An American in the Gulag

by Alexander Dolgun

  I am alone in this land of fear.

  My song laments in a cruel year.

  Not so alone, now.

  Three young men had taken me under their wing. All three had been patients, although I had not gotten to know them well. Two were from the Baltic area: Estonia and Lithuania. The other was a Ukrainian. They were all changing trains in Moscow and heading home. They kept me well fed and we stuck together throughout the ride. The time came when we should have arrived in Moscow, as I had cabled my mother. We were still far out in the country. I began to be very anxious about her waiting for me to show up, and no train.

  Night fell. The lights of Moscow showed up in the distance as we came around a curve. But the train was going very slowly now. There were many stops as we came into the outskirts. The sky was beginning to pale again as we came nearer to the center of the city. In the end we were seventeen hours late. I got off the train with my three young friends. We were all heavily laden. I had my sack and my medical kit and my books. I was bent nearly double trying to carry them all. I wore my patched, thin, and threadbare navy surplus shirt and my equally worn navy surplus gabardine trousers: the remains of the clothes I had on when they picked me up. I wore them proudly.

  I looked all around the milling platform for my mother, although I scarcely expected her to be there after all that delay. I thought I would just get a bus to her apartment.

  Suddenly I felt a hand on my sleeve. I craned my neck around my bundles. There was a drawn, terribly old face, too old, a face that I had kissed and thought of so often. My mother had tears in her eyes but she was not crying. She said, “My poor Alex. They have crippled you terribly!”

  I dropped my things and stood up. We just stared at each other a moment and then she was in my arms, laughing and crying at the same time. “Why, you’re not crippled at all! You’re fine, aren’t you, my poor poor Alex, my poor poor Alex!”

  My mother was only fifty-seven. She looked seventy-five. There was another old woman with her. I was introduced to her. She was a practicing physician and they shared an apartment on Kirov Street, just a short walk from the station. The doctor carried my guitar and I could walk upright with my other two bags.

  At the apartment my mother shamed me. She said, “Alex, you got off the train with three boys. Where are they?”

  I had forgotten my benefactors. I told her about them and she insisted that I go and find them. It took me an hour to track them down. I was exhausted by the time we got back to the apartment, but my mother had prepared an immense meal for us all. She seemed nervous and forgetful and a little strange. I wanted to be rid of my friends, as much as I was grateful for their help, because I knew there was something wrong with my mother and I was anxious to hear about it as soon as possible. Finally the boys had to leave to arrange for their next train. My mother’s friend discreetly left the room and went for a walk, and we were alone.

  I said, “Mom, what happened?”

  She began to clench and unclench her fists. Her eyes were quite strange. Suddenly something caught my eye: her fingernails were terribly distorted and crooked. I grabbed her hands. I made a terrible surmise. I said, “You’ve been in prison! They’ve tortured you!”

  She nodded. She could hardly speak. I realized now that there were scars on her temples and forehead and that she had been beaten. I began to feel sick. As her story came out, slowly, haltingly, confused, I had to hold myself under control to keep from vomiting.

  They had arrested her in 1950. For months she had pestered the MGB (it was still MGB then) for news of me. At first they told her I had been shot as a spy. She had a breakdown. Shortly after she recovered she got my triangle letter from Kuibyshev, in which I asked whether the American Embassy had given her my personal belongings. She went to the embassy to demand help. At the gates the MGB arrested her. She was still emotionally very fragile. They beat her with rubber truncheons, trying to get her to incriminate me. They pushed needles under her fingernails. Now her nails would never be straight again. After a very short period of this she went quite insane and, without sentencing her, they put her in a prison insane asylum in Ryazan.

  I just sat there, shaking my head in horror as this story came out.

  Then she said, with fear in her own voice, “And Alex, I’m not completely all right in the head even now.”

  I begged her to go on. I hardly dared ask about my father. So I just said, “Tell me everything that happened.” I remember that my voice was very hoarse but I did not cry.

