An American in the Gulag

by Alexander Dolgun

  As time went on I became more and more useless to him either as a victim of his sadism or as a source of information. Because I was losing consciousness so frequently, he would terminate interrogation at one or two in the morning and I would be allowed to sleep until six. Then, just before six, I would hear others being led back from interrogation, some screaming for pity and help, some moaning, some silent, some—from the faint sounds of dragging—unable to walk. I knew what that was like. It was like me.

  One man who moaned and cried a great deal was in the cell diagonally opposite mine. On a Saturday evening when I was beginning to compose myself for the relief of a long sleep and a day ahead without Kozhukhov I suddenly heard the dull thud of boot heels on the carpeting and then the whispering of many voices. Then there was the sound of a cell door opening violently and a pause and a loud call, “Bring a stretcher! Hurry!”

  Finally more boots and scuffling, and after a while urgent angry whispers: “No! You fool! It won’t fit the door that way. Twist it around. Turn it that way! God, what a mess. No! No! Lift him sideways. What a mess! What a mess!” And so on. I was listening intently at the door, moving away only when I heard the soft footfall of the guard approaching for his peep, and then back again to hear all I could. There were quiet, indistinct sounds of the cell door opening and closing a few times, and a sound of water being poured, and after a while silence.

  I stayed by the door listening for explanations. It may have been some hours later, I cannot be sure, when the guard on my block took a few minutes off from his boring routine to open the door between our block and the next and gossip with his colleague through the half-open door. I could catch a few whispered words. “Seemed all right… stood facing the door… quiet… what happened? … blood all over…” I assumed a suicide.

  I began now to go deeply into the thought of my own suicide. Although with the frequent total collapses I was possibly getting more sleep than I had had in Lefortovo, the fever and the microscopic meals were slowly draining all my physical strength and with it my will to resist. That was the standard I had set myself: when that will was gone, then it would be time to die. The guards’ whispers about my unknown neighbor unnerved me a little. Somehow they made me lose confidence in my ability to kill myself—not my courage to undertake the act, but my physical ability in strength and coordination to bring it off and not bungle, like the prisoner I once read of or heard of somewhere who had thrown himself from an inadequate height and succeeded only in popping out his eyes and breaking his neck, so that he lived on for years a blind and paralyzed derelict. I would rather rot away or yield or anything but that.

  And yet I could not imagine going on. Although I was not cold anymore because spring was coming, still I shivered much of the time anyway. My stomach hurt all the time, as did my head and my knees and elbows and back. Mental clarity was rare. I have no picture of whole days during that period, unlike my recall of the Lefortovo experience. And there came a point where it suddenly and dramatically seemed infinitely worse than even the freezing hard punishment cell in the basement of the K-shaped dungeon. I do not even remember where I was when it happened. Did they take me for baths at Sukhanovka? I think they did, though I do not remember a bathroom as such. What I do remember—and I still feel the shock that came with seeing the sight that will still form itself horrifyingly in front of me if I let it—is that somehow I was naked. It must have been at the bath. I looked at my shrunken body and I saw a devastating thing: my knees were thicker than any other part of my legs! I nearly fainted to see this. The terrible thing that swam into my mind was a photograph in Life magazine of some survivors of Belsen or Auschwitz—some one of the Nazi extermination camps. The staring creatures were not really people. They stood or lay or clung to fences, surrounded by the bodies of those who had died the morning of liberation or perhaps the day. before, and some of those bodies had been torn open for their livers and other soft parts. These were not human beings in the photographs, though they had been human once. They stared out of deep, dark eye sockets, but I believed they could not see or comprehend anything, and I thought at the time that such a life was worse than death and was more obscene than anything that could be imagined. That photograph had made me shudder, and now I was in the photograph. I. could not see my face, but I imagined it to be a staring, vacant face in that photograph. I shook with my fever, and I thought, Is this a life that is any better than death? And then I thought, if I am able to ask that question, does that mean I am pretty close to the end? Had I better try to remember where I have hidden my scraps of paper, and chew them up, and plug that lock on the bed frame? Oh God, I think I said—where have you gone to, Alex Dolgun? You could take anything once. If you’ve gone away somewhere, why keep the body living?

