Alexander Dolgun's Story [antikvár]

chapter 1 One day late in 1948 a young American out for an innocent walk in the streets of Moscow was accosted by an operative of the MGB, the Soviet secret police. Had he been quick to run away through the crowded streets to the American Embassy, only two blocks away, he would probably have been safe. Instead, he paused a moment to answer the agent politely. It was a fateful pause. Within seconds, the young man was a prisoner of the MGB. He would live imder their shadow for the next twenty-three years. How it began was mundane enough. In the early thirties, when jobs were scarce and pay was meager, a number of American technicians accepted offers from the Soviet Union to work in Russia for a one-year term. One of these men was Michael Dolgun, a Polish-bom New Yorker who went over in 1933 on contract to the Moscow Automotive Works. He was well paid in dollars, but it was hard to be away from his wife and two young children in New York, where he sent most of his pay. So when his employers offered to help bring his family over if he would accept a second one-year contract, Michael Dolgun accepted. Much' as he disliked Moscow, he thought he could stick it out one more year if his family was with him. Besides, things were stiU pretty tough in America. But that one year stretched into two, and then four, and then 1939 came and with it came the prospect of war. Michael Dolgun told the Soviet authorities he wanted to return home with his family. His wife, Anna, and the two children had never been happy in their drab little Moscow room anyway. But the Soviet authorities stalled. Endless bureaucratic barriers to his repatriation appeared. Michael was not politically sophisticated. If he even knew that there was an American Embassy in Moscow by this time, it never oc-