At nine o’clock in the morning, grim-faced and angry, I turned up at the central office. Immediately they began asking me about George Tenno, where we had gone together, what we were plotting, why we traveled by car. It looked pretty bad. I wondered if we had been bugged somehow. I kept my cool, told only the truth (though not of course the whole truth).
George had gone to an athletic meet in Tallin, on the Gulf of Finland, in October. When they asked me if I knew anything about his going to Tallin recently, I confused the dates in my mind somehow, and said, “Sure. Mid-September. An athletic meet.”
The effect on the room was instant and electric: The interrogators began to whisper excitedly among themselves. I asked to be taken to t1 toilet. They seemed to have lost interest in me for the moment.
On the way back from the toilet the guard opened the door to the wrong interrogation room. I caught a glimpse inside. Natalie Tenno was sitting inside looking haggard.
At the end of two days they let me out, without, of course, indicating any reason for my having been there. It was almost a week before I saw George again. This was the story: There had been a spectacular bank robbery in Tallin in mid-September. Three men had driven up to the bank at noon, shot the guard and every other witness they could see, and taken off with more than 2,000,000 new rubles.
One of the robbers was caught. He figured, apparently, that as long as the others were free he would be kept alive, and so he fabricated a very clever story. Having been in camp with George Tenno, and knowing his reputation, he told the police that Tenno was the brains behind the robbery and the ringleader, and so the following night, when George and Natalie returned home from the theater, six armed men were waiting for them in the darkened apartment. They flew George up to Tallin to confront the robber, then back to Moscow for interrogation. But George’s alibis were ironclad. His trip had been in October, not September as I had wrongly said (Natalie had made a similar slip, by the way), and all his fellow workers swore he had been at work the day of the robbery and for the whole month leading up to it. In the end the cops apologized to George, though not to Natalie or me.
Throughout this period I was often aware of being followed in the streets.
Later, when I got my phone, it was bugged; you could hear the interference. I had a lot of health problems stemming from Sukhanovka and from camp; it was not a fiction when I tried to escape extra duties by pleading ill health. I would be stricken with attacks of uncontrollable vomiting due to high blood pressure. There were frequent deep spasms in my belly. My broken jaw often ached terribly. When it seemed as though the surveillance over me was unending, my blood pressure would sometimes peak over 200.
And through all my troubles, George was an unfailing prop, a pillar of moral support.
One day in the early sixties George mentioned that he had recently talked with a friend and former prisoner who had written a novel about camp life. He gave me a samizdat—underground—copy of it. His own story was represented in it through a composite character named, in the book, Commander Buinovsky, I had met the other half of the composite, a naval officer named Boris Burkovsky, who now commands the historic revolutionary cruiser Aurora, which is a floating museum in Leningrad harbor. During the Yalta Conference, Burkovsky served as a liaison officer and had the misfortune to dance at a reception with Kathleen Harriman, the daughter of the
U.S. Ambassador to Moscow. I say “misfortune” because it was for this “offense” that, much later, in 1948, he received a charge of high treason and a sentence of twenty-five years. Burkovsky and I used to play Ping Pong in camp. So I read the novel eagerly and found it very good, and very accurate as a portrayal of camp life.
Then George Tenno told me that the writer wanted to interview me about my prison experiences, for another book he was planning. This was a bit risky, we thought, and so we arranged a code having to do with soccer scores, and eventually George phoned and in a casual-sounding coded sports conversation let me know the time I was to come to his apartment to meet this writer.
I arrived sharp on the agreed time of seven in the evening. I walked upstairs and knocked on the door. George introduced me to a grave, clean-shaven man with brooding eyes, who stood there with an old army leather dispatch case over the shoulder of his old military shirt. George said formally, “Please meet Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.”
We shook hands.