  I know that I came very close to plugging the spring lock. I do not know how close. I know only that, sometime in late April or early May, I knew that The End had about arrived. I was able to be almost dispassionate about it. I could say to myself, “Alex, you did everything you could. Now it is time to rest, forever.”

  Hazy and delirious much of the time now, and in the midst of the red mist around my eyes, one morning the door to the cell is open and I am aware that a woman in a physician’s smock is there and that I have never seen her before but feel a strange, dreamy affection toward her. Someone has told me to get up and get my things together. I think I try to do this, but it must be clear that I cannot raise myself. My lips are too dry to speak, when I try to speak, and my head is throbbing with the fever so much that I can scarcely make out any words.

  I am in a van, on a bench. There is a bundle beside me that I vaguely recognize. The van lurches and I look up and I can see outside it, and it is moving, and trees in early leaf are going by. The lurch almost knocks me off the bench, and a uniformed guard beside me holds me up. Not kindly, not roughly, just an object: Keep the prisoner off the floor.

  But the prisoner slides gratefully onto the floor and loses his senses. Then the sound of car horns and tram bells, and I force myself awake and pull up and catch a brief glimpse of the streets of Moscow, and of people. I recognize Kalyaevskaya Street. It seems very strange to recognize a street.

  Someone tells me where we are. Butyrka prison. It is an old and notorious prison. Orlov had spoken of Butyrka. “A slack place,” he said. I have a sense of pressures easing. I remember nothing of arriving there, only that after some days I became aware of waking up from endless sleep in a firm comfortable bed with many other beds around, of people speaking in soft voices, white-smocked medical people moving about, tubes taped to my arm, and of the marvelous and unfamiliar sense that I was not hungry and that my mind was emerging from fog into clear light again.

  Chapter 13

  The hospital ward in Butyrka was, after all, a cell. I was still a prisoner and, although slack, Butyrka was still a prison. The doctors and feldshers moved quietly and professionally around the ward and dealt with the patients in a straightforward and businesslike way, so that while they were not harsh you certainly could not say that they were sympathetic either.

  Once I was conscious again and the fever subsiding, they began feeding me sweet tea and soft-boiled eggs and codliver oil, and every day I felt tiny new increments of strength come to me. I determined to try to stay there as long as I could. I had the strongest sense of having come very close to the Absolute. An astonishing wave of confidence and optimism returned. I began to believe again that I had a future, not an easy or miraculous one, but a future I could handle. I knew that I would survive because I had survived.

  Slowly the blur of people around me in the ward sorted itself out into individuals, and I remember the two nearest me, although the names have vanished. One was a professor of Russian history who had been arrested for anti-Soviet propaganda and drug addiction and was suffering strong withdrawal symptoms. He had been taking veronal. On the other side was an Austrian who spoke English with a heavy accent. I pleaded with him to speak to me in English, even though we w
ould have made out better in Russian. He said he had been in charge of agriculture in the Ukraine, for the Germans, during the war. Then he had gone back to Vienna, and one day when he was transferring a large amount of money, perhaps $25,000, from his residence to a bank in the American Zone of Vienna, a car full of MGB swept him off the streets; he was knocked out, and came to on the way to Moscow. He was tried as a military criminal, but it seems all they really wanted was the dollars. He had met Orlov in camp.

  Every day I got shots of calcium chloride, which made me feel deeply and comfortably warm, and glucose and vitamins. When the fever started slipping back satisfactorily, I began to worry that I would be shipped out, so I learned how to keep my fingers in my, teacup when they brought the thermometer in the morning, and to hand the feldsher the thermometer with my hot fingers on the bulb. That usually maintained my apparent temperature at around 39º C (102º F) or 39½º, and so kept me in the hospital bed quite satisfactorily. I sent it up higher in the evening than in the morning because I remembered my mother telling, me that sick people run a higher temperature at the end of the day and that sleep cools you off.

