Thomas Sgovio

Who was Thomas Sgovio?

Thomas Sgovio was an American artist, ex-Communist, and former inmate of a Soviet Union GULAG camp in Kolyma. His father was an Italian American communist, deported by the US authorities to the USSR because of his political activities.

According to an AP article by Alan Cullison published by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on November 9, 1997, Sgovio moved to the USSR at the age of 19 with his father Joseph "...who the United States deported as a communist agitator in 1935." On arrival in the USSR he gave up his US passport. He became disillusioned after three years living in Moscow, tried to reclaim his passport at the US embassy there and was arrested by the NKVD on 12 March 1938 as he left the embassy. After his arrest, he was first taken to Moscow's Lubyanka Prison and later transported to Taganka Prison in a Black Raven. After a perfunctory and routine inquiry in which the Soviet authorities seem mainly to have been concerned with his attendance at the embassy, he was sentenced by a troika of three officials to forced labour as a "socially dangerous element".