Over two sessions I spent several hours with Solzhenitsyn. Since he had never, in all of his researches, met a sane survivor of Sukhanovka, he was very anxious to hear about my experience there and to try to understand how I had survived. He was also fascinated with my account of psychic cell 111 at Lefortovo, and my techniques for keeping myself together through the long period of solitary confinement. Much later George was to tell me that Solzhenitsyn was putting together a monumental work on the prison system, a book to be called The Gulag Archipelago. The book in which George Tenno’s history was combined with the identity of Burkovsky in the person of “Buinovsky” was, of course, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Having escaped service in the street patrol druzhinniki, I knew that I was a prime target for Kudryashov, and sure enough, one day he turned up and told me I had been assigned the voluntary task of leading a five-man volunteer fire brigade in our office, and that extra leave went with the assignment. I found that quite acceptable; It was totally nonpolitical and susceptible to tufta. I wrote elaborate reports about how we stayed late night after night checking fire extinguishers, the safety of stoves and hot plates, escape routes and so on. I wrote up splendid accounts of fire drills that had never taken place, and I conscientiously did a good deal of “agitation” among my fellow workers just to make sure that my reputation as an eager fireman would be remarked upon by the treugolnik. I remained fire chief until the end of my days in Moscow, but Kudryashov was eventually caught taking kickbacks from authors and was forcibly “retired.”
All this time I still had the question of my military ticket and selective service status hanging over my head. The promise that I would be examined for reclassification or exemption had not been fulfilled, but since I had never heard from the board again, I decided that it would not be prudent to raise the issue myself, and I just let it ride. But sometime in 1962 or 1963, all males were called in to be issued new military tickets, this time in the form of a booklet with several pages in it: more make-work for the bureaucrats. I had learned a lesson from George Tenno, and when I went to pick up my new card, and had to fill out a form with some new information to be included in this booklet, I spoke to the major in charge in a sort of suppressed, urgent voice, and told him I had to speak to him privately. He offered me a chair and told me to go ahead and say what I had to say.
I pulled out two matches and began to twirl them violently between my fingers. I said, “Listen, comrade major. I’m very sick. I want to be examined. I have already served-Oh! Excuse me. I’m sure you understand I have to pick them up.”
I dropped to my knees on the floor, scrabbled for my matches, resumed my seat with perfect composure, and went on: “I have already served. Nine years. In the American forces in Korea. Then I spent eight years in the ranks of the—Oh! Excuse me!”
Drop to the floor again. Then back to my chair.
“Where was I? Yes. Eight years in the ranks of the KGB. Furthermore, dear comrade major, furthermore!
I am a graduate, a licensed graduate of the school of obstetrics and gynecology of the United States Embassy, 1943-48. So you see I could not possibly serve!”
The major looked quite nervous. He said in a soothing voice, “Uh, look.
Here’s a glass of water. Now relax please. I have to—”
I interrupted him. “Excuse me! You understand I have to pick them up!” I picked them up. “Now, comrade major, you were saying?”
“Uh, yes. I have to see my chief for a moment.”
I was taken to the chief. I repeated the whole impossible, crazy story and did the thing with the matches again for h
is benefit. He looked sympathetic but alarmed.
He said, “Look, comrade, I really don’t think you have to worry. I, uh... I’m sure at the next examination you will be exempted. Please relax.”
They sent me away quickly. A few days later my booklet arrived in the mail, my new military ticket. In the section under “Former Experience” it said that A. M. Dovgun-Doldzhin was “Untrained Soldiers” (sic), and under “Civilian Training” it said, “Completed Obstetrical School, U.S. Embassy, 1943/48.”
No mention of my nine years in Korea or eight years with the KGB. But that booklet was a great hit at gatherings of the Trade Union. Whenever we met and there was a new member of the group, someone would say, “Alex, show your military ticket.” It always got a good laugh.
