An American in the Gulag

by Alexander Dolgun

  My outpourings to Orlov were a mixture of precious, treasured trivialities like the Zagorsk trip,, and bitter, angry accounts of the terrible year that had just passed. As I talked he listened gravely and attentively. He was on extra rations because, as it turned out, he had come to Lefortovo from a prison camp to give some desired information. He always shared his extra ration with me. He had a few cigarettes and offered one from time to time. Tobacco was a luxury I had not had for months and it was ecstasy to light the first one up, although it made me cough and go dizzy.

  “Well,” Orlov said, when I had pretty well exhausted my story some days later, and was rested and quite happy and relaxed in this bright warm cell, and had stopped shivering at last, “I think you had better prepare yourself for camp, and I can be helpful.”

  I did not like the sound of that. I said, “But they are through with me now.

  They have nothing on me. Surely they’ll have to let me out soon?”

  Orlov looked a little embarrassed and avoided my eyes. Then he said, “I really am afraid you will have to face the strange reality you find yourself in. Yes, I am afraid you will have to do that. If they truly found nothing against you, your sentence will not be a very long one, that is exactly true. But you will truly and unavoidably be given a sentence. It is not possible for the Organs to arrest a man and then free him. They never make mistakes, you know; I believe your diligent interrogator informed you of that fact?”

  I just stared at him blankly.

  He said, “Look. Cheer up. Camp is not fun, but after what you have come through with such shining courage, if I may say such words, you will do very well there. There are two kinds of prisoners in camp: the kind who die quickly and the kind who make life quite acceptable for themselves and survive very well. You are truly and definitely not the kind who dies quickly, and I will give you some hints about how to manage.”

  I pulled myself together. I thought, Well, at least the interrogation is over and if I survived a year of that hell, another year in a prison camp can’t be so bad. I was interested to hear Orlov speak, now that I had stopped my outpourings, and he began to make himself known a bit through his fairly elaborate way of talking. I asked him about his own background.

  “You see, I am an economist, and a good one. I helped organize the agricultural economy around Saratov. We were truly very successful. We had such a truly splendid harvest of wheat in 1938 that I was given the Second Order of Honor by the state. I was truly a very loyal and patriotic man. I volunteered for the army on the second day of the war. I was made a senior lieutenant and sent to the front very quickly. I was captured late in 1941. The Germans treated me very badly in camp. I know something of the kind of life you have had, truly I do.”

  We sat and smoked in silence for a while and I watched the memory of that bad experience darken his face. Then he went on.

  “A strange thing happened. Some Soviet officers came to see me in camp. They were dressed in German uniforms and they looked well fed and happy. They told me confidentially that I would be starved to death unless I agreed to work for the Germans. I said I could never do that. They said there was nothing to it, that they were sure there would come a way to escape someday and rejoin their units. They did not consider themselves traitors. Clearly they could not serve the Soviet Union again if they died in prison, and they were just going to be careful not to do anything for the Germans that would compromise their loyalty.

  “It was truly a seductive argument It seduced me. I agreed. I was taken to an intelligence-training camp and fed well and taught the German language, which is truly a difficult language to learn. I got a uniform and eventually a sidearm and joined an intelligence unit called NORD.”

  I said, “How could you work for German intelligence without compromising your loyalty?”

  Orlov scratched his head and looked miserable, and I felt sorry for having asked. After a while he said, “I always counted on getting back to my own troops somehow, my own people, and turning over German intelligence to them. We were assigned to a Colonel Krause. His unit was stationed at Mogilev. He was a specialist in recruiting Soviet POW’s and deserters into the German Army. I am truly sad to have to tell you there were many deserters. Conditions in our army were very bad in many cases. A lot of those boys came from the country. They were not educated.

  They wanted full bellies and girls and vodka to drink, and they hated their officers and they knew nothing of the Soviet and they had no politics, and all they truly wanted after a while was to survive. So they deserted.”

  He looked dejected, talking about this period of his life. I was going to suggest changing the subject, but I guess he wanted to get it off his chest. He said, “Truly, 1 would have to use these words, I would have to say that what I did was not different in fundamentals from what those illiterate boys did. I did what I did to survive.”

  I felt sorry for his guilt, and I told him so. I felt a bit contemptuous of his treason, but I did not say that.

  He said, “I was in touch with all kinds of classified German material, in Krause’s unit. And now I am beginning to justify myself a little, because they kidnapped Krause in the U.S. Zone in Berlin last month, and I am here in Moscow to meet him and confront him. They will take me to Lubyanka for the confrontation. To some extent I can truly redeem myself in the eyes of the state now, I think. But I felt so guilty at the end of the war that I went west instead of east, through the British Zone, and then ended up in Liege. I had been there before, on furlough. I got married to a lady who ran an inn. It was a nice life, a comfortable life, and I thoroughly and confidently expected to end my days quietly as an innkeeper.

  “One day a man came in who spoke Russian. He said he was an old emigre. I was just like you when you first came to this cell a few days ago. I was entirely and totally needful of human communication in my native language, and I truly told him my whole story and asked him to come often to talk. He came again the very next day, very punctually. We began to drink together. The next thing I knew I was waking up out of a drugged sleep on a Soviet plane. He was an agent, don’t you see. I even paid for the drink that knocked me out,” he finished ruefully.

  For his collaboration, Orlov had been given ten years in labor camps, and life had been pretty hard in Dubravlag, one of the Potma group of camps where he had been since late in 1945. But his interrogation had been easy. He had held nothing back since he felt himself a loyal Soviet and needed to pay for his sense of guilt. So no beatings, no sleepless nights, and reasonable rations. Now, because he was freely giving the interrogators information about the German colonel and had agreed to be taken for a confrontation with Krause, he was given extra rations and quite easy treatment. Because he shared those rations with me I began to regain my strength quite quickly. My buttocks began to develop a little cushioning again and my thighs to fill out.

  It was like a holiday in cell 216. Sunlight flooded the cell every afternoon through the frosted window. The cell was small, less than three meters square, but the light and the pale beige walls gave it a larger feeling. I wallowed in sleep every night, and the feast of talking went on and on.

  Occasionally a guard would come in the morning and take Orlov away for the day, but I never left the cell. I started doing push-ups and dynamic tension exercises again, and although I trembled with the exertion of two or three push-ups at first, I made very rapid progress. My muscles began to tone up, and I steadily gained weight, though of course not very much weight. Orlov, on his days away, was put in a Champagne van, and once in a Meat van—we both laughed about that—and was driven to Lubyanka for his meetings with Krause and his interrogation. He was always cheerful when he came back, and would talk about the joy of hearing the noises of the city around him as the van pushed its way through daytime Moscow traffic.

  He began to tell me about the life in camp, and gave me some rules for survival that I never forgot. Some of them were inverted parodies of the kind of puritan schoolbook sayings we used to get when we were
kids. “Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow,” for example, was one of a series of little sermons about conserving energy. “Never tell the truth if a lie will do,” as part of dealing with, and confusing, your captors. He told me that it was important to find an income-producing occupation, that there was always some need to be met in every camp and if you could find a way to construct or steal some needed objects (loaves of bread if they put you to work in the kitchen, for example), you did not hesitate to do so and to sell what you could to your fellow prisoners in exchange for other survival items.

  He warned me to watch out for common criminals and laughed when I told him that had been my first assumption about him.

  “They are truly very tough boys, Alex. They are organized all over the Soviet Union. They have their own code of rules, which is very strict, and if you find yourself in a camp where political prisoners and common criminals are mixed, be careful, because the ‘coloreds’—that’s the name they are known by—live by stealing from the politicals. The coloreds call the political prisoners ‘fascists,’ you know, and they call themselves urki.”

  “Urki?”

  “That’s their name. Now listen to me, Alexander Mikhailovich. These urki have one large advantage over the political prisoners. You’d better know about this. The urki come to prison ready—equipped, if I can use those words, for survival. They have a code of laws that binds them together. They understand each other’s way of thinking. They have lived underground outside in a way that teaches them how to cooperate against a hostile world, and when they come inside it’s not that much different for them.”

  He wagged a finger at me for emphasis. “They consider themselves loyal Soviet citizens who happen to live by a different code, by the way. They think all the politicals are enemies of the people.”

  “That’s why they call them ‘fascists’?”

  “I guess so. The urki’s only sin is getting caught. Some of them have patriotic slogans tattooed on their arms. They are a crude, hateful, antisocial gang, Alexander Mikhailovich, but they hang together and that makes them strong.”

  “And the politicals?”

  “Entirely different! Entirely different! Every political is convinced of his own innocence and convinced of every other political’s guilt. They have no street experience in cooperating for survival. They are thrown into confusion by their imprisonment. They distrust each other. They are completely incapable of organizing, you see. So they are the perfect victims for the urki. When they were outside, the urki practiced their trade on a suspicious, distrustful, disorganized society of ‘civilians.’ Inside they do the same thing. So watch out!”

  Orlov asked me if I had ever been tormented with salty food, and I told him about the herring soup in the hard punishment cell. “Watch out for that,” he said. “Sometimes when you are in transportation they will use it to drive you truly crazy. They are obliged by the regulations to give a certain number of grams of meat or fish, you see. So they give salt herring. Then people go crazy for water. Sometimes they will give the water and refuse to take you to the toilet, so you either develop terrible pain in your bladder, and maybe get kidney problems from holding in your water, or you relieve yourself on the floor. They will punish you for that, of course.”

  I missed Orlov a great deal when he went to Lubyanka for the day, and we fell to talking together when he got back at night like old companions who had not seen each other for years. I was becoming deeply fond of him for his old-fashioned manner and his courtesy and his careful, understanding way of listening to me and his unselfish sharing of his food. While he was away, I busied myself with exercise. I picked up my walking where I had left off, in Germany, west of Stuttgart, heading for the Rhine valley and the border with France. I made some more needles and carefully repaired my clothes with towel threads.

  It was about a month after my stumbling arrival in cell 216. I was much stronger now. My mind was alert and ready for anything. Orlov went out early one morning for another session at Lubyanka and I was doing arm and chest dynamic exercises when the door opened suddenly and a voice came from outside, “D. With all your belongings. Outside!”

  I wondered for a moment whether it had anything to do with Orlov, whether he had been talking about me and had procured some kind of change for me. I could not imagine what. I was sure, incidentally, that Orlov was asked to report on me, but I doubted that he would ever report anything harmful, not that there was much to report, except my hatred for Sidorov and my attempt to outwit him and eventually to kill him. And I had already been punished for that.

  They took me out to the courtyard. I was pleased in a childlike way to see a butcher’s van standing there, with colored pictures of pieces of meat on it and six little ventilators on the roof. Nothing was said. I was wordlessly motioned inside and I could hear that a guard had climbed in after me, just as in the first ride to Lefortovo. It seemed like another turning point. The fact that I had been made to bring all my belongings made me certain that I would never see Lefortovo again, and my heart was singing. I began to hum quietly as we rolled through the streets of Moscow:

  Over hill, over dale,

  We will hit the dusty trail

  As those caissons go rolling along!

  Outside I could hear traffic sounds, the bell of a trolley, a bus’s exhaust, and best of all the voices of free people talking as they jostled by the van at a stopping point. Once someone even bumped the side of it going by and slapped a hand on it, quite oblivious of the kind of meat it was carrying, I thought to myself.

