Volume 22, Number 14 · September 18, 1975
Prosecution Witnesses
By Helen Muchnic
Alexander Dolgun's Story: An American in the Gulag
by Alexander Dolgun, by Patrick Watson
Knopf, 370 pp., $10.00
The Education of Lev Navrozov
by Lev Navrozov
Harper's Magazine Press, 628 pp., $12.95
In bare outline, Alexander Dolgun's is the story of twenty-four years in the life of an innocent American, from 'one day in 1948' when on his way to lunch he was kidnaped on Gorky Street in Moscow by agents of the MGB, the Soviet Secret Service, to 'that brilliant day' in January 1972 when, with his Russian wife and their young son, he boarded a Boeing 707 and arrived at Kennedy Airport—twenty-four years, of which eight were spent in jails and hard labor camps and the rest in enforced residence in the Soviet Union. His release was obtained only through the unremitting efforts of a devoted sister who happened to be in a position to pull the right strings and, after many years, succeeded in getting the American secretary of state to intercede on his behalf. What happens, one wonders, what has happened, and may perhaps still happen to the countless victims who have no one to take their case to the highest authorities? The question is chilling.
Review, 2683 words
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