It was at this time that Thomas Sgovio briefly met John Pass, another young American surviving in the Kolyma camps. Born in the Midwest, Pass had emigrated to the USSR as a child in the early 1930s with his family. He had been arrested in 1940 for possession of a copy of John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World. The book had been banned in the Soviet Union because “it did not show the leading role of Stalin during the October Revolution.” 5 In Reed’s account, it was Trotsky who appeared most often by Lenin’s side directing the events of 1917, and Stalin was hardly mentioned.
