However, when Michael's second tour of duty was up, he was prevented from leaving by bureaucratic barriers erected by the Soviet authorities and his family was trapped.
Alexander Dolgun and his older sister, Stella, grew up in Moscow during the Great Purge of the late 1930s and the Second World War.
He was falsely accused of espionage against the Soviet Union and endured a year of sleep and food deprivation, as well as psychological and physical torture designed to prod him into "confessing" to his interrogator, Colonel Sidorov.
His whereabouts were known by Truman, Eisenhower and the US government, but they did nothing for fear of Soviet authorities further harming Dolgun due to fragile US-Soviet relations.
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.
Interest in him declined and he was eventually shipped back to Dzhezkazgan, to a different camp site, located near the village of Krestovaya (Крестовая).
His father was arrested according to Article 58.10 (anti-Soviet propaganda: allegedly, he said that American cars are better than the Soviet ones), sentenced for 10 years, served in Mordovia camps, released in 1955.
[1] He took a job translating medical journals into English for the Soviet Health Bureau and befriended several notable Gulag survivors, including Georg Tenno [ru] and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
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.