  I kept no track of the days. I was too grateful for rest to worry about the passage of time. No scratches on the wall, no mental attempt to remember. I think I was in that hospital three weeks, but it might have been two weeks and it might have been a month. I knew I would be discharged soon, even though I was still emaciated and weak.

  They took me one day to a sort of interrogation room. I was pleased in a vague way to see a civilian at the desk, since for a year and a half now I had seen only uniforms and medical smocks. Somewhere along the line they had given me an additional name, Dovgun, which they hyphenated to their version of Dolgun, so that I became for their obscure purposes Dovgun-Doldzhin. No one ever explained this appendage: it was a given. The civilian behind the desk, a very self-important-looking man, asked my name, and corrected it to Dovgun-Doldzhin when I gave him only Alexander Dole-gin. He then went on to read away the next quarter century of my life as if he were prescribing cough medicine: “Alexander M. Dovgun-Doldzhin, by decision of the Special Committee of the Ministry of State Security the MGB], on the basis of your espionage activities and other anti-Soviet activities, you are deprived of freedom for twenty-five years in IRT.” (“Corrective labor camps,” he explained. Later I would hear, over and over again, “Through hard labor you become free!”)

  Strangely, I was neither stunned nor even surprised. A mild anger was the strongest thing I felt. He presented the order to me and told me to sign. I refused: signing that thing would mean agreeing with it, so to hell with them.

  “Sign!” he said. “Otherwise it’s the hard punishment cell!” I shook my head.

  He brandished the pen at me.

  I shook my head again and said, “Nye polozhna!”

  He looked completely baffled, and I felt I was getting back together again.

  I never did get the hard punishment cell and I guess, having gone to the trouble of putting me back together again with drugs and vitamins, they probably thought it would be illogical to turn around and murder me right away. But it is hard to say, because everything in this crazy system seems illogical at heart. Maybe my avoiding hard punishment that time in Butyrka was no more than sloppiness and bad management, or absent-mindedness, or maybe the threat had never been meant in the first place. There is no way to tell.

  I had not seen my face for a long time. Occasionally back in Lefortovo the sun used to drive some light through the heavy window in a way that would allow me to catch a bright streak on the side of my face so that I could take the lid off the cast-iron toilet and see an indistinct glimpse of my drawn cheeks and sunken eyes reflected in the water. Now I did not want to see what I looked like. I just wanted thighs thicker than my knees. I had become compulsive about feeling those great knobbled joints with my fingertips, and stroking the wilted flesh above and below them and the sharp shin bone with its rough scars from Sidorov’s boots. I wanted to feel flesh growing back on my thighs and calves, to get me out of that nightmare photograph.

  I often thought, as I lay in that hospital, and in the crowded cell afterwards, of those strange experiences in prison where the cell walls seemed to disappear and I would be outside looking in at my own body. I knew that whatever source had provided me that gift, it had been a gift of life, but now I wanted to get back into life with all of myself. No more removals, but just let’s get going and see where it takes us. If I had known where that would be, perhaps I would not have been so eager, but life was beginning to move in my veins again.

  The crowded cell, after the hospital, had twenty-five beds, and more than twenty-five people, so there was sleeping in shifts and much lying on the floor. I remember no individuals from this cell because I was there only a day or two at the most. I remember only two things: I saw people playing chess, and the sight was very cheering; and now, beginning to be a little less indifferent about my sentence, I went around the cell and asked every single man what his sentence was. One man had ten years. Every other person had twenty-five years’ “corrective labor,” five years’ exile, and five years’ deprivation of civil rights, which meant that you could not vote in a Soviet election for the one candidate you can choose among, and you risked instant imprisonment for the slightest misdemeanor during that period.

  Everyone I spoke to, all around the packed cell: “Twenty-five, five, and five. Twenty-five, five, and five.” I was the only one with twenty-five years who had not been given the extra five-and-five.

