Nanci Adler,Keeping Faith with the Party: Communist Believers Return from the Gulag

Reviewed by: Mark Vincent, University of East Anglia, UK

In February 1956, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, provided a watershed moment in twentieth-century history by famously denouncing the personality cult and the dictatorship of his predecessor Joseph Stalin. The consequences of Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ resulted in thousands of former political prisoners embarking upon an unpredictable process of reintegration into Soviet society, during which many would struggle both to come to terms with the consequences of their imprisonment and return to the privileged positions which they had occupied in their former lives. After focusing upon this marginalized existence in her previous work The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System (2002), the Twentieth Party Congress continues to play a pivotal role in Nanci Adler’s new monograph which examines the returnees who not only retained their belief in Communist ideology but were even reinstated to positions of authority within the party. Some of these former prisoners included those who would later be involved in commissions which attempted to pass a series of reforms on the Gulag itself, investigations into the events surrounding the Sergei Kirov murder, petitions to posthumously rehabilitate denounced Bolsheviks such as Nikolai Bukharin and even in the writing of Khrushchev’s speech itself.

As suggested in the title, the discussion at the core of this book is: how was it possible for those who had been persecuted and subjected to the inhumane conditions and abject despair of life in the Gulag to maintain their faith in same the party which had incarcerated them for decades upon their release from the camps? In answering this, Adler suggests a variety of reasons including the long-established argument that, in the absence of institutionalized religion, communism provided an organization that could provide ‘safety, community and meaning’ for its citizens. Reflecting other scholars such as Igal Halfin and Jochen Hellbeck, Adler suggests that many individuals internalized communist ideals by ‘assimilation rather than accommodation’ and argues that some looked to pragmatically rebuild their life following release from the camps by compartmentalizing Soviet rhetoric from reality.

Adler describes how former prisoners constructed their own versions of Soviet history: some adopting the position favoured by Khrushchev, namely that the influence of Stalin and other prominent figures had made the party deviate from its ‘historic course’; others seeing their imprisonment as ‘chips flying’ (as in the adage ‘when you cut wood, chips fly’) and an unfortunate consequence of the turbulent events of the Stalinist period; while a handful saw the suppression of political opposition as originating even earlier, under the leadership of Lenin. Adler also demonstrates that some returnees would later only become dissidents after what they saw as the party’s failure to return to the position they had hoped for following Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s denouncement.

At the heart of Adler’s book is a rich tapestry of personal stories, collected through a number of oral history interviews and published and unpublished memoirs, highlighting both the individual experience and also the continuing effects of political repression on the families of returnees. Adler positions these inside an innovative interpretative framework which gives consideration to recent neuroscience and cognitive psychology alongside the broader themes of memory and perpetrator studies.

One slight word of caution, however, is that Adler’s argument rests on certain assumptions about how this group of former prisoners, through a variety of conscious and subconscious coping mechanisms, consistently retained their support for a party that had subjected them to years of imprisonment. Even with the help of recent neuroscience, it still remains difficult to understand the long-term effects of this kind of persecution and subsequent rehabilitation within a closed political system. Subjectively, it is rational to consider how some prisoners continued to retain their Bolshevik ideals to help them face the hardship of daily life in the camps. However, it becomes more difficult to appreciate how they internalized Khrushchev-era revelations and their own personal history alongside pragmatic concerns such as the lack of options available after their release. Adler suggests that this worked on an individual basis with all of the returnees harbouring their personal reasons not only for the return of their membership cards but also their continued belief in the party. This aside, Adler’s book is bustling with creativity and ideas. It is a welcome addition to the excellent scholarship on this period for anyone with an interest in trauma, memory and the search for a useable past.