  I was held in a box downstairs in Lubyanka. I was feeling quite sad about not saying good-by to Orlov. I assumed that I would be put into a solitary cell again, now that I had spilled my guts to Orlov for their benefit, and while that thought was a bit discouraging, I felt strong enough for solitude again. It was like a sort of accounting system. Just as I had considered any five-minute block of sleep I could steal in Lefortovo to be money in the bank against my need to keep alert and ahead of Sidorov, I considered my holiday month with Orlov to have built the account up to the point where I could stand several months on my own again, if it came to that.

  After a short while the door of my box opened and I was told to bring my bundle and follow a guard. I was amused to hear the tongue-clucking again. I followed him to a cell on the third floor, cell 33. To my pleasure, the guard stopped outside the cell and opened the peephole and looked inside. I was to have company after all. I had a sudden moment of guessing it was Orlov. But I was wrong, because I was never to see Orlov again. Instead, there were two strangers inside, a tall, rather courtly-looking man in his fifties with gray hair and bushy eyebrows, and a short, dark man in his thirties. I felt very excited. The cell was quite large. It had been a hotel room in the old days when this building had been the Insurance Hotel. I walked forward briskly with my hand out, imitating Orlov, and said, “Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Dolgun. I am an American citizen.” I addressed the older man first. He gave a little bow, very courteously, and said simply, “Igor Krivoshein.” That was a familiar name from Russian history: a Krivoshein had been a minister under Tsar Nicholas II. Krivoshein stepped back and waved the other man ahead very politely. The dark-haired guy grinned a big, toothy grin and shook hands very warmly. He was much less reserved than Krivoshein. He said, “My name is Feldman, and I bet I know all about you!”

  I raised my eyebrows. Feldman said, “Sure. I read about it in London. You were picked up outside the American Embassy, right? Sure, sure. I read the story in some paper, I don’t remember.

  “I was a correspondent for Red Star,” he added. “I used to get a bit loaded with my English friends and tell anti-Soviet jokes. I thought they were pretty funny jokes. One of my English friends turned out to be not so English and not so friendly, and here I am. Fifty-eight point ten.”

  Krivoshein had fought in the White Army in the Civil War, and when they were defeated in the Crimea he had found his way to Paris and settled down to wor
k as a taxi driver. Quite a comedown, he said, for a man descended from a famous Russian statesman. During World War II he served in the French underground and began to dream of going home again, because he was terribly homesick for Russia and was sure that things would change after the war. Sure enough, Stalin, in 1946, announced that Russian emigres were forgiven and invited home. Krivoshein was immensely happy. He set out with his French-born wife and child, got to Moscow, and was given a place to live and a job in Sverdlovsk, in the Urals, about fifteen hundred kilometers east of Moscow. He worked in a garage. One day his boss told him that he wanted Krivoshein to make trips to Moscow for him to get parts and so on, and that he would go with him on the first trip to help him along. Of course, when they got to Moscow the boss turned Krivoshein right over to the MGB, and the only puzzle is why they bothered with the Sverdlovsk honeymoon.1

  I stayed with these two only for three or four days. The cell was bright and smelled of fresh floor wax because every morning we were given a brush and a bit of wax and told to polish the parquet floor with it. In the afternoons we were taken up on the roof for exercise. There was a high parapet around the roof, and guards in boxes, so you could not see the streets of Moscow below, but you could hear the traffic and the voices of people and once I even heard children laughing. I continued my exercises every day and discussed the possibilities of the future with Feldman and Krivoshein. Feldman believed they would get one-to-three-year sentences and found that tolerable. I was appalled at the cool way they looked at the prospect of years of confinement, but to them it seemed to be natural and acceptable. Although Krivoshein used to sigh gloomily and say, “Never expect anything good from the MGB!”

  Both had signed Article 206, termination of interrogation, and neither had had a rough time in interrogation.

  Feldman said, “Dolgun, I don’t know how you did it. I admire you very much.

  Very much. I really do. I thank God they did not take you to Sukhanovka.” I had never heard of it.