Keeping Faith with the Party: Communist Believers Return from the Gulag

Notes

177 Preface 1. Nanci Adler, Trudnoe vozvrashchenie: Sud’by sovetskikh politzakliuchennykh v 1950– 1990-e gody [The difficult return: The fates of Soviet political prisoners from the 1950s– 1990s] (Moscow: Zven’ia, 2005). 2. Zoria Leonidovna Serebriakova, interview, Nikolina Gora, April 19, 2006. Introduction Some parts of this chapter have appeared in Nanci Adler, “Enduring Repression: Narratives of Loyalty to the Party Before, During and After the Gulag,” Europe-Asia Studies 62, 2 (March 2010): 211–234 (www.informaworld.com). I gratefully acknowledge EuropeAsia Studies for their permission to reproduce these sections. 1. Among the published memoirs that deal with this theme are: Iulii Daniel’, Pis’ma iz zakliucheniia: Stikhi [Letters from imprisonment: Poems] (Moscow: Obshchestvo “Memorial ,” Zven’ia, 2000); Anna Mikhailovna Larina, This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow (London: Hutchinson, 1993); Richard Lourie, Sakharov: A Biography (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2002); Raisa Orlova and Lev Kopelev, My zhili v Moskve [We lived in Moscow] (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1988); Petr Ionovich Yakir, A Childhood in Prison (London: Macmillan, 1972). 2. See, for example, Steven Greene, “Understanding Party Identification: A Social Identity Approach,” Journal of the International Society of Political Psychology 20, 2 (1999): 393–403; Agnes Horvath, “Tricking into the Position of the Outcast: A Case Study in the Emergence and Effects of Communist Power,” Journal of the International Society of Political Psychology 19, 2 (1998): 331–347; see also Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, et al., The NOTES 178 Notes to pages 2–4 Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 3. Roy Medvedev, interview at his Moscow dacha, June 19, 2005. 4. Nina Gagen-Torn, “O verakh,” in Semen Vilenskii, ed., Dodnes’ tiagoteet [Till my tale is told], vol. 2 (Moscow: Vozvrashchenie, 2004), 22. The first volume of this brilliant collection of memoirs has been published in English: Simeon Vilensky, ed., Till My Tale is Told: Women’s Memoirs of the Gulag, trans. John Crowfoot (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 5. During our interview she could not recall which year she had entered camp. In my 1995 questionnaire to her, she recorded that she had been sentenced to eight years. She probably spent a total of fifteen to seventeen years in camp or exile. 6. Nataliia Alekseevna Rykova, interview, Moscow, October 18, 2005. 7. V. A. Kozlov and S. V. Mironenko, eds., Kramola: Inakomyslie v SSSR pri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve 1952–1982 [Uprising: Dissidence in the USSR under Khrushchev and Brezhnev 1952–1982] (Moscow: Materik, 2005), 170. 8. See interview in “Obeliat’ Stalina bessmyslenno [It is senseless to vindicate Stalin ],” 30 oktiabria 84 (2008): 4–5. 9. See Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 78. 10. For a review and apt analysis of the various estimates, see Michael Ellman, “Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments,” Europe-Asia Studies 54, 7 (2002): 1151–1172. In 2000, Russian criminologists Vladimir Kudriavtsev and A. I. Trusov introduced the figure of 6.1 million sentenced on political articles between 1918 and 1958; by 1991 this number had increased by 5,000. They estimated that up to 1,165,000 of these arrestees were executed . In sum, they calculated 13 million victims of political repression in all, including the victims of collectivization and mass deportation. They cautioned, however, that some of these victims may have been actual offenders. Still, they concluded that “even inconclusive data . . . indicate an incomparable scope of mass repression” (V. N. Kudriavtsev and A. I. Trusov, Politicheskaia iustitsiia v SSSR [Political justice in the USSR] (Moscow, 2000), 312–318. See also J. A. Getty, G. T. Rittersporn, and V. N. Zemskov, “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Material ,” American Historical Review 4 (1993): 1017–1049; Steven Rosefielde, “Stalinism in Post-Communist Perspective: New Evidence on Killings, Forced Labour and Economic Growth in the 1930s,” Europe-Asia Studies 48, 6 (1996): 959–987; Stephen Wheatcroft, “The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and Mass Killings, 1930–45,” Europe-Asia Studies 48, 8 (1996): 1319–1353. In his speech at the opening plenary session of the international conference Itogi Stalinizma (Moscow, December 5, 2008), Oleg Khlevniuk argued that the 20 million arrests frequently quoted in statistics are just the “tip of the iceberg.” Yoram Gorlizki reported the following rough repression statistics from the sessions titled “Politics: The Institutions ” and “Methods of...