Later that year the room I had applied for when I first started work in the publishing house came through. I had only had to wait six years. Now I was officially entitled to two rooms, my mother’s, where I was registered, and the new one. By the stratagems available to those who understand the Moscow bureaucracy I was able to exchange these two rooms for a small apartment, about thirteen by sixteen feet, with its own little bath, toilet, and kitchenette. In America we would call it an efficiency apartment. In Moscow it was considered a luxury.
It was in a nine-story concrete-block building in the northeast suburbs, on Sirenevy Bulvar, “Lilac Boulevard,” right at the end of the subway line, near Shchelkovskaya station. My apartment looked out over a little garden courtyard, and I could see the street where the head of the Moscow Soviet had planned to plant miles of lilacs before he was caught red-handed taking bribes for getting rooms and apartments for people. I had a two-ring gas stove with a little oven. I was able to squeeze in my big hard-currency refrigerator. With a bath and toilet all my own, I felt very grand indeed.
It was a lengthy drive to my office in downtown Moscow, but I preferred driving to taking the long subway ride, because by now I had learned how to get a completely full tank of gas for one ruble. All kinds of truck drivers used to register more trips than they actually took, because that way they could make much more money. They could adjust the odometers in their trucks by prodding the gears with a matchstick. But then they had to get rid of their extra gas. Millions of gallons were simply siphoned out into the sewers somewhere out in the suburbs of Moscow. It is a wonder the city did not blow up. But many drivers, like myself, arranged to meet truck drivers regularly and buy our tankful for one ruble. That amounted to about seven cents a gallon, so everyone was happy. Tufta again.
The biggest risk in keeping a car in Moscow was having your tires stolen. There was a sort of semi-underground “private industry” that sold millions of rubles worth of protection devices for cars. They made a set of smooth, roundheaded wheel nuts that no wrench would fit, except a special eccentric key that fit inside an eccentric hole in the end of the bolts and was specially made to fit only your wheel bolts. Thieves countered with big pipe wrenches with hard teeth that would get a grip on the round bolts. Then private industry made a rotating collar that fitted outside the bolt, case hardened, which simply rotated if you applied a pipe wrench to it.
Thieves began to open the central hub cover and take off the axle nut to steal the whole wheel-hub, brake drum, and all. Private industry countered with a plate that covered the whole hub, held in place by bolts with their spinning exterior caps. And so the war went.
One day, years after I moved into that apartment, I got a faded postcard in the mail. It had my own signature on it. It was an eleven-year-old application for a refrigerator. I remembered Aleksandrov. I called him at his office.— “Remember the American guy you took to the U. S. Embassy?”
A short pause, then a warm laugh. “Sure I do! Are you Dovgun-Doldzhin?”
“That’s me. Do you still want the refrigerator?”
“What refrigerator? Wait a minute! You mean you finally got your card?”
“That’s right!”
“I’ll send a messenger right over.” So there was that little debt repaid.
In the publications branch I was now the chief of a considerable establishment. I employed a staff of six full-time editorial assistants—copy editors, proofreaders, and typists. I had twenty-eight free-lance writers under contract. When the work got out of hand I would contract some translation to a friendly but overloaded translator, do it myself, and collect some overtime that way.
I was easily able to integrate myself practically, though not emotionally and spiritually, into the daily life of a Moscow bureaucrat. I discovered that tufta is really as much a part of civilian life in the Soviet Union as it is in camp. Without cheating the system nobody could survive; so everyone is engaged in tufta all the time. In Russia many people lead a kind of double life in order to be able to live with the extremely controlling and regulated manner in which the government tries to manage its society.
I had to go to political education meetings regularly. Every two or three months someone from my superior’s office would come around with the schedule of “Voluntary Political Education” sessions for the next quarter or so, and say, “Now here’s your schedule; we know you’ve volunteered for it.” (I had not!) “You will be expected to study these particular sections of Lenin’s works or these speeches by Chairman Brezhnev,” and so on and so on.
