Marvin Makinen

Marvin W. Makinen has been a member of the faculty at The University of Chicago since 1974 and is a founding member of the Human Rights Board. He is presently Professor in the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and has served as chairman of the department from 1988 to 1993. His primary research interests in molecular biophysics and biochemistry are in mechanisms of enzymes and the structural basis of enzyme action.

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Makinen completed the fourth year of his undergraduate education at the Free University of Berlin as an exchange student from the University of Pennsylvania. Traveling in the Soviet Union, Makinen was arrested for espionage and was sentenced to eight years of imprisonment by a closed military tribunal. Of the slightly more than two years that he spent in the Vladimir Prison, known as the most important prison of the Soviet political prison system, a total of approximately 12 months was spent in solitary confinement. He was afterwards transferred to a labor camp in the Mordvanian Autonomous Republic and was later exchanged with Father Walter Ciszek, S. J., an American citizen, who had spent over 15 years in Soviet prisons and labor camps followed by 10 years of forced exile in Norilsk, a city above the Arctic Circle, Krasnoyarsk, and Abakan, which is further south. In the Vladimir Prison one of Makinen's cellmates was Zygurds Kruminsh, who had been previously the only cellmate of the U-2 pilot Gary Powers. While Kruminsh had admitted to only having met a Swedish prisoner, later in labor camp Makinen learned through another former inmate of the Vladimir Prison that Kruminsh had also been a cellmate of "the Swedish prisoner van den Berg."

Since 1990 Professor Makinen has worked on three international committees as a consultant to the Swedish Foreign Ministry regarding the fate of Raoul Wallenberg, who, sent to Budapest as a diplomat in July, 1944, is credited with having saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from annihilation. He was arrested on January 17 1945, by SMERSH through an order from the Deputy Minister of Defense Bulganin and brought to Moscow. The Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs acknowledged for the first time in 1957 that Raoul Wallenberg had been in captivity in the Soviet Union but claimed that he had died in 1947. Nonetheless, there has been a constant stream of reports from former prisoners-of-war and inmates of the Soviet prison system attesting to his presence in Soviet prisons, labor camps, or psychiatric hospitals up to the 1980s. A large portion of these reports emanated from the Vladimir Prison located approximately 200 kilometers east of Moscow. In the course of his work, Makinen uncovered two retired employees of the prison who identified Raoul Wallenberg from unpublished photographs as having been there in solitary confinement. With Ari Kaplan, a leading database computer expert, Makinen carried out a cell occupancy analysis of Korpus 2 of the Vladimir Prison, the building in which the prisoner was stated to have been confined, showing that records documenting the presence of the prisoner identified by these witnesses had been removed from the prison archives. The period of solitary confinement of this prisoner was 1960.