In the northern part of Toronto, in Earl Bales Park, there stands a monument to RAOUL WALLENBERG. The date of his death ends with two question marks. The real circumstances of his death remain unknown to this day… In 1944 Wallenberg, acting as Sweden’s diplomatic representative in Budapest, issued thousands of “protective passports” to save Jews from deportation to death camps. However, on 17 January 1945 Wallenberg was arrested by the military counterintelligence service SMERSH and taken to the USSR, after which he disappeared without a trace. According to the official Soviet version, he died on 17 July 1947 of a heart attack in the MGB’s “inner prison” on Lubyanka. When Wallenberg’s relatives appealed to the FSB requesting interrogation protocols and the originals of a number of documents previously released only in partially edited form, the FSB refused. Wallenberg’s relatives filed a lawsuit against the FSB in the Meshchansky District Court of Moscow. On 18 September 2017 the claim was rejected…

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The GULAG, like the Soviet Union itself, was a multinational phenomenon. One could truly meet nationalities from A to Z — from Americans to Japanese. The appearance of foreigners usually depended on political processes taking place both in the USSR and abroad. For example, Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 caused a flow of political refugees from Germany, mostly communists fleeing fascist persecution. In the Soviet Union many of them were immediately sent to camps, accused of collaborating with the same fascists. After the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the victims of the GULAG included former residents of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bessarabia, and Eastern Poland.

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The criteria by which people were arrested, sent to camps, or exiled included practically any kind of activity, political views, and even the absence of such views. They could be members of various parties, merchants, former officers, people who had traveled abroad, or those who had relatives overseas. On the “islands” of the GULAG Archipelago and around it there was room for everyone — including stamp collectors and Red Cross workers. The stories of foreigners in the GULAG are tragic — often exacerbated by not knowing the Russian language and not understanding what had happened to them. Among these people were some who later became quite well known.

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Menachem Begin — Mieczysław Wolfovich Begun, Prime Minister of Israel, Nobel Peace Prize laureate. On 20 September 1940, in Vilnius, Begin was arrested by the NKVD and imprisoned in Lukishki Prison. He was sentenced to eight years as a “socially dangerous element,” and on 1 June 1941 he was transported to a camp at the Kozhva station of the North-Pechora Corrective Labor Camp. Many years later Begin described his reflections on camp life in his memoir White Nights: “Over our camp flew a banner: ‘300 percent of the quota for every two workers.’ The reward for fulfilling, even overfulfilling the quota was not satiety but lesser hunger. Here I met two-legged animals. A hungry man will go much further than a full one for the sake of survival. This progression is defined by the striving to live at any cost. And it grows as the prisoner unlearns the habits of civilization and becomes accustomed to a bestial existence.”

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When you study the biographies of foreigners who were executed, repressed, or sent to the GULAG, you notice the striking number of people with communist convictions.

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ABANI MUKERJI, one of the founders of the Communist Party of India. His life included arrests, prison escapes, and devotion to Marxism. From youth he tied himself to India’s national-liberation movement. He worked in the Comintern. He graduated from the Institute of Red Professors in Moscow. He translated Sanskrit sources on the ancient history of India. He supported Stalin and criticized Trotsky. In 1920 he married Rosa Fitingof, assistant to Lenin’s secretary Lydia Fotieva. The family had two children — a son, Gora, and a daughter, Maya. It seemed that life had settled. But it ended on 28 October 1937 at the NKVD execution ground Kommunarka. Rosa Fitingof received a term in the infamous ALZHIR — the Akmolinsk special camp for the wives of “enemies of the people,” and the children were placed in an orphanage…

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It would seem a paradox: these people saw hope in the Soviet Union, believed in a bright future, yet received a bullet in the back of the head or years in the GULAG. Most of them were neither spies nor wreckers, nor even opponents of Stalin.

The Soviet Union’s victory over Germany made the country attractive to several generations of the first wave of Russian émigrés. Stalin’s aura as the conqueror of Hitler and the savior of Europe proved far stronger than the reports reaching the West about arrests, torture, and concentration camps. In France alone, the organization that united Russian émigrés wishing to return to Russia numbered more than eleven thousand people. And of course, a huge role was played by the 1946 Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on restoring Soviet citizenship to subjects of the former Russian Empire.

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Nikita Igorevich Krivoshein was born in France in 1934. His father was an engineer, an officer of the White Army, and a member of the French Resistance during the Second World War. In 1944 he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Buchenwald, then to Dachau. In 1945 he was liberated by Allied forces and, by order of Charles de Gaulle, awarded a medal for participation in the Resistance. His mother, Nina Alekseevna Krivosheina, was the daughter of “the Russian Ford,” Alexei Pavlovich Meshchersky. After the October coup she left Russia across the ice of the Gulf of Finland. His grandfather was the Minister of Agriculture of the Russian Empire, Stolypin’s associate in agrarian reform, and the Prime Minister of General Wrangel’s government in southern Russia.

