One Russian prisoner, Boris Chetverikov, kept sane for sixteen months in solitary by washing his clothes, the floor, the walls—and by singing all the opera arias and songs that he knew.10 Alexander Dolgun was kept in solitary during his interrogation too, and managed to keep his head by walking: he counted the steps in his cells, worked out how many there were to a kilometer, and started “walking,” first across Moscow to the American Embassy—“I breathed in the clear, cold, imaginary air and hugged my coat around me”—then across Europe, and finally across the Atlantic, back home to the United
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