Nov 08 2008
Fascinating Tragedy Within Stalin’s Ocean of Victims
The last known photographs of Isaiah Oggins as a prisoner in the Soviet gulag, shortly before he was executed in 1947 by injection. Photo by C.J. Chivers of the New York Times
Robbin Oggins, a retired historian of Medievel Europe at Binghamton University, stands after a tragic chapter in his family’s history. The New York Times tells today of his father, the Jewish leftist Israel Oggins working as a spy for Stalin.
An aspiring American professor turned spy for the N.K.V.D., Stalin’s intelligence service, Mr. Oggins had been convicted of treason and espionage by the Soviet Union and completed an eight-year sentence in the gulag.
It was the summer of 1947. He was past due for release. A few months before in New York, his wife and young son had pleaded with George C. Marshall, then the secretary of state, to seek Mr. Oggins’s freedom from the Soviet Union’s grip.
By then a picture of frailty, Mr. Oggins was taken to a medical examination in a Moscow clinic, where a doctor prepared an injection. But this was not a treatment to dress up a mistreated inmate for display. It was a blacker art: the injection contained the neurotoxin curare.
The journalist Andrew Meier made a book about Israel Oggins called “The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin’s Secret Service” (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008). In my classes students read about the gulag through the eyes of Alexandr Solzhenitzyn in his short novel A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Those students who read about the fictional Ivan Denisovich — a willing soldier for the Red Army against the fascists who was sentenced simply for a mild joke in a private letter at Stalin’s expense — would not be surprised to hear in the case of Israel Oggins that the benefectors of Stalinism were also its victims.