He was a cruel victim of fate, a young American living in the USSR forced to endure unimaginable torture and brutal beatings, who would later be one of the many sources for Gulag Archipelago. In 1933 Alexander Dolgunâ??s father went to the Soviet Union to work as an automotive technician; however, when his short-term contract expired, he was not allowed to leave. Alexander and his sister Stella thus grew up in Moscow during the Great Purge and World War II. He started working at Embassy Moscow in 1943 at the age of 16. In 1948 he was apprehended by State Security and interrogated at the notorious KGB headquarters at Lubyanka on suspicions of espionage. His nightmare had only begun.
He was brutally tortured and finally forced to â??confess.â? He was then transferred to Sukhanovka prison, which was known for being even worse than Lubyanka. He survived several months of intense torture and was one of a very few who survived the prison with their sanity intact, using tactics such as measuring the distances he covered walking; he estimated that he â??walkedâ? from Moscow through Europe and halfway across the Atlantic Ocean. Although his whereabouts were known by the U.S. government, it did nothing to help him, on the pretense that bilateral relations were so fragile Dolgun would be harmed.
Dolgun was eventually sentenced to 25 years in the Gulag, the network of prisoner work camps scattered throughout the Soviet Union, and ended up in Kazakhstan, where he was interned for several months until being called back to Moscow. His recall was initiated by the infamous General Mikhail Ryumin, No. 2 in the Soviet Unionâ??s State Security Department, who wanted to use Dolgun as a puppet in a show trial. Dolgun was once again sent to Sukhanovka, where Ryumin personally tortured and beat him in an effort to get him to confess to a number of plots and conspiracies against the Soviet Union. For several months, Dolgun endured this torture without succumbing until political shifts resulted in a loss of interest in the show trial and Dolgun was shipped back to Kazakhstan, where he stayed until 1956.
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