, Kozhukhov treated the fever like a joke. I pleaded with him. I told him I was sweating and that the fever was dangerously high. I told him my head and joints were aching, and he could see the parched lips and the high color. He just laughed. He said, “I’ll help you to cool down, then!” He stepped to the window and threw it open. Outside the late February air must have been below zero. Kozhukhov put on his woolen scarf and his army greatcoat and his fur hat and heavy gloves. Then he just laughed hugely at me. I think the laugh was spontaneous. I think he found the situation quite funny and enjoyable in a crazy way. He tried to continue the interrogation but most of the time I was shivering too much to answer him. He finally closed the window, not out of any humanitarian intention but because the shivering and the chattering teeth slowed down his work and made progress impossible. But the next day he would say with a hateful grin, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. “Got a high fever again today, have you, prisoner? Well, we can bring that fever down very easily. You’ll see. We are much better than those doctors. You’ll see.” And again he would put on his coat and open the, window and laugh to see me tremble out of control.

  So I am not surprised that sequential, chronological recollections of Sukhanovka scarcely exist. I went downhill quickly, losing weight and losing clarity. I remember the kinds of things Kozhukhov concentrated on, but I recall few of the actual conversations. He had a dirty mind. He would question me in detail about the sexual part of my relations with the girls I had known. I recall that I told him about Steve Sage and me going to Gorky Park and picking up a couple of girls in the rowboat we rented; we offered to take them home, very gentlemanly, but of course. expecting that there might be some drinks and some fun when we got there. My girl lived miles from the center of Moscow, and by the time we got there it was almost time for the last tram back. Furthermore, she showed me the house where she lived with her parents and sisters but did not invite me in, so that was a terrible waste. I got on the tram, but it stopped somewhere in the outskirts and the conductor cleared the car: it was the last stop. I asked her how to get to central Moscow and she just waved—”That way.” And I started walking. After midnight.

  Some time later I was passing through a very dim street, and I saw three young men waiting at the corner. I thought they were probably looking for trouble. They followed me for a while and finally a couple pulled ahead and cut me off and asked for cigarettes.

  “1 don’t smoke,” I said politely. “Sorry.”

  I was looking frantically for a sign of a cop or a house I could dash into or any source of help or safety. No luck. One of the guys asked the time. I said I had no watch. He said he could hear it ticking. I backed up against a wall with a big drainpipe so that I had my back and one side protected, and I said toughly, “All right, you guys, what do you really want?”

  “Your coat,” one said. He pulled a knife and came toward me. I kicked out, not at him but at the guy beside him. I got him in the crotch and he went down, but the knife got me over the eye at the same time. I felt blood come out, and I let go with a hard right to somebody’s jaw and then ducked and ran. They did not come after me. For a while I thought I had been blinded in my left eye. I wiped it with a handkerchief and saw a lot of blood and found it was coming from my forehead, just over the eye, and I could still see all right. A cop at a subway station took me to their feldsher—a medical assistant—and the feldsher clamped the cut. I told Kozhukhov about the girls but not about the fight. He thought the story was a waste of time.

  I told him another one about a beautiful half Chinese girl Steve Sage and I picked up at the bar of the Moskva Hotel. She worked as a bartender and knew only three words of English: I love you! We got friendly and proposed having a party, and she agreed to bring a girlfriend—in fact, we ended up at the friend’s apartment. It turned out pretty well, with lots of caviar and cold meat and wine and records on the phonograph, and plenty of giggling and stories and all the rest, until the friend’s estranged husband came to the door and threatened to break in and kill us all, and Steve Sage and I went out the second-floor window. Steve and I had both grabbed champagne bottles as weapons in case the jealous husband got in, and we found we still had them when we jumped out. There we were running like hell through Moscow, clutching champagne bottles in our hands. Kozhukhov thought this was a great story, although he was disappointed that it did not have any real sex in it. The one thing I did not tell him about the adventure with the champagne bottle was that the jealous husband was an MGB colonel. I wanted to throw that at Kozhukhov, to humiliate him. If I had thought of it with Sidorov, I would have thrown it at him. I might even have added something provocative like, “It wasn’t you, by any chance, was it?” and taken my kicks and blows just for the satisfaction of getting at him. With Kozhukhov it was different. I was desperately sick most of the time, and I never had the feeling that Kozhukhov cared whe
ther I lived or died. Sidorov had been determined to get information from me. Kozhukhov, I felt, was determined to be cruel to me, and if information came along as well, then that was gravy for him. The end product did not matter; it was the experience of the day he lived for. So I thought if I pushed him too far, he would beat me hard enough to kill me and never think twice about it. In fact, he did not beat me as badly as Sidorov. I was too much of a whimpering mess of fever and emaciation most of the time. I got very little sleep. I was unconscious a great deal of the time and many days went by with almost no conscious activity on my part, although I think I almost always managed to put a scratch on the cumulative calendar.

