Nanci Adler. Keeping Faith with the Party

Nanci Adler's previous monograph, The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System (2002), surveyed the experiences of returnees from Stalinist prison camps after the dictator's death. Focusing on victims of political terror, she argued that most experienced a marginal and stigmatized existence in which the struggle for housing, work, and social recognition broadly construed meant that post-camp life was still one of suffering and hardship. Her new study continues this examination of Gulag returnees but now focuses on communists who, even after long periods in prison, retained their belief in socialism. A handful returned to positions of responsibility within the party, notably during the period of de-Stalinization. This book is based on a variety of narrative sources, including oral history interviews and memoirs, published and unpublished, which provide a rich seam of personal recollection. In the course of the book, the reader meets survivors ready to articulate their own versions of Soviet history: some believed the violence of the Stalin era was a “historical necessity”; others held that Joseph Stalin had diverted the party from its revolutionary course, a position largely consistent with the line Nikita Khrushchev adopted in 1956 and 1961; a few believed that the party had gone wrong as early as V. I. Lenin. Adler also introduces us to returnees who later joined the dissident movement because of what they perceived as the party's failure to return to “Leninist norms” after Stalin's death.

Communism · Criminology · Dictator · Gulag · Literature · Memoir · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Prison · Socialism · Sociology · Testimonial · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration