Alexander Dolgun

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.

Pre-Gulag years Alexander Dolgun was born on 29 September 1926 in the Bronx, New York, to Michael Dolgun, an immigrant from Poland, and his wife, Annie. 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 on the condition 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 the 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.

Gulag On 13 December 1948, 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.

After prison After his release from prison in 1956, Dolgun returned to Moscow. Under his release conditions he was not allowed to contact American authorities. Dolgun discovered that both his mother and father had been tortured in an effort to pressure them to implicate him, driving his mother to insanity and she was placed into an asylum, released in 1954. His father was arrested according to Article 58.10 (anti-Soviet propaganda: allegedly, he said that American cars are better than the Soviet ones), sentenced for 10 years, served in Mordovia camps, released in 1955. He took a job translating medical journals into English for the Soviet Health Bureau and befriended several notable Gulag survivors, including and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn included some of Dolgun's experiences in his work The Gulag Archipelago.

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 Alexander Dolgun's Story: An American in the Gulag, co-written with Patrick Watson, which recounted his Gulag experience in detail.

Health and death Dolgun's health was severely harmed by his experience and he suffered from numerous ailments. In 1972, he received back pay of from the U.S. Embassy for the period of service from 1949 to 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 28 August 1986, aged 59, in Potomac, Maryland, of kidney failure. He was survived by his wife and son.