  They let her out early in 1954 and she came back to Moscow without a kopek. “I had a terrible time when I came back here. They had taken my apartment. The MGB man who interrogated me was living in it. He had all my furniture. They said I was an enemy of the people and I did not deserve to have anything.”

  Soon the tears were pouring down my cheeks but I did not sob. She told me she had gone to the police over and over again to claim her belongings. Her certificate of release did not mention any political charges and so the police dismissed it as meaningless. If she had been charged and then released they would have been responsible for finding her. a place to live, but she had never been charged and they just said, What the hell? and turned her into the streets.

  She actually slept under the bridges of Moscow!

  She was completely alone. Now she told me about my father. Two days after she was picked up they took him. He came back to Moscow in 1955. By now she had been granted a tiny room. The court had agreed that under normal circumstances she should have gotten her own apartment back, but since her son and her husband were convicted enemies of the people she could not possibly be given a larger room. They gave her a room that was ten feet square, but they told her to go to her old apartment and claim her own furniture. When she got there the apartment was empty. The MGB man had heard of the court’s decision and sold everything except a kitchen table that my father had made by hand. The court interrogated the neighbors and concluded that we had American furniture and books and other goods worth an estimated 11,000 rubles. Under Soviet law they were obliged to make restitution to her, but only 10 per cent. She got 1100 old rubles, or about $50, and on that she was able to live for a while. When my father showed up and expected to move in with her she was nearly hysterical, she said. She raged at him for having brought us all into this hell, and told him to get out and never come back. My father decided to kill himself. But a man he had known when he ran the transport service for the chief prosecutor’s office—a writer named Lev Sheinin, who once was chief criminal investigator for the USSR but had the misfortune to be a Jew and so spent some time in camp himself—talked my father out of suicide and helped him get a job in Istra, a town about fifty-five kilometers from Moscow. My mother and father never saw each other now. They were completely alienated.

  I was exhausted from traveling night and day and by the emotional extremes my mother was putting me through. Suddenly my body reflexes took over to rescue me. I began to yawn uncontrollably. We made up beds in the little apartment. The doctor came back. I stood looking out of the window for a while before I fell into bed. I thought, Somehow I have to get out of this terrible place!

  It would not be easy. I looked up my father. He was bitter and lonely, but very glad to see me. I had assumed that he had suffered on my account, as my mother had, and so I felt guilty about him, too. The guilt was quite painful. But my father had been arrested under 58.10. Two witnesses testified that he had been heard to say twice that Soviet cars were inferior to American cars.. Since American cars were at a premium right after the war in all the high levels of the Soviet bureaucracy, this would seem to have been a reasonable observation, but it earned my father a ten-year sentence to a labor camp in Mordovia.

  My mother and I could not continue to impose on her elderly friend. We moved to her tiny room. Although it was clear from the first few days that living so close to her would be difficult because of her precarious mental condition, I wanted to stay with her until I could be assigned a room of m
y own, and that would take months and maybe years. I—could not even apply for my own place until I had a job, and job hunting would have to be the first order of business as soon as I was registered as an occupant in mother’s building. Everything you do in the Soviet Union has to be officially registered.

  I went to the local passport office; an officious, insolent little junior cop was in charge of our block.

  I wrote out a housing application and signed it and submitted it, along with my passport and my certificate of release from camp. The policeman glanced over the papers. Then he looked at the building management office records on my mother’s room. Then he just shook his head and pushed my papers back at me.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “What do you mean! I’ve just come from camp. I’ve got nowhere to live. She is my mother. This is my only home.”

  “It’s too small for two people. The law demands nine square meters for each person. She has only eleven square meters. You’re out of luck.”

  I was purple with anger. “Well, just what the hell do you expect me to do?

  Sleep in the street?”

  “Not my problem; that’s the law. You’ll have to leave Moscow.”

