Pre-Gulag Years

Alexander Dolgun was born on September 29th, 1926 in the Bronx, New York City, the son of Michael Dolgun, an immigrant from Poland, and his wife, Annie Dolgun. In 1933, Michael travelled to the Soviet Union as a short-term technician at Moscow Automotive Works. After a year in Moscow, his father consented to another one-year tour with the stipulation that the Soviet Union pay for his family to come over as well. However, when Michael's second tour of duty was up, he was prevented from leaving by bureaucratic barriers erected by the Soviet Union and his family was trapped. Alexander Dolgun and his older sister, Stella, grew up in Moscow during the Great Stalinist Purges of the late 1930's and the time of the Great Patriotic War. In 1943, the 16-year-old Alexander took a job at the United States Embassy in Moscow.

Gulag

In late 1948, Alexander was working as a file clerk at the Embassy. During his lunch break, he was suddenly taken into custody by the Russian State Security, the MGB. Alexander was interned in the infamous Soviet prison Lubyanka and the soviet military prison Lefortovo. He was falsely accused of espionage agianst the Soviet Union and endured a year of sleep and food deprivation, as well as an assortment of brutal psychological and physical torture methods designed to prod him into "confessing" by his interrogator, Colonel Sidorov. After successfully enduring this trial, Alexander was transferred to Sukhanovka, a former monastery converted into a prison. He survived several months of the most sadistic tortures that his interrogators could design and was one of a very few who survived the prison with their sanity intact. Alexander was finally released from this prison and given a twenty-five year sentence in the Gulag, the network of prisoner work camps scattered throughout the Soviet Union. He ended up at Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, where he labored for several months until being called back to Moscow at the behest of General Ryumin, No. 2 in the Soviet Union's State Security Department behind Abukamov. Ryumin intended to use Alexander as a puppet in a show trial, and prceeded to personally physically torture him until he confessed to a number of plots and conspiracies against the Soviet Union. Dolgun endured this torture without succumbing for several months until political shifts resulted in a loss of interest in the show trial and Dolgun was shipped back to Dzhezkazgan, where he was interned until 1956.

After Prison

After his release from prison on the condition that he never contact Ameican authorities, Alexander was sent back to Mosocw, where he discovered that both his mother and father had been tortured in an effort to get them to implicate him, which caused his mother to go insane. He took a job translating medical journals into English for the Soviet Health Bureau and befriended several notable personages of the Gulag, including George Tenno and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn included some of Alexander's experiences in his work "The Gulag Archipelago." Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union for his book The Gulag Archipelago. ...

Alexander married his wife Irene in 1965 and gave birth to a son, Andrew in 1966. His mother died in 1967, and his father in 1968. In 1971, through the efforts of his sister, Stella M. Krymm, who had managed to escape the Soviet Union in 1946, and Ambassador John P. Humes, Alexander managed to get an exit visa and relocated to Rockville, Md, where he worked at the Soviet-American Medicine sction of the Fogerty Internation Center at the National Institues of Health. In 1975, he published the bestseller "An American in the Gulag," which recounted his Gulag experience in detail.

Alexander's health was severely compromised by his experience, and he suffered from numerous ailments. In 1972, he received back pay of $22,000 from the U.S. Embassy for the period of service from 1949-1956 and complained that he was paid "Peanuts" for his time and should have, at the least, received interest on his salary.

Alexander died on August 28, 1986, at the age of 59 in Potomac, Md. of kidney failure. He is survived by his son and his wife.

Sources

Dolgun, Alexander. "An American in the Gulag." ballantine Books: New York. 1975

"American Tells of his Arrest and 8 years as a Soviet Captive." New York Times. 28 December, 1973.

"Alexander Dolgun; American was held 8 years in the Gulag." New York Times. 29 August, 1986.