Vorkuta, Soviet Union (Siberia, just west of the gigantic mouth of the Ob River). Trotskyists held in the gulag are gathered for a march through the snow. Suddenly, from an invisible point in the blinding white blanket, heavy machine gun fire opens on the advancing black column of men. Death arrives cloaked in sun and snow. Those who survive are finished off with Colt rifles. 1,053 Trotskyists are killed. A few days later, another 760 people are killed in the same place, in the same manner. These are the Kasketin shootings, named after the commander who ordered them. Another 200 are killed at the brickyard station, forced into the building naked and shot in the back. Their bodies are burned in the tundra. A few weeks earlier, another 250 Trotskyists are shot on the railway in Rudnik. Among them was Frank Dickler, a Jew from Brasilia, who had been fascinated by Soviet propaganda in New York and had boarded a ship. Marching with him, Dickler recognized Andreycin, an American communist originally from Yugoslavia who had lectured at Madison Square Garden. Andreycin saw Dicker and shouted: “Frank! Just listen, don’t say a word! This is the end. We’re going to be murdered in cold blood! Frank! Listen! If you ever get out, tell the world who they are: a bunch of cutthroats! Assassins! Bandits!” Others, hearing the screams, began to cry: many evidently understood English. Arriving in a ravine, they were machine-gunned by soldiers stationed there. Dickler miraculously escaped, fled, and even returned to Brasilia, where forty years later he related the story to Solzhenitsyn.