In 1947, during the wave of repatriation, thirteen-year-old Nikita left with his parents for the Soviet Union. Two years later his father was arrested for “collaboration with the world bourgeoisie” and sentenced to ten years in the camps. He served his term in the so-called Marfino “sharashka,” together with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In 1957, after his father’s release, Nikita himself was arrested for an article in Le Monde about the Soviet invasion of Hungary. He served time in the Mordovian camps. Only in the early 1970s was the family able to return to France.

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June 1951. Budapest. 60 Andrássy Avenue. The State Security Office of the Hungarian People’s Republic. The people called this building “the House of Horrors.” In one of the rooms a man lies on the floor, writhing in pain, covered in blood. His fingernails have been torn out. Above him stands an officer with the rank of colonel, waiting for the moment when the man on the floor groans. The colonel urinates, trying to direct the stream into the man’s mouth. The colonel’s name is Vladimir Farkas, one of the most terrifying sadists of the Hungarian State Security. It is said that he broke prisoners’ limbs, raped women, and tore off men’s scrotums. The bound man lying on the floor is the former Minister of the Interior of Hungary, János Kádár. At the end of the investigation he will be sentenced to life imprisonment. After Stalin’s death he will be rehabilitated, and from 1956, for thirty-two years, János Kádár will be the leader of Hungary’s communists and the head of the country.

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Another story on the same theme. Rachel Dubendorfer had been obsessed since childhood with the idea of building a just society. In her view, that society was the USSR. In 1927 Rachel became an agent of Soviet intelligence in Germany under the alias Sissi. After the Nazis came to power she found herself in Switzerland and became the head of a cell of the “Red Orchestra,” a network of Soviet informants from different countries. According to financial reports preserved in the archives, the intelligence network in Switzerland cost ten thousand dollars per month. Although Moscow constantly insisted on continuing the work, the Center could not ensure a continuous transfer of funds to Switzerland. Rachel managed to borrow money on the obligation that the USSR would repay it with interest after the war. But after the war Rachel ended up on Lubyanka. During interrogations her nervous system broke down; she was declared mentally ill and placed in a prison psychiatric hospital in Kazan. After the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, Rachel’s case was closed. The first thing she did in freedom was to secure the Soviet state’s repayment to the creditors of the money she had borrowed during the war. Amazingly, she succeeded. She was also granted a pension, a free one-room apartment in Berlin, and awarded the Order of the Red Banner. One could say that her life turned out well…

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Walter Joseph Ciszek was born in Pennsylvania in a family of Polish immigrants. In his youth he was a member of a local gang, so the decision to become a Jesuit priest shocked his family. At the moment of the Soviet occupation in September 1939 he was serving in a Jesuit mission in eastern Poland. Using his priesthood and American citizenship, he could have tried to return to the West, but after meeting Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky he decided to go underground. Under the assumed name Vladimir Lipinsky he moved to the Urals, where he took a job in logging and secretly conducted Catholic services. In 1941 he was arrested on denunciation; on 26 July 1942 he was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment for “espionage” on behalf of the Vatican. For five years he was held in solitary confinement on Lubyanka. He was then transported to Siberia and served his term in the camps of Dudinka, Norilsk, and Kayerkan. He took part in the famous Norilsk uprising of 1953. He was released on 22 April 1955. “I was often asked about the feeling of fear — whether I felt it, and how I overcame it. No fear could shake me except the fear of losing sight of Him. The future, however hidden it might be, was contained in His will and therefore acceptable to me, whatever it might bring”…

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And this fate was completely different. Edward Bucza was an irreconcilable enemy of the USSR. In 1940, at the age of fifteen, he joined the Home Army, was arrested by the Germans, and escaped. He joined the Polish partisans. Arrested again, transferred to the Gestapo — and escaped again. He was the commander of a unit responsible for eliminating Polish collaborators. On 4 May 1945 he was arrested by the NKGB. In August 1945 a Military Tribunal sentenced him to death, which was commuted to twenty years in the camps. He became one of the leaders of the famous Vorkuta uprising in July 1953. For participation in the uprising he received another ten years. In 1958 he was returned to Poland, where a court in Łódź sentenced Bucza to thirteen years’ imprisonment and five years’ deprivation of civil rights. In the early 1970s he fled to Sweden and then to Canada. His story largely served as a prototype for the hero of Andrzej Wajda’s film Ashes and Diamonds.