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Alexander Michael Dolgun (29 September 1926 – 28 August 1986) was an American inmate in the Soviet Gulag who wrote about his experiences in 1975 after being allowed to leave the Soviet Union.
He survived several months of torture and kept his sanity using tactics such as measuring various distances in his cell as well as distances he covered walking; he estimated that in his time there, the distance he covered walking was enough to take him from Moscow across Europe and halfway across the Atlantic Ocean. His time in Sukhanovka brought him to the brink of death, and he was transferred to the hospital at Butyrka prison to recuperate. His whereabouts were known by Truman, Eisenhower and the US government, but they did nothing for fear of Soviet authorities further harming Dolgun due to fragile US-Soviet relations.
Dolgun was finally given a 25-year sentence in the Gulag. He ended up in Steplag at Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, where he labored for several months until being called back to Moscow. His recall was initiated by colonel Mikhail Ryumin, No. 2 to Viktor Abakumov in the Soviet Union's State Security. Ryumin intended 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 fully succumbing but eventually signed several nonsensical confessions. Interest in him declined and he was eventually shipped back to Dzhezkazgan, to a different camp site, located near the village of Krestovaya (Крестовая). In 1952 he was moved to Желдор-поселок (Zheldor-poselok), to a construction site, in 1954 he was moved to a camp site by the settlement of Никольский (Nikolsky, now the city of Satbayev), for construction works. He was interned in Steplag camps until 13 July 1956. On many occasions he managed to find a relatively easy job at camp hospitals.Dolgun, Alexander, and Watson, Patrick, "Alexander Dolgun's Story: An American in the Gulag." Ballantine Books edition, 1976, Conditions at Dzhezkazgan gradually improved after Stalin's death in March 1953. Dolgun did not serve at Kengir, but at a camp nearby. He did, however, describe the Kengir uprising in his autobiography from witnesses' accounts.
Dolgun married 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 escaped from the Soviet Union in 1946, and Ambassador John P. Humes, Dolgun managed to get an exit visa and relocated to Rockville, Maryland. Dolgun took a job at the Soviet-American Medicine section of the Fogerty International Center at the National Institutes of Health. In 1975, he published the bestseller , co-written with Patrick Watson, which recounted his Gulag experience in detail.
Dolgun died on 28 August 1986, aged 59, in Potomac, Maryland, of kidney failure. He was survived by his wife and son.
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