  At some point Kozhukhov began asking me about another girl, an artist named Ella I met at a party with Joe O’Brian from the embassy. She said she wanted to paint my portrait, and we had some pretty friendly times in her studio apartment until I realized that she was bleeding a lot of money from me. We’d be lying there in bed on a sunny afternoon, and she would say things like, “Listen, I need twenty rubles—I’ll give it back tomorrow.”

  I always gave. Then after a while I realized she never gave it back. I was embarrassed to ask her about it, but after a while I got the message pretty clearly: she was never going to give it back. She was an old-fashioned gold digger. So I stopped seeing her.

  This had never been an important relationship to me, although Ella was beautiful and very active and had a great sense of humor. But we were not together long at all. I was surprised that Kozhukhov was zeroing in on her. He kept describing her, her features and her figure, the location of her studio, and finally the location of our first meeting after the initial cocktail party, where we had made a rendezvous in a subway station. He knew where I had stood, where she had stood, what we had each been wearing. I began to re-create the scene in my mind as he talked about it. Finally in my memory cam the clear view of the MGB tail who had been on me that night, and I finally knew where I had seen Kozhukhov before. He had been the tail.

  He said, “By the way, did she ever borrow any money from you?”

  I was embarrassed still about the way she had taken me, so I said no. He said, “Come on, tell me, didn’t she get some money out of you?”

  I thought, Boy, he knows a lot! Then I guessed why he knew, and I said, “Are we by any chance milk brothers?” That is a Russian expression for two men who have shared the same woman. He just laughed and went on asking me if Ella had gotten any of my money, and when I kept protesting crossly, “No, for Christ’s sake. Why do you keep on about that!” he finally said, “Well, I’ll bet she did, because she borrowed a whole lot from me and I never got it back!”

  That was before life with Kozhukhov became nearly impossible and the thoughts of suicide began to form in my mind again.

  Kozhukhov, was very abusive. His language was worse than Sidorov’s—not in quality, which would not have been possible, but in quantity: the nonstop spewing of dirty, ugly words.

  He tried to get me to say that I had attempted to persuade a Soviet employee of the U. S. Embassy, Morris Seltser, to defect to the United States and had helped him with his plans to escape the Soviet Union.

  As we moved off the casual areas of girls and other acquaintances, Kozhukhov’s manner became more deliberate. When he asked me about Seltser, he moved around the interrogation room with deliberate, measured steps. He held himself in a military posture. His army breeches were tucked precisely into his high boots and he would place each foot before the other in a hard, emphatic way, as if to say, “I’ll show you, prisoner. I’ll get it out of you.” His square chin he held forward with a kind of grimace drawing down the corners of his mouth. He worked at looking cruel.

  Unlike Sidorov with his vague suggestions, Kozhukhov came right out with it, naming Seltser and specifying the charge. I denied it. Kozhukhov said he had been a boxer and would demonstrate a few of his punches to help me remember. His favorite was a hard jab on the biceps, repeated to the point where my arm would be swollen and completely useless. I said I remembered Seltser all right. He was a deferential man; during the one and only conversation we had, he called me Mr. Dolgun and I called him Morris. He was a messenger and handyman who made a good living selling secondhand goods around Moscow, some of which he got out of embassy employees who liked his pleasant ways. A carton of cigarettes would bring 200 rubles in those days; Morris would get some cigarettes at the embassy—as well as clothes—and pay the embassy employees prices they thought were pretty good.

  I had never played this black-market game. I thought it was bad stuff. Except for my little pistol collection, which I got from trading cigarettes with diplomatic couriers and other embassy people and never with Soviets, I never sold any of these things for money, although I gave a lot of presents to my Russian girlfriends. But I talked with Morris that day about his success in the trade, and he boasted that if he had been living in America he would have been a millionaire because he was so good at buying low and selling high. He liked to boast about it. And it turned out that this was the only source of the accusation that I was helping Morris Seltser escape to America, this remark of his about being a millionaire if he lived in my country.

