An American in the Gulag

Alexander Dolgun was born on September 29, 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, Michael consented to another one-year tour with the stipulation that the Soviet Union pay for his family to come over. However, when Michael's second tour of duty was up, he was prevented from leaving by bureaucratic barriers erected by the Soviet authorities and his family was trapped. Alexander Dolgun and his older sister, Stella, grew up in Moscow during Stalin's Great Purge of the late 1930s and the Second World War. In 1943, the 16-year-old Alexander took a job at the United States Embassy in Moscow.

In late 1948, Dolgun 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. He was interned in the infamous Lubyanka and Lefortovo prisons in Moscow. He was falsely accused of espionage against the Soviet Union and endured a year of sleep and food deprivation, as well as brutal psychological and physical torture designed to prod him into "confessing" to his interrogator, Colonel Sidorov. After successfully enduring this trial, Dolgun was transferred to Sukhanovka, a former monastery converted into a prison. He survived several months of the most sadistic tortures that his captors could design and was one of a very few who survived the prison with their sanity intact.

Dolgun 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 the infamous General Ryumin, No. 2 to Viktor Abakumov in the Soviet Union's State Security Department and engineer of the Doctors' Plot. Ryumin intended to use Dolgun as a puppet in a show trial, and proceeded 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 his release from prison on the condition that he never contact the American authorities, Dolgun was sent back to Moscow, where he discovered that both his mother and father had been tortured in an effort to pressure 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 Gulag survivors, including George Tenno and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn included some of Dolgun's experiences in his work "The Gulag Archipelago."

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

Dolgun's health was severely harmed 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.

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