Still others had no trial at all: they were sentenced in absentia, either by an osoboe soveshchanie—a “special commission”—or by a troika of three officials, rather than by a court. Such was the experience of Thomas Sgovio, whose investigation was completely perfunctory. Born in Buffalo, New York, Sgovio had arrived in the Soviet Union in 1935 as a political émigré, the son of an Italian American communist who had been forcibly deported to the Soviet Union from the United States for his political activities. During the three years he lived in Moscow, Sgovio gradually became disillusioned, and
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