  Every day Kozhukhov would hit me. The beatings did not go on and on. I was too weak. One or two blows would keep me in agony for hours, and the sleeplessness was, of course, the principal weapon. Sometimes Kozhukhov would smash me with the edge of his open hand right under my nose. I would go temporarily blind from this blow, and my eyes would run and sometimes my lip would bleed. And all the time I denied and denied trying to persuade Morris Seltser to defect, until one day Kozhukhov brought me a protocol that showed my room had been bugged the day Morris and I had that conversation. The protocol said that he tried to buy flour from me. Most of the flour I was able to get I gave to my mother, but I was always a soft touch and I gave a bag to Morris, even though I knew he would sell it for a lot of rubles, and that was when he said, “If I lived in the United States,” etc., etc.

  I was furious with Kozhukhov through my fear and weakness and fever and pain. I yelled, “Is this what’s supposed to prove I was trying to make Seltser defect? Are you serious!”

  I even laughed at him. Faced with this outright crap, I found the daring to laugh at him and taunt him. My self-respect would not let the opportunity go by, even though I would suffer for it. Kozhukhov did not hit me for laughing. I supposed he had been told to see if there was anything behind that innocent conversation, and had done as much fishing as he thought was worthwhile and finally completed what he had to do by showing me the protocol. In the end he probably felt not sheepish, but a kind of what-the-hell feeling. He could not possibly have believed in what he was doing. It was orders.

  By the end of February 1950, my buttocks had shrunk to wrinkled skin and sitting anywhere was painful. I probably weighed less than Charles Atlas’s famous ninety-seven-pound weakling by this time, but I was much too feeble for any dynamic tension exercises. I walked a little in the cell and continued to move across France toward the border of Spain. I was never taken outside. For that whole period in Sukhanovka, I never saw the sky, although by the end of March the smell of pines coming in through the window when it was open for those few precious minutes each morning gave me visions of an outside world and gave me a little hope, somehow—just knowing that such things as pine trees still existed. The prison was deadly quiet. It was carpeted throughout. At first, being left alone in that cell with the terrible heavy beds and the round stools was oppressive not just because of the stuffy air and the harsh light but also because of the absolute silence.

  Later I began to hear a buzz of voices, and slowly, over a period of time, I discovered that the cell opposite had two prisoners in it, and that they must have had a very special status because they were allowed to talk, and also, as I soon discovered by listening at the door, they were taken out for exercise periods every day. I envied them both privileges and came to feel hatred for them because they had and I had not. One day I
nearly screamed in rage because I heard a soft voice at their food slot opposite asking them to choose books from a library list. “Here’s the catalogue, what books do you want to order this week?” the voice said. I would have given one of my tiny, loaves of bread away for a book, even though my eyes were almost too sore to read and my body was shrinking into invisibility. (They had a phrase for this. I was taunted with it on several occasions. The phrase is tonki, zvonki i prozrachny. Literally, it means “thin, ringing, and transparent,” like a crystal goblet—so thin you are invisible.)

  I was told later that some very senior officials serve their sentences of ten or fifteen or twenty years in a closed prison like Sukhanovka, never going to a slave labor camp where they might form a faction and find themselves allies they could use during their captivity or later in freedom. I never found out who these two were. I hated them worse than ever the day I realized that the noise I could hear was beds going down and I knew that they could raise and lower their beds when they wanted to.

  Toward the end of the week 1 would pass out with increasing frequency, sometimes coming to on the floor of the interrogation room with a doctor peering at me, sometimes on the floor of my cell with a guard’s key tapping at the food slot to wake me up. On Saturday Kozhukhov would usually let me go early and go off to Moscow where his friends were. I often heard him making dates to meet in bars, on the telephone in the interrogation room. It was hard to believe that such a man had friends. I am not sure I ever met anyone else I felt that way about.

  When Kozhukhov went to sleep in his chair at night, as he often did, he would wake up in a fright that lasted long enough for me to perceive it. Then he would rage at me and the flow of filth would run for several minutes without interruption, except maybe for a punch on the biceps or a hand edge blow on the upper lip. I believe he was frightened because he thought I would sneak up on him and kill him while he slept. In fact I went to sleep the moment he did, sometimes succeeding in staying on my chair and some times waking up on the floor at the end of Kozhukhov’s hard boot.