Chapter 5 Inside the Digital Goulog

A Defector in California

On the afternoon of May 9, 1968, a non-descript 76-year-old Russian man,

former low-level Communist Party member, technician in the People's Commissariat of Machine Tools,

a Goulog prisoner, and a Defector.

Was paid a visit at his bungalow in San Francisco's South Bay in Mountain View, California.

The devil, you see, is in the details. Over 30 years before on January 29, 1937,

on an otherwise unremarkable day beyond, that is, overlapping with the third of the three

very public Moscow trials, he admitted some 20 seconds of barely audible grumblings at an

inopportune time, and within earshot of an NKVD officer. His otherwise inconsequential

browsing proved decisive, unbeknownst to him. He was placed on a list of socially dangerous elements,

right deviationist. This right deviationist was the particular designation written in the column

to the right of his name. On February 9, 1937, in the middle of the night, he was arrested. Soon,

the Goulog camp surrounded him. Exactly five years later to the day, his confinement ended as

abruptly and inexplicably as it began. His sentence had been served, and he was released.

He returned to his hometown of Orenberg, and he thought he no longer recognized it.

It didn't occur to him that he could no longer recognize as himself the self that he had once lived

there. Unrecognizable, he would defect. Although he had endured five years of arbitrary and pointless

cruelty at the hands of his comrade prosecutors, he found escaping belief much more difficult

than scaling the metaphorical iron curtain whose inside was covetously guarded by a line of

resolute sentinels, believing that any slippage through the Berlin Wall near the city center

meant their death. And it did. But our defector reduced the number of potential executions,

...