Nobody wanted to go but nobody wanted the harassment that came with refusing. We were supposed to write out ten-page analyses of a chapter or a political idea for each session. This was where tufta came in. We all cheated. We made up the reports by simply writing out several pages of Lenin or Brezhnev with enough words changed so that it would seem to be in colloquial Russian instead of the dense, uncommunicative, incomprehensible doctrinaire crap of the original. It hardly mattered. The papers we submitted were never read; they could have been pages from Dostoevski or Peter the Great for all the administration knew. All they wanted was so many pages in your handwriting. When we gathered for “discussion” we had to read aloud certain pages from the work under study and then, if you had a young, gung-ho party leader who really believed in the system, you simply had to—put up with an hour of readings and dry analysis and try to keep awake. Fortunately we had a very knowing leader for a couple of years. He would say, “Now, Comrades, today we are going to examine the following fourteen pages. But since I know that you are all very well-read and politically sophisticated and intelligent people, I will just go over the headings with you, and a few representative paragraphs, and then you will be free for advanced reading during the rest of the period.”
We would get through the fourteen pages in a few minutes and then he would release us early. There was one stubborn old party member who wanted to read the entire chapter out loud whenever it was her turn. She could not pronounce the words of foreign origin; she was scarcely literate but terribly enthusiastic. Our instructor would admonish her: “Now, Comrade, that is very good, really very good, but you know, we are all very knowledgeable here. These comrades have read these works many times. They almost know them by heart, so I really think we can stop there!”
It was routine. Every official is afraid for his position. If he does not go through the motions, someone will report him. The political supervisor or party secretary has to be able to report that the enrollment m the political indoctrination (volunteer) classes is 100 per cent. This is of course impossible in a volunteer class, yet it is achieved everywhere. Tufta. That’s it. The whole of life in the system is tufta. Back in camp, whenever a prisoner died of typhus or some other disease that had been “eradicated” twenty years earlier in the Soviet Union, we were instructed to indicate heart disease, or any other noncommunicable disease, as the cause of death. Those contagious diseases, which killed so many, had not been officially reported in the Soviet Union for decades. Many physicians and feldshers told me later that this was normal in civilian medical practice too. In those days, if some innocent and truthful physician reported the outbreak of several cases of cholera, say, he would get hell from the
supervising health unit and an instruction to change the report because Don’t you know that we don’t have any such epidemic diseases anymore?
In 1964 I met my wife Irene. We married in 1965 and our son Andrew was born within the year. George Tenno was with us on all the great occasions, sad and happy, of our lives. Irene soon came to love and admire him as much as I. He was still planning spectacular escapes. In the summer of 1968 he went on a trip to Estonia to pick up two handguns from friends in the underground there. He never got to Estonia. On the way he became violently ill. He was flown back to Moscow. Through friends in the ministry I arranged for him to be seen by top specialists. They made an exploratory operation. He had scirrhous cancer that had metastasized wildly. He died in one month. He was fifty-six.
All my best friends died. But at least I now had Irene, and a fine son of my own. And there was someone else who was to supply the last great turning point of my life—my sister, Stella. We had been in correspondence since my release, correspondence of the kind in which you safely say I am fine how are you, and not much more. What I had not known was that Stella had been slowly and determinedly badgering everyone she could get to listen to her, trying to convince them that her brother, a foreign service employee of the United States government, was alive and well and somehow forcibly detained in Moscow, and that it was time the United States government did something about that. The time had not come yet, but it was on its way.
Chapter 29
My sister Stella married a British subject, a member of the Royal Air Force, in Moscow, in 1942. She had met him at the British Military Mission, where she worked during the war. The wedding reception early m the afternoon was a lot more cheerful than it would have been if anyone there had known what the late afternoon would bring. By six thirty Soviet authorities had put her new husband on a train for Murmansk to meet a boat for England. In their view, Stella was a Soviet citizen, and marriages between Soviets and foreigners were just not acceptable.
An American in the Gulag Page 51
