For weeks after Wallace’s visit, Thomas became the butt of camp jokes, his presence greeted by taunts of “You Americans are really stupid.” There was hardly a single prisoner in Kolyma who had not heard of the vice president’s visit. And if the jokes themselves were insufficient reminder of the vice president’s folly, the camp commanders and their wives deepened the ridicule by dressing up in expensive American clothes. Attached to each item delivered to Kolyma was a handwritten tag with a message in English, and the name and address of a donor from the Californian branch of “the USA-USSR
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