  Before I could start yelling again he told me brusquely that if I wanted to complain I had the right to appeal to the Chief Passport Director of the Moscow Police. Number 22, Leningrad Prospekt.

  I went all the way across Moscow on foot. To my surprise, the police major who interviewed me at 22 Leningrad Prospekt was very sympathetic. I let down my usual guard and told him everything about my case, from the beginning.

  He heard it all with growing amazement. At the end he shook his head, and then suddenly pounded his fist on the desk and stood up. “You’ve had one hell of a time, Comrade, one hell of a time. Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

  He went quickly out of the office. In less than five minutes he was back. He gave me a reassuring sideways jerk of the head and said, “Chief wants to see you.” Sideways jerk of the head again to indicate where. “Come on.”

  The chief wore a general’s stars on his shoulder boards. He shook hands warmly and offered me a cigarette. “You know, those local bastards are just damned irresponsible and thick-skinned. I want you to know, Comrade, that we have given them formal instructions twice—twice, mind you—that they are to do everything they can to help unfortunate comrades like you reestablish yourselves in normal life. I don’t know what the matter is!”

  He picked up the phone and called the officious little jerk who had turned me down. In two minutes it was settled, with an impressive show of firm authority. No rage, no fireworks; just a no-nonsense order. I could live in my mother’s room.

  Walk back across Moscow to my mother’s block. Sign another form. Get the official okay.

  “But just for one month!” the little twerp warned. “Then if you don’t have a job, you leave Moscow for good.”

  He had to have the last word, of course.

  Moscow was launched on a very big building boom. I was sure, with all my experience in construction, that finding a job would be a cinch. But I was wrong. The daily trip downtown to scan the bulletin boards was frustrating because all there appeared to be was plain manual labor and, while I was quite prepared to do that if I had to, I was sure that with my various skills I could earn much more so that my poor mother could have a little comfort and we would not be so oppressed in our stark little cubbyhole.

  I held out. A couple of arc-welding jobs appeared on the notices but by the time I applied for them they were already filled. September came and went and I was thirty years old. Most of my early adult years had been spent in prisons and camps. I felt a sense of waste and an urgency to establish myself and begin to live a decent life while I still had the energy to enjoy what was left of my youth. I wanted to marry and have children. I wanted all those things a normal young American wants. Few of them would be available to me in Moscow, I knew, but I felt that once I had stabilized my life a little I could get to work on a plan of some sort for getting my mother and me back to the United States.

  In mid-October a notice appeared on the bulletin boards that looked promising.

  MINISTRY OF HEALTH PUBLISHING HOUSE

  Typist with working knowledge of English Must be able to use English typewriter.

  There was simply no such thing as a male typist in Russia. But I did not know that. The personnel chief at the publishing house of the Ministry of Health was amused when I submitted my application. I told her I had to support my mother. She said, “Look—first of all it pays only 78 rubles a month [about $75] and that’s not enough. Second, this is a woman’s job. Third, you are much too well qualified. Let me go over your documents again.”

  She looked at my certificate of release from prison. She read my character reference from Lavrenov. He had been generous. He said I was highly efficient and reliable and that I was quite qualified to operate an independent medical station and had substituted for qualified surgeons on a number of occasions.

  She asked me about my English. I told her. I had been born in New York City.

  I did not tell about working at the U.S. Embassy, because I believed that I would never even be considered for a job if they knew that.

  She was obviously very much impressed by everything I showed her and told her. She said that they were organizing a new branch dealing with foreign language medical publications and had not been able to find anyone who could handle the English division, and that I was perfectly qualified.

  “Look,” she said. “Why don’t you take this typing job for one month. In the meantime, we’ll draw up an application for the position of senior editor in the publications branch. This is a highly paid job, Comrade, and they will not process the application quickly. That’s why I suggest you take the typing job for the present.”

