Keeping Faith with the Party

Nanci Adler

Description

Why some gulag survivors remained loyal to Communism

How is it that some prisoners of the Soviet gulag—many of them falsely convicted—emerged from the camps maintaining their loyalty to the party that was responsible for their internment? In camp, they had struggled to survive. Afterward they struggled to reintegrate with society, reunite with their loved ones, and sometimes renew Party ties. Based on oral histories, archives, and unpublished memoirs, Keeping Faith with the Party chronicles the stories of returnees who professed enduring belief in the CPSU and the Communist project. Nanci Adler's probing investigation brings a deeper understanding of the dynamics of Soviet Communism and of how individuals survive within repressive regimes while the repressive regimes also survive within them.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Enduring Repression
1. The Gulag Prisoner and the Bolshevik Soul
2. Reconciling the Self with the System
3. Beyond Belief: Party Identification and the "Bright Future"
4. Striving for a "Happy Ending": Attempts to Rehabilitate Socialism
5. The Legacies of the Repression
Epilogue: The "Bright Past," or Whose (Hi)Story?
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• 20th Century
• Social Science
• Modern
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Modern history
• Cold War
• General officer
• Eastern Europe
• Social sciences
• Russian
• Russia
• History of Europe
• Eastern
• General
• Eurasia
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Russie
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 05 mars 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253005717
• Langue: English

Extrait

KEEPING FAITH with the PARTY
Communist Believers Return from the Gulag
NANCI ADLER
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
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© 2012 by Nanci Adler
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Adler, Nanci.
Keeping faith with the Party : Communist believers return from the Gulag / Nanci Adler.
      p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35722-9 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-22379-1 (paperback : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-00571-7 (electronic book) 1. Ex-convicts—Soviet Union. 2. Ex-convicts—Soviet Union—Attitudes. 3. Kommunisticheskaia partiia Sovetskogo Soiuza. 4. Allegiance—Soviet Union. 5. Political persecution—Soviet Union. 6. Labor camps—Soviet Union. 7. Communism—Soviet Union—Psychological aspects. I. Title.
DK268.A1A35 2012
364.80947—dc23
2011037563
1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12
For Zoë and Noah
Party official turned inmate: “When they chop down the forest, the chips fly, but the Party truth remains the truth and it is superior to my misfortune.… I myself was one of those chips that flew when the forest was cut down.” Fellow prisoner Ivan Grigoryevich's response: “That's where the whole misfortune lies—in the fact that they're cutting down the forest. Why cut it down?”
Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing (1972)
CONTENTS
 
 
 
 
 
 
Preface
Acknowledgments
 
Introduction: Enduring Repression
1   The Gulag Prisoner and the Bolshevik Soul
2   Reconciling the Self with the System
3   Beyond Belief: Party Identification and the “Bright Future”
4   Striving for a “Happy Ending”: Attempts to Rehabilitate Socialism
5   The Legacies of the Repression
Epilogue: The “Bright Past,” or Whose (Hi)Story?
 
Notes
Works Cited
Index
PREFACE
 
 
 
 
 
