Gulag: A History

by Anne Applebaum

Just about anyone could be arrested. Among the Hungarians picked up in Budapest, for example, was George Bien, age sixteen. He was arrested, along with his father, because they owned a radio.47 At the other end of the social spectrum, NKVD officers also arrested Raul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who had singlehandedly saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from deportation to Nazi concentration camps. In the course of his negotiations Wallenberg had had many dealings with both fascist authorities and Western leaders. He also came from a prominent, and wealthy, Swedish family. For the NKVD, those were sufficient reasons for suspicion. They arrested him in Budapest in January 1945, along with his chauffeur. Both men disappeared into Soviet prisons—Wallenberg was registered there as a “prisoner of war”—and were never heard from again. Throughout the 1990s, the Swedish government searched for clues as to Wallenberg’s ultimate fate, to no avail. It is now widely assumed that he died under interrogation, or was executed soon after his arrest.