  The men in the cell talked about etap. It meant a shipment of prisoners to labor camps anywhere across the huge eastern expanses of the Soviet Union. I said I hoped they would not send me north to Siberia. I still shivered when I remembered the hard punishment cell in Lefortovo. Other prisoners spoke about the equal terrors of the desert south. I was told that from now on, as we moved through transfer prisons and on and off trains, we must learn to recite the prisoner’s prayer. When a guard wanted to call you out he would call your initial: “D!” In fact, they said, “On D!” Then all the initial D’s must come to the door of the cell and recite their prayer, consisting of full name, date of birth, length of sentence, and section of the criminal code under which they have been convicted. Hence, “Dovgun-Doldzhin, Alexander M. 1926. Twenty-five years. Fifty-eight point six. Fifty-eight point ten.” That was my prayer, and I would recite it hundreds and hundreds of times in the next years.

  Thousands of times, perhaps.

  I believe that on the second day in this crowded cell where I was trying to convalesce, the guard came to the door and called for the D’s, and two or three of us recited our prayers, and the others were told to go back, while I had to bring my bundle and follow him for the etap. But when we got out onto the train platform, I collapsed unconscious and the officer in charge of the convoy refused to accept me He said I was too weak to stand transportation, and that he would not accept the responsibility for having a corpse in his care when they got to Kuibyshev, which was evidently to be the first stop. So back in a van to Butyrka, still pretty confused in the head with all this sudden action after a period of rest, and glad to have another few days to try to get my strength back before going on a train trip.

  But finally I had to face it. It was decided (by whom? Who was so wise as to predict my survival, so medically sophisticated? Nobody ever examined me, as far as I recall) that I was fit to travel. I was shoved into a Black Maria and taken to the station with a dozen other men—in age from seventeen to fifty, in physical condition from wrecks like me to guys who looked strong and healthy and good candidates for survival, even if I was not. I learned that looks are deceptive.

  A Stolypin railway car is another masterpiece of the deception of the security system of the Soviet Union. It is painted to look like a mail car. Since sometimes there are four or five or more such prison cars on a train, nobody is fooled into thinking that Soviet citizens have suddenly been infected by a prodigious fit of letter-writ
ing, but nobody will officially admit that there is such a thing as a Stolypin car. They were designed to the orders of a tsarist minister, and they carry his name. They are converted from old coaches, and in place of four-bunk compartments giving onto the corridor, there are four-plank cells, ostensibly meant for a maximum of sixteen prisoners but seldom carrying fewer than twenty, in my experience. At each end of the corridor there is a toilet. Guards patrol the corridor. You are not allowed to talk to prisoners in the next cell, but you can talk all you want to your own, and I enjoyed that. I was lucky to be one of the first to board the train and to occupy the plank across the top bunks before the cell was filled. Filled is the right word. The guards responsible for operating the train used boots and rifle butts to shove the incredible number of twenty-nine people into our four-person compartment. Men lay in the tiny space beneath the lower bunks. Men lay on other men in the middle and upper bunks. Some stood packed together in the space between, with their heads uncomfortably bowed under the planks I lay on. Arms and legs and bodies were mixed together.

  The stink and confusion were terrible. I think we were two or three days on the first leg. The dominant smell was urine, and the floor was always wet. I had been dehydrated by a violent three-day attack of diarrhea in Butyrka and, while my bowels were beginning to come under my voluntary control now, I was feverish again almost as soon as we were put aboard the train, and the dehydration persisted all the way to Kuibyshev. Sleep was a haphazard affair, but at least, if you could find any way to compose yourself and drop off for a while, the guards did not bother you. The weather was warm and got warmer as we traveled east and then south. The frosted glass window in the cell was fastened shut, but the cell door was just open bars, and once out in the open country where curious civilians could no longer see what kind of mail was being carried in such mass loads to eastern Russia, the guards for their own sakes threw open the windows in their corridor and we could see the countryside sliding by.