Dolgun

Contents

By Alexander Dolgun and Patrick Watson
Published by Fontana, 1976
Paperback, clean reading copy

Moscow, Dcember 1948; a yountg American Alex Dolgun is picked up by the MGB. He has done nothing - it must be a mistake. He makes no attempt to resist.

There follows eighteen months in solitary confinement, deprived of food and sleep and subject to brutal interrogation; five years in the Gulag for 'espionage' ; and fifteen grim years in Moscow under the KGB surveillance. It was not until 1971, in nightmare circumstances, that Dolgun was at last allowed to leave Russia.

Dolgun is the amazing story of a man with a genius for survival. In his prison cell he leanred to sleep in sixty-sceond bursts, and 'walked' from Moscow to the West. 

In the slave camps he made friends with the powerful prisoners, worked as a medic, even fell in loie with a woman prisoner.

Above all, Dolgun survived; amidst horror, desperatioin, he kept his identity, his humour and his anger.