The day he walked out of a Soviet labor camp in October 1963, having served 28 months for espionage, Marvin Makinen was a 24-year-old American eager to begin his medical studies at the University of Pennsylvania and ready to put his prison experiences behind him.
Among the things he could not forget, however, were the references made by two cellmates and a fellow labor camp inmate to another KGB prisoner, a Swede, whose identity and background were closely guarded.
Today, 28 years later, Makinen, chairman of the biochemistry and molecular biology department at the University of Chicago, suspects that the mysterious prisoner with whom he probably served time in the Soviet penal system was Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat credited with saving the lives of 100,000 Jews in Budapest, Hungary, during the closing days of World War II.
What happened to Wallenberg after his arrest by Red Army soldiers in January 1945 is a 46-year-old question that may at last be moving toward resolution, thanks in part to Makinen`s efforts on his behalf.
Makinen, 52, is the sole American on the 10-member Soviet-International Commission on the Fate and Whereabouts of Raoul Wallenberg, and the first U.S. citizen to gain access to records inside the Soviet prison system.
Last Thursday, two members of that commission-Wallenberg`s half-brother, Guy von Dardel, a Swedish nuclear physicist, and another Swede, a former UN official-were scheduled to begin two days of talks with KGB authorities in Moscow.
On their schedule was an appointment with the new KGB chief, Vadim Bakatin. On their agenda was the release of two secret files detailing at least parts of Wallenberg`s time in the Soviet prison system; they are the first documents expected to shed significant light on an incarceration that may have lasted nearly half a century.
This month, Makinen is scheduled to travel to Moscow for a second round of meetings with KGB officials. During the summer of 1990, he and the other members of the Wallenberg commission spent two weeks in the USSR, interviewing former KGB guards and poring over 100,000 prison registration cards in an exhaustive search for traces of Wallenberg.
The Soviet government has issued contradictory statements about Wallenberg, including stories that he was murdered in 1945 by pro-Nazi gangs in Budapest; that he never made it to Soviet territory; and that he died of a heart attack in Moscow`s Lubyanka Prison on July 16, 1947.
With each statement, and after repeated petitions by the Swedish government for the release of any information, came this Soviet refrain:
”Careful examination of all records has shown that there are no records of Raoul Wallenberg.”
Experts on the case never believed the Soviets. Even now, his family maintains that Wallenberg might still be alive somewhere in the network of Soviet prisons. If so, he would be 79.
The Soviets started to open up, Makinen says, after a 1988 human rights conference in Geneva, where Wallenberg`s half-brother, Von Dardel, met with a high-ranking Soviet foreign affairs officer and spelled out his idea for a non-political international commission to independently investigate the Wallenberg case.
Several months later came the word: The commission would be allowed to conduct its investigation in the Soviet Union. It would be given unprecedented access to the archives of the Vladimir Prison, where Makinen had been a prisoner for 20 months and where most of the Wallenberg sightings reportedly had occurred.
The commission`s biggest break, however, came in September 1990, at the end of its two-week fact-finding mission to Moscow and Vladimir.
Just before leaving the country, Von Dardel and Makinen met with Bakatin, then the Soviet minister of foreign affairs, to express their thanks for his cooperation. Almost a year later-after the failed Soviet coup in August-Bakatin was named chief of the KGB, a move, Makinen believes, that makes it more likely the commission will be granted access to the most important Wallenberg files.
Upon meeting Bakatin, Makinen says, he and his colleague were struck by his warmth, and by his tribute to Von Dardel`s efforts: ”I understand what you are trying to do. I and my family would like to know where my grandfather is buried. We only know he was shot in 1930 in Tomsk.”
”That was an amazing revelation,” Makinen recalls. ”There may be circumstances later that will prevent him from (opening all the files), but his statement shows his qualities as a human being. And it makes me feel he`s quite sincere in wanting to clear up this case.”
Indeed, weeks after taking over as KGB chief, Bakatin called the Wallenberg case ”the most embarrassing matter against the Soviet government since World War II.” He went on to say that ”it must be cleared up and all information released.”
Of his scheduled trip to Moscow this month, Makinen says: ”I think we are going to come up with the answer in the end. I don`t know how long it will take.”
`Sensitive photographs`
Makinen`s journey into Wallenberg`s world began in July 1961, when as a foreign exchange student traveling alone through the Soviet Union, he was arrested by KGB agents on a street in Kiev and charged with possession of sensitive photographs. Makinen won`t reveal any other details of the charges. At a closed military trial, Makinen was found guilty of espionage and sentenced to eight years in prison. He served 28 months before being exchanged, in October 1963, for a Soviet spy and sent home to medical school. During his 20 months at the Vladimir Prison 130 miles northeast of Moscow, Makinen heard two cellmates refer to a Swedish prisoner he believed was being held in the same building. Later, at a Mordovian labor camp, a fellow prisoner mentioned to Makinen that he was familiar with the same man.
