Son Finds Veil on Father's Death Under Stalin Lifting a Bit
After a career of deception, Isaiah Oggins died in an executioner’s dirty trick.
An aspiring American professor turned spy for the N.K.V.D., Stalin’s intelligence service, Mr. Oggins had been convicted of treason and espionage by the Soviet Union and completed an eight-year sentence in the gulag.
It was the summer of 1947. He was past due for release. A few months before in New York, his wife and young son had pleaded with George C. Marshall, then the secretary of state, to seek Mr. Oggins’s freedom from the Soviet Union’s grip.
By then a picture of frailty, Mr. Oggins was taken to a medical examination in a Moscow clinic, where a doctor prepared an injection. But this was not a treatment to dress up a mistreated inmate for display. It was a blacker art: the injection contained the neurotoxin curare.
Isaiah Oggins was soon dead, by Stalin’s order and a doctor’s hand. His secrets from Soviet netherworlds — the foreign spy service and the labor camps — had been hushed. His family would be told the necessary lies, including a death certificate mentioning “sclerosis” and a place of burial, the Jewish cemetery in Penza, where his grave has never been found.
More than six decades later, Mr. Oggins’s only child, Robin, now 77 and a retired associate professor of Medieval History at Binghamton University, sat at home in upstate New York on a recent morning, contemplating the enduring puzzle of his father’s dark journey.
After years of investigative work by Andrew Meier, an American journalist and former correspondent for Time magazine, much about Isaiah Oggins — a leftist academic killed by the very system that once had attracted him — had been dragged into the light.
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An aspiring American professor turned spy for the N.K.V.D., Stalin’s intelligence service, Mr. Oggins had been convicted of treason and espionage by the Soviet Union and completed an eight-year sentence in the gulag.
It was the summer of 1947. He was past due for release. A few months before in New York, his wife and young son had pleaded with George C. Marshall, then the secretary of state, to seek Mr. Oggins’s freedom from the Soviet Union’s grip.
By then a picture of frailty, Mr. Oggins was taken to a medical examination in a Moscow clinic, where a doctor prepared an injection. But this was not a treatment to dress up a mistreated inmate for display. It was a blacker art: the injection contained the neurotoxin curare.
Isaiah Oggins was soon dead, by Stalin’s order and a doctor’s hand. His secrets from Soviet netherworlds — the foreign spy service and the labor camps — had been hushed. His family would be told the necessary lies, including a death certificate mentioning “sclerosis” and a place of burial, the Jewish cemetery in Penza, where his grave has never been found.
More than six decades later, Mr. Oggins’s only child, Robin, now 77 and a retired associate professor of Medieval History at Binghamton University, sat at home in upstate New York on a recent morning, contemplating the enduring puzzle of his father’s dark journey.
After years of investigative work by Andrew Meier, an American journalist and former correspondent for Time magazine, much about Isaiah Oggins — a leftist academic killed by the very system that once had attracted him — had been dragged into the light.