Thomas Sgovio (7 October 1916 – 3 July 1997) was an American artist, ex-Communist, and former inmate of a Soviet Union GULAG camp in Kolyma. His father was an Italian American communist, deported by the US authorities to the USSR because of his political activities. [1]
He was born in Buffalo, New York on 7 October 1916.
Sgovio moved to the USSR at the age of 19 with his father Joseph "...who the United States deported as a communist agitator in 1935." [2] On arrival in the USSR he gave up his US passport. [1] He became disillusioned after three years living in Moscow, tried to reclaim his passport at the US embassy there and was arrested by the NKVD on 12 March 1938 as he left the embassy. [1] After his arrest, he was first taken to Moscow's Lubyanka Prison and later transported to Taganka Prison. [3] After a perfunctory and routine inquiry in which the Soviet authorities seem mainly to have been concerned with his attendance at the embassy, he was sentenced by a NKVD troika of three officials to forced labour as a "socially dangerous element". [1] Some years later Sgovio sought to have his case reviewed; the prosecutor who dealt with the application concluded that, "Sgovio does not deny that he did make an application at the American Embassy. Therefore I believe that there is no reason to review Sgovio's case. [1]
Sgovio was transported in a prison train to Vladivostok. Sgovio wrote, "Our train left Moscow on the evening of 24 June. It was the beginning of an eastward journey which was to last a month. I can never forget the moment. Seventy men ... began to cry." [4] From Vladivostok he was shipped aboard the SS Indigirka to the Kolyma camps.
Within the camps the professional criminals were often kept alongside and dominated the other prisoners including the political prisoners. [5] Tattoos of various types were one of the hallmarks of the professional criminal and as a professional artist, Sgovio became part of the tattoo trade. For a while Sgovio was also personal orderly to a senior guard in the camp. [6] At another time he was part of a logging brigade. [7] During the Second World War, Sgovio learned of the conflict in the Pacific when machine parts wrapped in old newspapers arrived in the Gulag having been diverted from the US Lend-Lease program with the USSR. [8] He witnessed and later wrote about the starvation and deaths of countless Gulag prisoners and victims of the Soviet authorities. [9]
Sgovio survived his ordeal. After a 16-year sentence in labor camps, he was released but initially had to remain in the USSR where he was stigmatised as a former prisoner. [10] Eventually he was permitted to return to the United States in 1960. [11] He related his experiences and the lethal nature of the camps in his memoir, Dear America! Why I Turned Against Communism, published in 1972. [12]
His fate is also recounted in Tim Tzouliadis' book The Forsaken . [13]
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The Gulag was a system of forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. The word Gulag originally referred only to the division of the Soviet secret police that was in charge of running the forced labor camps from the 1930s to the early 1950s during Joseph Stalin's rule, but in English literature the term is popularly used for the system of forced labor throughout the Soviet era. The abbreviation GULAG (ГУЛАГ) stands for "Гла́вное Управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х ЛАГере́й", but the full official name of the agency changed several times.
Kolyma or Kolyma Krai is a historical region in the Russian Far East that includes the basin of Kolyma River and the northern shores of the Sea of Okhotsk, as well as the Kolyma Mountains. It is bounded to the north by the East Siberian Sea and the Arctic Ocean, and by the Sea of Okhotsk to the south. Kolyma Krai was never formally defined and over time it was split among various administrative units. As of 2023, it consists roughly of the Magadan Oblast, north-eastern areas of Yakutia, and the Bilibinsky District of Chukotka Autonomous Okrug.
Alexander Michael Dolgun was an American survivor of the Soviet Gulag who wrote about his experiences in 1975 after being allowed to leave the Soviet Union.
Nikolai Ivanovich Getman or Mykola Ivanovich Hetman, an artist, was born in 1917 in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and died at his home in Orel, Russia, in August 2004. He was a prisoner from 1946 to 1953 in forced labor camps in Siberia and Kolyma, where he survived as a result of his ability to sketch for the propaganda requirements of the authorities. He is remembered as one of few artists who has recorded the life of prisoners in the Gulag in the form of paintings.
Dalstroy, also known as Far North Construction Trust, was an organization set up in 1931 in order to manage road construction and the mining of gold in the Russian Far East, including the Magadan Region, Chukotka, parts of Yakutia and parts of present-day Kamchatka Krai.
Eduard Petrovich Berzin was a Soviet soldier, Chekist and NKVD officer that set up Dalstroy, which instituted a system of slave-labor camps in Kolyma, North-Eastern Siberia, one of the most brutal Gulag regions, where hundreds of thousands of political prisoners died or were murdered in subsequent decades.