  I said, “What about the fact I’ve been a political prisoner? Won’t that be an obstacle here? To a senior position like that?”

  She laughed in a sardonic way. “You must be really naive,” she said. “There are so many highly skilled former political prisoners in Moscow that we couldn’t fill half our key jobs if we kept them out.”

  I suppressed the urge to ask why the hell they’d all been put away in the first place. Not her fault.

  She said, “However, I will need to indicate how it was you came to be born in the United States, and I need to know where you were working before you went to camp.”

  I had to think fast and I had to make a tough decision. I decided to lie. I said, “Well, you know there were many Soviet specialists in America in the twenties. My father was a trade attaché there for a couple of years. We came back when I was two.”

  She wrote the lie down. “And your last job before you went to camp?”

  “I was with...” I thought fast and lied again. “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”

  I did not say whose foreign affairs.

  She looked impressed. She wrote some more words and then she said, “That’s it, then. Just bring me a letter from the ministry confirming you worked there, and I can assure you you’ve as good as got the job.”

  She flashed me a friendly smile. I smiled back but I felt terrible inside. There was no conceivable way short of forgery to get that letter. I dimly heard her telling me where to report for the typist’s job on Monday. I went out gloomily and walked all the way home, trying to figure something out.

  I thought my position through very carefully. I wanted that job badly and I knew they needed me badly. I finally decided on a bold step. I wrote a detailed letter describing my case fully and accurately, except for one detail. I did not admit in the letter that I had lied to the personnel chief. I simply stated that the Ministry of Health required a certificate indicating where I had worked prior to my arrest, and that I was forbidden under the terms of my release to go to the embassy.

  I also wrote that I would like very much to reclaim my personal belongings from the embassy and, since I could not go there myself,
I wondered if the foreign ministry through its regular contacts could request the return of my clothes, and pass them on to me. This was a move designed to let American officials know that I was alive and in Moscow. It was the first step in my repatriation. The clothes and books and other things were secondary. The essential need was to make the contact and let my country know it still had a living, breathing citizen named Alex Dolgun.

  In the letter I was honest and straightforward about my birth and the circumstances of my coining to Moscow. I read it all over several times. Then I put it in an envelope and addressed it to the personal attention of V. M. Molotov, the foreign minister. I posted it and crossed my fingers.

  Then I reported to the publishing house of the Ministry of Health and started my work as the Only Male Typist in the USSR. At the end of the first day I was given a job certificate to prove I was employed and a notice requiring me to report to the appropriate militia office and register for my military ticket, which meant selective service.

  The job certificate from the personnel department gave my name as A. M. Dovgun-Doldzhin, perpetuating the inexplicable MGB spelling mistake from years back. It declared that I was employed as a typist with a knowledge of English and a salary of 78 new rubles.

  Doldzhin, unlike Ivanov/Ivanova and other Russian names, gives no indication of the sex of the person. The building management chief, a tall, fat woman in her fifties, looked at the certificate and said in a whiskey voice, “Well, why didn’t this typist come herself?”

  I said, “She did come.”

  “Then where the hell is she?”

  I laughed and said, “Right here. It’s me.”

  The woman was quite upset. She looked at the certificate, peered around the table and looked at my trousers, blushed, and stammered, “Please forgive me; my mistake; I didn’t realize you were an ‘it’!”

  The selective service registration worried me a bit. Not that I thought it likely with my blood pressure and enlarged heart and history of hernia that I could be obliged to serve in anyone’s army. But I knew from my work in the consular section of the embassy that under American law anyone who actually serves willingly might be considered to have renounced his American citizenship. I just did not want to take any chances. I reported, told the officer in charge of the local office that I was a very sick person with high blood pressure and a weak heart, and requested a medical examination with a view to being exempted. This was promised and I was told not to worry. In the meantime I would have to carry the military ticket, but at the next annual review of status I would be thoroughly examined and if what I said was true, I was told, then I would certainly be exempted.