Keeping Faith with the Party: Communist Believers Return from the Gulag by Nanci Adler (review)

Nanci Adler opens her book Keeping Faith with the Party by recounting a conversation that she had with narrator Zoria Serebriakova, a survivor of the Gulag: “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” (emphasis in original, xi). Adler was caught off guard by Zoria’s views, and it was this conversation that inspired Adler to examine the stories of Gulag survivors who remained loyal to the Communist Party after being released. With the Gulag as the fixed point, Adler searches for themes and commonalities in how people remembered and spoke of their experience. Through the narratives she has gathered, as well as published memoirs and archival documents, Adler examines what she calls the adaptive responses of returnees, including Communism as a faith-based system, Communism as a psychological defense mechanism, cognitive dissonance, functionalism, and the traumatic bond (Stockholm syndrome). By outlining these responses, Adler studies how narrative structures reveal symptoms of the deeper thought processes working to make sense of the experience.

Adler opens with the idea that the Party served as a religion for many members. Through devotion to the promise of Communism, loyal returnees could look past the violence and terror perpetrated by the Party and interpret their imprisonment in the Gulag as redemptive — a noble sacrifice. This devotion underlies the mental anguish experienced by loyal Party members who were accused of anti-Communist activities. To be expelled from the Party for some was a far worse fate than the Gulag. However, many loyalists, who were accommodated to a repressive system, did not question the necessity of the Gulag and other forms of punishment, even when it came to their own imprisonment.

Later, Adler shifts to the post-Gulag experience and examines both how returnees survived with their commitment intact and the importance of Party reinstatement. A key part of both the returnees’ and the Party’s narratives is Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953; in the following years the Party placed the culpability for the Gulag primarily on his shoulders, allowing it to compartmentalize its own role in the Gulag and allowing returnees to maintain their faith in the Party. Many returnees sought reinstatement out of sincere loyalty, although for others it was a practical matter of regaining Party privileges and restoring reputation. Some privileged returnees re-entered the Party and climbed the ranks, hoping to reform it and to help reinstate other returnees. Adler notes rehabilitation and reinstatement were complex processes influenced by Party leaders and their stance on how openly the Gulag could be discussed.

Adler concludes her book by exploring the meaning of the Soviet Union’s collapse in Russia’s national memory: “When the Soviet Union collapsed, so also did the meaning it had created for its citizens. The first generation of Party loyalists had to salvage meaning from the failure of their dedicated efforts” (149). Survivors, their children, and all of the Soviet Union faced coming to terms with not just the Gulag but also with the failed dream of Communism. Adler argues that there is no happy ending in the story of Soviet Communism; any meaning that could be made is undermined by the continual efforts to reframe the Soviet Union’s past for personal and political utility.

In the stories she studied, Adler not only examines cognitive structures but also what she argues is a breakdown of cognitive structure. Certainly terror and coercion are a part of this process; Adler is sensitive to this in the narratives she is working with, but her approach at times seems to pathologize her subjects. While Adler’s insight into how narrative functions for both people and political systems is quite sophisticated, at times she offers arguments that obscure...