Keeping Faith with the Party: Communist Believers Return from the Gulag
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Keeping Faith with the Party: Communist Believers Return from the Gulag
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253223791 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/05/2012 |
| Pages: | 264 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Read an Excerpt
Keeping Faith with the Party
Communist Believers Return from the Gulag
By Nanci Adler
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2012 Nanci AdlerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35722-9
CHAPTER 1
The Gulag Prisoner and the Bolshevik Soul
Oksana Lazarevna taught socioeconomics at Odessa University and was the mother of two. She was also the wife of an "enemy of the people," who had been arrested and taken away. Oksana was a committed Party member, but as she watched the arrest of one after another of her cohorts, she suspected that the enemy had "penetrated the Party, and it was the NKVD." One day, while Oksana was nursing her infant son, they came for her too. The NKVD agents tore the baby from her and dispatched her sons to her parents. Oksana was taken to an Odessa prison. There, the suspicions she had harbored when she was free were confirmed by what she witnessed in prison.
By the time Oksana was sent to the Gulag, she had resolved to "clear the names of honest Communists." From her barracks, she began to write letters to Stalin and the Central Committee. She charged that "lawlessness reigns in the organs of the NKVD ... it has led to the destruction of the Odessa Party ranks and many sincere Leninist-Communists." Her campmates were terrified. They warned, "You will have to give these letters to the NKVD authorities in the camp. Don't you understand what the consequences will be? You will die, and you will kill your children." In her response, Oksana illustrated how the dedication to a set of values can override even so strong a human devotion as motherhood, let alone personal survival. She declared: "I am a Communist in the first place, and after that a mother." Oksana was transferred, and her story, recorded in the memoirs of a campmate, ends there. The author, also a committed Party member, wrote in 1963: "In these days of the triumph of truth and justice, the complete unmasking of the cult of personality of Stalin, the restoration of the Leninist principles in life and Party leadership, I would love to know what ever happened to Oksana Lazarevna—a sincere Communist with a capital C." Given the content of Oksana's letters, it is unlikely that she even made it to, or survived transport to, the camps. What is likely is that she maintained her faith until the very end.
In the aftermath of Khrushchev's Secret Speech, the great wave of return and rehabilitation was followed by thousands of requests for Party reinstatement. The motivation of some applicants raises questions about the similarity between Bolshevism and religion. Because Bolshevism presented itself as a secular political movement, it may seem a terminological mismatch to couple Bolshevik with soul and, further, to discern the Bolshevik soul in the grinding coercion of the Gulag. However, this linkage is justified when religion is viewed as a sociological phenomenon and religious conversion as a process that has historically been facilitated by compliance and coercion—behaviors widely evident in the Gulag. In her discussion of the former peasants who served in the Red Army during the war, Catherine Merridale similarly notes that the belief of some of them in Communism was tantamount to religious "fanaticism": "It would be unwise to assume much love for Communism among the rural population as a whole, but where the new ideas struck root, they could be embraced with a fanaticism that calls to mind the Inquisition or the new jihad. This kind of ideology was really faith, and it was ruthless and personal." Lenin would not have been surprised by this phenomenon. While the revolutionary leaders, including Lenin, were atheists, they well understood the religious proclivity of the Russian peasantry and how beliefs could be exploited to facilitate the Revolution. The professed, and likely genuine, atheists of the Bolshevik vanguard produced a revolution that was, in the words of Alexander Etkind, "not necessarily secular."
Religions are faith-based beliefs that provide a connection to a "higher power," contingent on adherence to a world view. In a religious context, this connection is described as the "soul," which refers to the "immaterial essence ... the spiritual principle embodied in human beings." To be sure, the frequent references among some prisoners and returnees to their "Bolshevik soul" suggest that the penchant of humans to transcend their individual, material being and connect to something greater than their self is not unique to religion. It is an innate property of being human—a property used and exploited by both religious and secular "total institutions." Indeed, it is an ordinary part of daily human experience. Examples of this transcendent connectivity can be found in parenthood, religious devotion, patriotism, and belonging to a collective.