Makinen knew only that the Swede was named something like Vandenberg, and that, according to a KGB informant with whom Makinen once shared a cell, the man ”would be well rewarded when he got home.”
Makinen`s interest in the man intensified in 1964, a year after his release, during a visit to the Swedish Embassy in Washington for a debriefing regarding those prison references to the Swede. (The Swedish Embassy had learned of his knowledge from the U.S. State Department, which had interviewed Makinen after his release.)
In his conversation with the charge d`affaires, Makinen was told that the Swede was a diplomat in wartime Budapest who had been helping Jews escape from the Nazis when he was arrested by Soviet troops. Then as he was being escorted to the embassy door, Makinen recalled, the charge advised: ”Mr. Makinen, we would appreciate it if you would not talk about this.”
”Why? What was this? It was the one statement that made me think, `Who was this person?` ” says Makinen, who would not know for another 17 years that, most probably, the person was Wallenberg.
And that Wallenberg, son of a wealthy banking family in Sweden, sheltered 13,000 Jews in ”safe houses” flying the neutral Swedish flag, was chauffeured to death trains where he handed out 20,000 passports, forged Swedish work documents for condemned Jews, and with his own hands pulled people out of death marches.
Revelation dawned
In a Hyde Park office crammed with molecular biology texts, some written by Makinen in Russian, and a 3-D model of carboxypeptidase, the enzyme upon which he has focused much of his research during his 17 years at the U. of C., the biochemist recently discussed his role in the international campaign to ferret out the facts about Wallenberg.
For Makinen, a soft-spoken man who freely shed tears as he recounted his own ”ghastly months at Vladimir,” the name Wallenberg meant nothing until 3 in the morning on Tuesday, April 1, 1980. Home late from his laboratory where he had been conducting experiments with liquid helium, Makinen poured himself a glass of orange juice and retired to the living room to catch up on that week`s New York Times Sunday magazine.
He turned to Page 21, to an article titled ”Hero of the Holocaust.” He was engrossed within minutes. ”I was just so floored. I mean I was taken by this article. As I started to read, all those neuronal connections started to come into play,” the scientist says. ” `Vandenberg, Wallenberg, that`s it.` That was the first time I`d made the connection. I had known nothing. Wallenberg was not then a household name.”
The article mentioned that Wallenberg had a half-brother, Von Dardel, on sabbatical at Stanford University`s Linear Accelerator Center. The next morning Makinen placed a call to Palo Alto. He explained to Von Dardel how he had been imprisoned at Vladimir, and how he remembered four veiled references to a Swedish prisoner whose identity was closely guarded.
The two subsequently met between flights at O`Hare International Airport. Less than a year later, Von Dardel asked Makinen to speak at the first international Wallenberg hearing in Stockholm. The meeting, in January 1981, was designed to focus attention on the most recent signs that Wallenberg may have been alive, and, if he was, to pressure the Soviet Union to produce him. ”There`s no way I could have said no, nor would I have wanted to,”
Makinen recalls. But until that time, he had never publicly spoken about his imprisonment. He had never mentioned a word to his two sons, then 9 and 6. He rarely even talked about it to his wife, Michele, a psychiatric social worker. For 17 years, Makinen says, ”it was all in the background.”
”Much of the hard, harsh experience I hadn`t resolved totally. I just sort of kept it repressed,” he says. ”Still I find it extremely heavy, a painful process. What happens to people who`ve been through these kinds of experiences is that one little word evokes such a fountain of emotions, of different emotions and associations, that you become immobilized.”
Before flying to Stockholm, where he figured his recounting of life in Block 2, Cells No. 31 and 33 at Vladimir Prison would cause a media stir, Makinen knew he had to talk to his sons, lest they find out from a teacher or someone reading the newspapers. So one night as he gave them their baths, he told them how he`d once been a prisoner in Russia and that while there he`d heard about another man who, if still alive, ”had been imprisoned for more than half his life for no real justified reason at all.”
That taken care of, Makinen testified before a crowd of 800 at the Wallenberg hearing. Upon his return to Hyde Park, Makinen says, he ”did not seek out ways to be involved.” But periodically Von Dardel would ask him to check out various Wallenberg tips.
By the mid-1980s, Von Dardel mentioned to Makinen his idea to set up the international committee to investigate Wallenberg`s fate. In 1988, Von Dardel`s persistence paid off when the Soviets agreed to hear his proposal.
As Makinen sees it, that was the development that set the stage for what he and others believe is ”the test case of glasnost.”
”If glasnost means anything,” Makinen says, ”it means that they will totally reveal all materials on the Wallenberg case.”
