scattered throughout the Soviet Union. He ended up at Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, where he labored for several months until being called back to Moscow. His recall was initiated by the infamous Colonel Mikhail Ryumin, No. 2 to Viktor Abakumov in the Soviet Union's State Security Department and engineer of the Doctors' Plot. Ryumin intended to use Dolgun as a puppet in a show trial. Dolgun was once again sent to Sukhanovka, where Ryumin personally tortured and beat him in an effort to get him to confess to a number of plots and conspiracies against the Soviet Union. For several months, Dolgun endured this torture without fully succumbing but eventually signed several nonsensical confessions Interest in him declined and he was eventually shipped back to Dzhezkazgan, where he was interned until 1956. Conditions at Dzhezkazgan gradually improved after Stalin's death in March 1953. Dolgun did not serve at Kengir, but at a camp nearby. He did, however, mention the Kengir Uprising in his autobiography. After prison After his release from prison in 1956, Dolgun returned to Moscow. Under his release conditions he was not allowed to contact American authorities. Dolgun discovered that both his mother and father had been tortured in an effort to pressure them to implicate him, driving his mother to insanity. He took a job translating medical journals into English for the Soviet Health Bureau and befriended several notable Gulag survivors, including Georg Tenno and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn included some of Dolgun's experiences in his work The Gulag Archipelago. Dolgun married Irene in 1965 and they had a son, Andrew, in 1966. His mother died in 1967, and his father in 1968. In 1971, through the efforts of his sister, Stella Krymm, who escaped from the Soviet Union in 1946, and Ambassador John P. Humes, Dolgun managed to get an exit visa and relocated to Rockville, Maryland. Dolgun took a job at the Soviet-American Medicine section of the Fogerty International Center at the National Institutes of Health. In 1975, he published the bestseller Alexander Dolgun's Story: An American in the Gulag, co-written with Patrick Watson, which recounted his Gulag experience in detail. Health and death Dolgun's health was severely harmed by his experience and he suffered from numerous ailments. In 1972, he received back pay of $22,000 from the U.S. Embassy for the period of service from 1949 to 1956 and complained that he was paid "peanuts" for his