For purposes of discussion, this chapter focuses on and seeks to explain Gulag prisoner and returnee accounts that profess enduring faith in the Party and the Communist project. This faith raises issues concerning Bolshevism's similarity to religion, which included sacrificing the individual for the collective, self-reflection, conversion, confession, and purging. The idea that Communism was a secular or political religion is neither new nor fully explanatory, but it is one factor relevant to understanding the preservation of belief despite the Gulag.
RELIGION AND BOLSHEVISM
The success of religions in appropriating the human proclivity for a superordinate connection is evidenced by the prevalence and variety of competing religions throughout human history and across a wide array of cultures. Religions compete with each other and with secular political systems. Their popularity is especially informative because they often succeed in spite of contrary scientific evidence. Atheists regularly point out that people accept the claims of religion with less scrutiny than they would apply to claims regarding the material value of a purchase. Since this is common behavior, it can be inferred that religious adherents are receiving immaterial value and relying on nonobjective evidence. The immaterial value that believers receive from religion is a connection with a "higher power" or "greater cause" that provides meaning to their life.
This perception can be more consequential than anything of material value—or any earthly connections—as witnessed by Oksana's story above. In another context, a 1787 work by the French writer Louis Sebastien Mercier offers a rich illustration of this phenomenon. In an episode titled "Bringing a Criminal to Death," a jilted lover attacks and kills the man for whom his fiancée left him. He is then brought before the court, in his blood-stained shirt, "beating his chest and showing all signs of regret." As he approaches the judges, he drops to one knee to kiss the Penal Code. The presiding judge tells the accused that he is not hated, and that he should ask forgiveness from God and his fellow citizens. He was given the choice of living in shame and indignity, but nevertheless living. The judge warned, however, "Thou will be looking at the sun that will reproach Thee daily because Thou robbed one of [Thy] fellow human beings of its soft and bright light ... Thou will only see contempt in our eyes." The accused did have an alternative, though: he could be "brought to death." The judge said that they would cry for him when the law had taken its course, "but death is less awful than shame." The accused nodded in agreement, and he was no longer treated as a guilty man. He was encircled, given a clean white shirt, forgiven, blessed, and ritually executed. His name was reentered in the population registers. When, on the night after the execution, one of the king's advisory posts became available, it was offered to the brother of the executed man. The narrator writes, "Everyone was delighted with this choice that combined reason and charity ... our laws lean more toward reform than punishment." The lesson of this parable is that this man's death made sense. It offered him, his family, and society immaterial (and material) benefits to which they would not have had access if he had chosen to live.
All religions, as well as a secular belief system such as science, provide two basic needs—group membership with social support, and a system of beliefs that provides a cognitive frame for understanding events. These have been described as panhuman "group-system" needs. What religion adds to the need for social support is access to a superhuman power, a mechanism illustrated above. While the cognitive frames of secular systems answer what and how questions, religion answers why questions—the purpose and meaning of events. A further distinguishing characteristic of religious systems is that their claims are not (supposed to be) questioned. As Bolshevism increasingly came to operate as a nonfalsifiable system, it merged with the practice of religion. Inconsistent empirical evidence—if admitted at all—could be interpreted as serving a higher purpose.
As noted above, because the provision of group-system needs is so necessary for social functioning, total institutions—secular (collectives, political movements, social causes, cults, etc.) or religious—can manipulate these needs for the purposes of conversion or simply adherence. The immediate influence of total institutions resides in their power to compel compliance by exercising control over everything imaginable—including life, death, and suffering. The long-term influence of such closed systems resides in the indoctrination/incorporation of that compliance, exemplified by the enduring belief in the Party by some Gulag prisoners and returnees. People live for belief systems, die for them, and kill for them, and as these stories will illustrate, for ardent believers, allegiance is not impaired by contradictory evidence. Some of the stories suggest that there was no contradictory evidence because the world view of true believers admitted none.
