Dolgan, Alexander

Before arrest

Alexander Dolgan was born on September 29, 1926 in the Bronx , New York , his father was Michael Dolgan, an immigrant from Poland , and the mother of Annie Dolgan. In 1933, Michael Dolgan went on a short-term business trip to the Soviet Union to work as an engineer at the Moscow Automobile Plant. After a year of work in Moscow, Michael extended the contract for another year, provided that the Soviet Union paid for the arrival of his family. However, when the second year of Michael’s contract ended, he was unable to leave the USSR due to bureaucratic obstacles set by Soviet officials, as a result of which he and his family were trapped. Alexander Dolgan and his older sister, Stella, grew up in Moscow during the Great Terror in the late 1930s and during the Second World War . In 1943, the 16-year-old Alexander took a job at the US Embassy in Moscow .

Arrest

In December 1948, a US citizen Dolgan worked as a junior clerk (a file clerk) at the American Embassy in Moscow. During the lunch break, he was suddenly arrested by the Soviet State Security Service, the MGB . He was imprisoned in the infamous Lubyanka , and then in Lefortovo prison . False accusations of espionage against the Soviet Union were made against him. In these prisons, he spent a year devoid of proper sleep and food, and survived severe psychological and physical torture, the purpose of which was to induce him to “confess” to the investigator, Colonel Sidorov ^[2] , in non-existent sins. After Dolgan successfully overcame this test, he was transferred to Sukhanovka , a prison in a building of a former monastery. There he survived several months of intense torture and turned out to be one of the very few who survived in this prison and did not lose his mind. He used special practices to maintain his psyche, such as measuring the dimensions of his camera in various ways, as well as the distances he traveled in the camera for a certain period. According to his estimates, for the time spent in Sukhanovka, he walked the camera a distance sufficient to pass from Moscow through the whole of Europe and reach the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. A stay in Sukhanovka brought him to the brink of death, and after that he was transferred to a hospital at Butyrka prison. His whereabouts were known to Truman , Eisenhower, and the US government, but none of them did anything to save him because of the fear that the Soviet authorities could inflict even more damage on Dolgan because of the instability and fragility of American-Soviet relations.

Dolgan was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. He ended up in Dzhezkazgan , in Kazakhstan , where he worked for several months, until he was again summoned to Moscow. His call was initiated by the famous colonel Mikhail Ryumin , man number 2 after Viktor Abakumov in the state security system of the Soviet Union and the "chief designer" of the " Doctors' Affair ". Ryumin intended to use Dolgan as a puppet in the demonstration process. Dolgan was again sent to Sukhanovka, where Ryumin personally tortured and beat him, trying to force him to confess to participating in several anti-Soviet conspiracies. For several months, Dolgan went through terrible torture, but did not succumb until Stalin died and Ryumin was arrested. These two events caused a loss of interest in the exponential process, and Dolgan was sent back to Dzhezkazgan, where he was imprisoned until 1956. Dolgan was not in the Kengir campsite, but in another camp of Steplag nearby. However, in his memoirs he described the Kengir uprising according to eyewitness accounts.

After conclusion

After his release from prison, Dolgan returned to Moscow. The condition for his release was a ban on contacts with US authorities. Dolgan found that both his mother and father were arrested and tortured in order to get them to accuse him, causing his mother to go insane. He settled in the bureau to translate several medical journals into English for the USSR Ministry of Health and became friends with several well-known prisoners of the Gulag, including George Tenno , and Alexander Solzhenitsyn . Solzhenitsyn included some episodes from the history of Dolgan in his book " The Gulag Archipelago ."

In 1965, Dolgan married Irina (nee?), In 1966 they had a son, Andrei. Dolgan's mother died in 1967, and his father - in 1968. In 1971, thanks to the efforts of his sister, Stella Krymm (Krymm), who managed to get out of the USSR in 1946, and Ambassador to Austria John P. Hums (John Portner Humes, 1921-1985) Dolgan managed to get an exit visa, and he returned to the US and settled in Rockville , Maryland . Dolgan got a job in the Soviet-American medical sector of the Fogerti International Center at the National Institute of Health . In 1975 he published (in collaboration with Patrick Watson ) the bestseller History of Alexander Dolgan: An American in the Gulag ( Alexander Dolgun's Story: An American in the Gulag ), in this book he described in detail his experience in the Soviet camps.

Dolgan’s health was seriously undermined by the torture and beatings he endured, and he was tormented by numerous illnesses. In 1972, he received compensation from the US embassy for not receiving wages for the period of service from 1949 to 1956 in the amount of $ 22,000. He complained that he was paid "for nuts", and he should have received at least a percentage of unpaid salary.

Dolgan died on August 28, 1986, at the age of 59 in Potomac , Maryland, from renal failure . He left behind a wife and son.

• Dolgun, Alexander, and Watson, Patrick, "Alexander Dolgun's Story: An American in the Gulag."
  • NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1975, ISBN 0-394-49497-0
  • Ballantine Books, 1976, ISBN 0-345-25801-0 (paperback)
• “American Tells of His Arrest and 8 Years of a Soviet Captive.” New York Times. December 28, 1973.
• “Alexander Dolgun; American was held for 8 years in the Gulag. ”New York Times. August 29, 1986.
• American in the Gulag - Russian translation of the book "Alexander Dolgun's Story: An American in the Gulag." ^[3]
• Page in the "Open List"

• Sgovio, Thomas
• Noble, john
• Kovacs, Rose