Nikolai Ivanovich Getman or Mykola Ivanovich Hetman, an artist, was born in 1917 in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and died at his home in Orel, Russia, in August 2004. He was a prisoner from 1946 to 1953 in forced labor camps in Siberia and Kolyma, where he survived as a result of his ability to sketch for the propaganda requirements of the authorities. He is remembered as one of few artists who has recorded the life of prisoners in the Gulag in the form of paintings.
Sevvostlag was a system of forced labor camps set up to satisfy the workforce requirements of the Dalstroy construction trust in the Kolyma region in April 1932. Organizationally being part of Dalstroy and under the management of the Labor and Defence Council of Sovnarkom, these camps were formally subordinated to OGPU later the NKVD directorate of the Far Eastern Krai. On March 4, 1938, Sevvostlag was resubordinated to the NKVD GULAG. In 1942 it was resubordinated back to Dalstroy. In 1949 it was renamed to the Directorate of Dalstroy Corrective Labor Camps. In 1953, after the death of Joseph Stalin, with the reform of the Soviet penal system, it was again resubordinated to Gulag and later reformed into the Directorate of Far Eastern Corrective Labor Camps Управление Северо-восточных исправительно-трудовых лагерей, УСВИТЛ (USVITL).
Gulag: A History, also published as Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, is a nonfiction book covering the history of the Soviet Gulag system. It was written by American author Anne Applebaum and published in 2003 by Doubleday. Gulag won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the 2004 Duff Cooper Prize. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle prize and for the National Book Award.
John Dickinson "Jack" Littlepage was an American mining engineer. He was born in Gresham, Oregon on September 14, 1894. Littlepage was employed in the USSR from 1928 to 1937, becoming Deputy Commissar of the USSR's Gold Trust in the 1930s. He is one of the foreign recipients of the Order of the Red Banner of Labour.
The SS Indigirka was an American built steamship that served in the Soviet Gulag system and transported prisoners. Launched in 1919 as SS Lake Galva, it served under the names Ripon, Malsah and Commercial Quaker between 1920 and 1938, when it was renamed Indigirka. On its final voyage in 1939 over 700 prisoners perished.
Ivan Fyodorovich Nikishov was a Soviet NKVD Lieutenant General and director of Dalstroy.
Art and culture took on a variety of forms in the forced labor camps of the Gulag system that existed across the Soviet Union during the first half of the twentieth century. Theater, music, visual art, and literature played a role in camp life for many of the millions of prisoners who passed through the Gulag system. Some creative endeavors were initiated and executed by prisoners themselves, while others were overseen by the camp administration. Some projects benefited from prisoners who had been professional artists; others were organized by amateurs. The robust presence of the arts in the Gulag camps is a testament to the resourcefulness and resilience of prisoners there, many of whom derived material benefits and psychological comfort from their involvement in artistic projects.
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, abbreviated as NKVD, was the interior ministry and secret police of the Soviet Union from 1934 to 1946. The agency was formed to succeed the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) secret police organization, and thus had a monopoly on intelligence and state security functions. The NKVD is known for carrying out political repression and the Great Purge under Joseph Stalin, as well as counterintelligence and other operations on the Eastern Front of World War II. The head of the NKVD was Genrikh Yagoda from 1934 to 1936, Nikolai Yezhov from 1936 to 1938, Lavrentiy Beria from 1938 to 1946, and Sergei Kruglov in 1946.
De-Stalinization comprised a series of political reforms in the Soviet Union after the death of long-time leader Joseph Stalin in 1953, and the thaw brought about by ascension of Nikita Khrushchev to power, and his 1956 secret speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences", which denounced Stalin's cult of personality and the Stalinist political system.
Victor Herman was a Jewish-American who spent 18 years as a Soviet prisoner in the Gulags of Siberia. At 16 years of age, his family went to work in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s but met tragic fates during the Stalin purges.
The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia by Tim Tzouliadis is a 2008 book published by Penguin Books. It tells the story of thousands of Americans who immigrated to the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
Ivan Ilich Dolgikh was a Soviet police officer, politician, and the head of the Gulag system of labour camps from 1951 to 1954.
Serpantinka is the informal name for the place of detention and execution at the times of Stalinism. Though never officially found by any expedition it is believed to be located somewhere in the Kolyma region. It was under control of Sevvostlag, and the local NKVD troika used it as the second major place for the enforcement of their death sentences during the Great Terror. The few survivors recall "Serpantinka" as one of the most brutal sites, even among Stalin's camps in the Kolyma area.
Among the factors that influenced the Cold War were the detention of several hundred Americans in Gulags, in addition to the obstacles in returning some 2,000 American POWs out of an estimated 75,000 who ended up in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany by 1945, as well as the reunification of Soviet wives with their American husbands.