This chapter is not about the inhumane treatment of prisoners or the wretched conditions in the Gulag. That is the background. Rather, this study foregrounds the adaptive responses of some prisoners and returnees. "Adaptive" is narrowly defined as physical survival, accompanied by a functional way of processing the experience. Sometimes this entailed reframing the forced labor as a meaningful episode, akin to religious martyrdom. A relevant question—not answerable through available data and beyond the scope of the present study—is whether there was a differential survival rate that favored adherents over non-Communists and dissidents.
The Gulag has joined the tragic annals of what has been described as "man's inhumanity to man." It raised questions connected with our very being. Paradoxically, however, while the Soviet treatment of Gulag prisoners was inhumane from the perspective of secular humanism, it was all too human from a theocratic perspective. In its righteous justification by an idealized cause, in its lack of concern for the rights of the individual, and, most ironically informative, in the loyalty of some prisoners/victims themselves, it challenges us to dispute Bolshevism's self-proclaimed standing as a political rather than a religious entity. Particularly suggestive is that true believers in Communism looked past the physical hardships of the Gulag for its meaning within an idealized vision of the state.
The Gulag experience forced those who went through it to search for meaning, and those who aimed to portray it to search for explanation. It was only in the mid-fifties that references and discussion related to the camp theme began to appear in journals, memoirs, and on stage. This continued until the fall of Khrushchev, after which ideas, information, and experiences had to rely mainly on nonofficial means of transmission such as samizdat. This unofficial grapevine—to which a number of courageous members of the intelligentsia contributed—honorably kept the discourse on Soviet repression alive, but the circulation and readership were limited by the great risk involved. Production or even possession of samizdat material could be considered "anti-Soviet agitation" and was punishable: writing or reading about the Gulag could land one there.
A quarter of a century after Khrushchev's ouster, starting in 1988 under Gorbachev, the camp theme would reenter the public arena, but occasional references to the Gulag—if only in the form of veiled (published) fiction—did trickle out in the decades in between. Some of these muted references drew the reader's attention to the socially redeeming function of the Gulag—an issue relevant to making sense of the Gulag experience. One such novel published during that time (in 1974), Skudnyi materik (Poor Continent), is set in the late 1950s and highlights contrasting perspectives and perceptions of the Gulag experience. The protagonist, Ivan, had been arrested in 1940 and spent ten years in camp in Pechuro and another five years in exile. Upon release, he returns to his native city of Grozny, is rehabilitated, and is offered a vacation on the Black Sea. While at the resort, Ivan meets a geologist from Pechuro, who assumes that Ivan would be enthusiastic about joining in on some of the drilling projects there. The geologist's stance reveals much about the perceptions that were programmed among the populace at that time, but not among many returnees. Ivan quips, "I'm not going [back] there. I have been wronged.... Your Pechuro took fifteen years of my life! Fifteen years!" The geologist supports his original suggestion by recalling that a number of ex-prisoners ended up returning, because so much of their lives was connected with these places, and he adds that it was "too bad" that Ivan would not be among their ranks. This apparent insensitivity enrages Ivan. Still, the geologist persists, "Calm down. Vorkuta, Norilsk, Magadan were heroic deeds of people who, despite the fact that they were camp inmates, worked hard and developed these areas for the motherland."
The geologist's argument deftly shifts the issue from Ivan's individual needs and aspirations to those of the collective. To the extent that any discussion at all was permitted on this tabooed theme, this was a Brezhnev-era spin, focusing on the positive achievements of the Soviet workforce. In the end, Ivan returns to Pechuro and signs a three-year contract to work there. His initial reluctance was visceral; his decision to return, pragmatic. Given the impetus to resolve psychological conflict in favor of ongoing behavior (cognitive dissonance), allegiance to the Party and/or the Soviet state was a functional adaptation for many returnees. The novel guides inmates disgruntled by their hardship and loss of individuality through the perplexity of reconceptualizing their value system and coming out in favor of Party-propagated values. The camp is no longer a crime scene but a sacred space, in which sacrifices of time and effort are redemptive.
A "Church-like" Party?