 
Early on in this research, an interview I conducted with a Gulag survivor somewhat inadvertently proved to be an excellent illustration of precisely the kinds of issues I was aiming to address. It was a follow-up to a previous interview almost ten years earlier. Right after I got to Moscow in the spring of 2006, I called Zoria Serebriakova to talk to her about my new project. As it happened, she had just finished reading the Russian edition of my book on Gulag survivors, published by Memorial, 1 and she was eager to share her thoughts about it.
She picked me up outside a subway station on the outskirts of Moscow and we talked for the hour it took to drive to her dacha, which had been home to Old Bolshevik Leonid Serebriakov, then Andrei Vyshinskii, and then to Zoria and her mother again when they returned from exile. Zoria was so anxious to express her opinions that we skipped the small talk and started our discussion even as I was climbing into her car.
Zoria passionately expressed her outrage at the interaction between the ex-prisoners and the government when the survivors were released from the Gulag. Her outrage, however, was not directed at the unapologetic behavior of the government's representatives , but rather at the ingratitude of the returnees. Zoria was so affronted by their ingratitude that she incredulously asked, “How could it be that they were not grateful to the government when they were released from camp?” Underscoring her argument, she declared, “Those times were full of opportunity.” 2
Yes, she acknowledged that I had accurately reported the bitterness expressed by many Gulag survivors, but she herself had been a prisoner, and she claimed that her embittered fellow prisoners were misguided. So the people whom I had described as victims and survivors were considered by one of their own as ingrates who had failed to appreciate the opportunities afforded them in the post-Stalin era. Zoria rightly claimed the authority of personal experience, but over-claimed the right to invalidate the experience of others who did not share her ideology. It was the self-evident quality of her convictions that I found so enlightening, because I realized that Zoria's justification for adherence to Communism was as self-evident to her as the justification for individual freedoms was self-evident to me. Although we seemed to be talking about the same Gulag and post-Gulag events, we were not, because our incompatible interpretive frames changed their meaning. Until I recognized this, Zoria's judgments seemed counterintuitive.
I knew that Zoria had been a privileged returnee under Khrushchev, and that she subscribed to the “returnee as hero” stance. I also knew that her mother, Galina, had spent twenty-one years in Siberia, and then went on to become a Party propagandist after release. So I was not too surprised by Zoria's unwavering loyalty to the Soviet regime. But I was unprepared for her inability to recognize the validity of the bitterness of so many of her fellow returnees. This group—and they were in the majority—described themselves as having been victimized by the state both during camp and after their release.
Although Zoria's allegiance to the Party, both during and after camp, was a minority view, she was not alone. There were others, like Lev Gavrilov, who entitled his memoirs “z/k,” which he defined as meaning zapasnoi kommunist (reserve Communist). In the camps, he had demonstrated his allegiance by extracting his own gold teeth and offering them to his interrogators in support of the war effort. Some prisoners sang patriotic songs while in camp, wrote poetry about the day they would be reinstated in the Party, and glorified the “humanist principles” of socialism and the heroic struggle to attain them. Although such responses did not represent the views held by the majority, they do represent something about the interaction of repressive regimes and their captive populations. The incorporation of such an interpretive frame would enable subjects of a total or totalitarian system to effortlessly avoid internal and external conflicts.
While I felt comfortable about disagreeing with Zoria's perspective, I felt uncomfortable because of my difficulty in making sense of her authentic feelings. A goal of this study is to explain how and why this minority point of view makes sense to people like Zoria. To accomplish this goal, I realized that it would be necessary to view such perspectives from within the experience of the loyalist Gulag prisoner or survivor.
I would like to gratefully acknowledge that this interview, along with my understanding of Zoria Leonidovna's opinions, benefited from a third encounter in 2009. At the first International Conference on Approaches to Stalinism (Moscow, December 2008), in a paper I presented to the Biography Section, I had recounted the conversation with Zoria described above. Zoria was not in the audience, but her friend was, and told Zoria that I had portrayed her as a Stalinist. Zoria contacted me a few weeks later to complain about this presumed portrayal of her as a Stalinist, and to assert that she reviled Stalin and held him personally responsible for mass murder. Zoria argued that if one does not emphasize how different things were after Stalin, then it is a justification of Stalin. I explained that the entire discussion centered on the post-Stalin, post-camp period. I had not portrayed her as a Stalinist, but in the course of reviewing the context of the reported conversation from which her friend drew this inference, I could see how some might mistakenly so label her. This mistake could occur if people failed to make the same sharp separation between the Stalin regime, which she disowned, and the post-Stalin Communist Party, which she supported. This separation was apparently more ideologically relevant for Zoria than for most of her fellow returnees, as illustrated by her response to their ingratitude to the post-Stalin Communist Party at the time of their release.
When Zoria and I revisited our previous conversation, she concurred that she had declared then, and affirms now, that the returnees’ bitterness was misguided. Rather than being angry with the Communist Party for imprisoning them, they should have been grateful to Khrushchev and the Party for releasing them. Most of Zoria's fellow returnees did not share Zoria's loyalty to the Party, did not absolve it of its behavior under or after