Alexander Dolgun

Alexander Michael Dolgun (born September 29, 1926 in New York City , † August 28, 1986 in Potomac ) was a US citizen and one of the few survivors of Sukhanovka Prison, which was notorious during the Stalin era .

Life

Alexander Dolgun was born to Polish immigrant Michael Dolgun and his wife Annie in the Bronx , New York . In 1933 his father Michael Dolgun went with his family to the Soviet Union to work as a technician in a car factory. Since the Soviet authorities forbade him to leave the country again, the family also lived through the time of the Great Terror .

Dolgun, who had worked as an office worker in the Moscow US embassy since 1943, was unexpectedly arrested by the MGB in late 1948 during a lunch break . The espionage against the Soviet Union accused he was as a political prisoner in the Lubyanka , in Lefortovo interned and in the Sukhanovo Prison, where he more than a year under sleep deprivation and food refusal was interrogated and physical and psychological torture. Dolgun only survived a month of continuous sleep deprivation by learning to sleep standing up without being detected by the guard. In order not to suffer the fate of other Sukhanovka inmates, who lost their minds if they survived the torture at all, he distracted himself with mental games and mental arithmetic, measured his cell with the simplest means or wandered from Moscow across Europe and over in his mind the Atlantic to America .

Dolgun was eventually sentenced to 25 years in the Gulag and interned in Jeskazgan , Kazakhstan . In the meantime, the Deputy Minister for State Security, Mikhail Ryumin , brought him back to Moscow for a show trial and continued the brutal torture himself, until Dolgun admitted various conspiracies against the Soviet Union. After political turmoil, Dolgun was sent back to Dscheskasgan, where he remained interned until his release in 1956.

He then settled in Moscow, where he was not allowed to contact US authorities. He learned that his parents had also been tortured and that his mother remained severely mentally damaged. Dolgun found a job at the Soviet Health Department as a translator of medical journals into English. At the time he made contact with other Gulag survivors, including Georg Tenno and Alexander Solzhenitsyn , who processed parts of his life story for his book The Archipelago Gulag .

Dolgun married his wife Irene in 1965 and had a son, Andrew. After the death of his parents in 1971, thanks to the efforts of his sister, who fled the Soviet Union in 1946, and the US ambassador, he was able to leave the country and returned to the USA, to Rockville , Maryland , where he worked for the National Institutes of Health . In 1975 he published together with Patrick Watson, also a former Gulag inmate, his experiences in the Soviet penal camps ( Alexander Dolgun's Story: An American in the Gulag ). For the period from 1949 to 1956, he received an additional payment of 22,000 dollars from the US embassy in 1972, which he called "peanuts" and which at least demanded regular interest payments. Due to his bad health, Dolgun died on August 28, 1986 at the age of 59 of kidney failure .

Quote

“His deputy then beats Ryumin all the more happily. His place of work is Sukhanovka, the 'Generals' room. It is paneled all around in walnut, silk curtains frame the curtains and the door, a large Persian carpet muffles the steps. So that this splendor is not damaged, a dirty, blood-stained mat is spread over the carpet for the person to be beaten. During the execution, it is not a simple guard who assists in the 'Generals' room, but a colonel. 'So, so,' begins Ryumin politely and gently moves the two-inch-thick rubber club, 'you have passed the test of insomnia with honor (Al-der D. learned to sleep standing up, and this ruse helped him, the sleepmarters hold out for a month). - Now let's try the stick. With us nobody can withstand more than two or three treatments. Pants down and laid down on the mat! ' The colonel sits on the victim's back. AD resolves to count the strokes. He still doesn't know what it is like, a blow to the sciatic nerve when the buttocks are sunken from starving. You don't feel it at the point of impact - it explodes your skull. After the first blow, the victim almost loses consciousness in the pain, his nails dig into the mat. Ryumin tries to strike precisely. The eaten Colonel depresses the man lying down - just the right job for three big stars on the armpits! (After the treatment, the victim cannot walk, it is of course not carried either, they drag it across the floor. Soon the buttocks swell so that the trousers can no longer be buttoned, but there are hardly any welts left. It is a terrible diarrhea next, and crouching on the bucket in his solitary cell, D. begins to laugh uproariously. A second treatment is still ahead of him, then a third, the skin will burst, and in the end Ryumin loses his temper and begins to hit the stomach until the abdominal wall cracks open and the intestines well out of the huge fracture; then they take the prisoner with peritonitis to the Butyrka infirmary and for a while give up their attempts to beat the decency out of him. "

- Alexander Solzhenitsyn : The GULAG archipelago

literature

• American Tells of his Arrest and 8 years as a Soviet Captive . In: New York Times . December 28, 1973.
• Alexander Dolgun: American was held 8 years in the Gulag . In: New York Times . August 29, 1986.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ We prisoners had an unwritten rule, steal another man's clothes and you'd get a hiding, steal a man's bread and you'd die: The chilling testimony from the Gulags' forgotten victims . In: Daily Mail , March 31, 2011
2. ↑ Alexander Solzhenitsyn : The Gulag Archipelago . Volume I, Chapter 3 The Interrogation . P. 122 f.