The hardship of the camp experience and the hardship of return stamped ex-prisoners for life. In camp, they struggled to survive. After camp they struggled to reintegrate with society and to reunite with their former preinstitutional self and family members. Party members strove to renew their vows with the Party. In reviewing the narratives of survivors, words such as "struggle" and "allegiance" are unambiguous because they describe the overcoming of obstacles and commitment, respectively. But other descriptors, such as "repression," incorporate a value judgment. If the Gulag experience is perceived as brutalized forced labor, it is repression. If it is perceived as a "labor of love," according to Frankl's definition of meaning, it "ceases to be suffering" and veers in the direction of devotion. And these contrasting perceptions are embedded in a system of beliefs regarding the mutual obligations and responsibilities of the state and its citizens. In a secular democratic society, these are negotiated between the two. In total systems, including theocracies, they are dictated by the state and perceived as infallible.
In his pioneering study of Stalinist civilization, Stephen Kotkin discusses the "church-like" nature of the Party. This was even reflected in the language used by participants, who referred to the "sacred cause" of building Communism. These loyalists also imparted "miracle"-like status to Party achievements. If prisoners could enter and leave the Gulag with the conviction that they were serving a greater good, and such devotion provided meaning and value to their existence, then the line between the Soviet system in the Stalinist era and a theocracy is easily conceivable.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Keeping Faith with the Party by Nanci Adler. Copyright © 2012 Nanci Adler. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Enduring Repression1. The Gulag Prisoner and the Bolshevik Soul2. Reconciling the Self with the System3. Beyond Belief: Party Identification and the "Bright Future"4. Striving for a "Happy Ending": Attempts to Rehabilitate Socialism5. The Legacies of the RepressionEpilogue: The "Bright Past," or Whose (Hi)Story?NotesWorks CitedIndexWhat People are Saying About This
"This valuable book contains an enormous amount of information about a group of gulag survivors who retained their love of Communism and its Soviet proponents even after many years of torture at their hands. The theme . . . has never been subjected to a study even close to Adler's in detail and rigor."
One of the achievements of this book is that while explaining the experience of the Communist 'true believers' among Gulag victims in terms of sociological notions that were not available to the subjects themselves, Adler manages to maintain human sympathy for these people as well as sensitivity to their special Soviet predicaments.
Nanci Adler's fascinating and impressive new book on Gulag returnees focuses on the question of how a substantial number of communists punished by the Stalinist regime – often brutally and at length – could continue to maintain loyalty to the party and state while interned and even after release. The individual stories she tells to illustrate her answer are crucial for understanding the essence of the Soviet belief system.
This valuable book contains an enormous amount of information about a group of gulag survivors who retained their love of Communism and its Soviet proponents even after many years of torture at their hands. The theme . . . has never been subjected to a study even close to Adler's in detail and rigor.
This valuable book contains an enormous amount of information about a group of gulag survivors who retained their love of Communism and its Soviet proponents even after many years of torture at their hands. The theme . . . has never been subjected to a study even close to Adler's in detail and rigor.
Nanci Adler's fascinating and impressive new book on Gulag returnees focuses on the question of how a substantial number of communists punished by the Stalinist regime – often brutally and at length – could continue to maintain loyalty to the party and state while interned and even after release. The individual stories she tells to illustrate her answer are crucial for understanding the essence of the Soviet belief system.
In a compelling narrative that presents new information and important interdisciplinary insights, Nanci Adler takes readers through the traumatic aftermath of a long mass terror whose survivors struggle to cope with their shattered lives and sustain their Communist beliefs. For anyone interested in the Soviet Stalinist experience but also crimes against humanity elsewhere, this is an essential book.
In a compelling narrative that presents new information and important interdisciplinary insights, Nanci Adler takes readers through the traumatic aftermath of a long mass terror whose survivors struggle to cope with their shattered lives and sustain their Communist beliefs. For anyone interested in the Soviet Stalinist experience but also crimes against humanity elsewhere, this is an essential book.
One of the achievements of this book is that while explaining the experience of the Communist 'true believers' among Gulag victims in terms of sociological notions that were not available to the subjects themselves, Adler manages to maintain human sympathy for these people as well as sensitivity to their special Soviet predicaments.