Paul Goble
Staunton, May 17 – Both in Soviet times and since, there have been rumors that some Soviet prisoners in the GULAG were able to escape, cross the Bering Straits and reach Alaska. It is known that several groups planned to do so but there are no confirmed cases of success. Nonetheless, Russian Seven says, there is a report that one group of prisoners escaped that way.
In the early 1950s, it says, citing the memoirs of a Soviet journalist at the United Nations in New York, the US brough to a meeting 30 Russian men in criminal guard and identified them as former GULAG prisoners who managed to escape and cross the Bering Straits despite being shot at by Soviet border guards (russian7.ru/post/iz-kolymy-na-alyasku-kak-zaklyuchyonnye-gu/.
The Americans presented these men as former prisoners of Dalstroy, and the men talked about the deprivations they had suffered. But as soon as they were introduced, the Soviet representative, the notorious Andrey Vishinsky, left the room. It is unclear whether the men were what they said they were, but one detail of the story is interesting: the US press did not cover their appearance at the UN.
Earlier, the portal continues, there were two serious plans hatched by GULAG prisoners to flee to the West via the Bering Straits. The first arose in 1937 at a time of a revolt in northeastern Yakutia (Sakha), and the second in 1950 when prisoners overpowered their guards and sought to flee. Both groups of prisoners were arrested and returned to the camps before they could get anywhere.
Nonetheless, the possibility of fleeing to Alaska remained a lively notion among prisoners, as even Alexander Solzhenitsyn reports in his Gulag Archipelago.
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