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xi Early on in this research, an interview I conducted with a Gulag survivor somewhat inadvertently proved to be an excellent illustration of precisely the kinds of issues I was aiming to address. It was a follow-up to a previous interview almost ten years earlier. Right after I got to Moscow in the spring of 2006, I called Zoria Serebriakova to talk to her about my new project. As it happened, she had just finished reading the Russian edition of my book on Gulag survivors, published by Memorial,1 and she was eager to share her thoughts about it. She picked me up outside a subway station on the outskirts of Moscow and we talked for the hour it took to drive to her dacha, which had been home to Old Bolshevik Leonid Serebriakov, then Andrei Vyshinskii, and then to Zoria and her mother again when they returned from exile. Zoria was so anxious to express her opinions that we skipped the small talk and started our discussion even as I was climbing into her car. 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. Zoria was so affronted by their ingratitude that she incredulously asked, “How could it be that they were not grateful to the government when they were released from camp?” Underscoring her argument, she declared, “Those times were full of opportunity.”2 Yes, she acknowledged that I had accurately reported the bitterness expressed by many Gulag survivors, but she herself had been a prisoner, and she claimed that her embittered fellow prisoners were misguided. So the people whom I had PREFACE xii Preface described as victims and survivors were considered by one of their own as ingrates who had failed to appreciate the opportunities afforded them in the post-Stalin era. Zoria rightly claimed the authority of personal experience, but over-claimed the right to invalidate the experience of others who did not share her ideology. It was the self-evident quality of her convictions that I found so enlightening, because I realized that Zoria’s justification for adherence to Communism was as self-evident to her as the justification for individual freedoms was self-evident to me. Although we seemed to be talking about the same Gulag and post-Gulag events, we were not, because our incompatible interpretive frames changed their meaning. Until I recognized this, Zoria’s judgments seemed counterintuitive. I knew that Zoria had been a privileged returnee under Khrushchev, and that she subscribed to the “returnee as hero” stance. I also knew that her mother, Galina , had spent twenty-one years in Siberia, and then went on to become a Party propagandist after release. So I was not too surprised by Zoria’s unwavering loyalty to the Soviet regime. But I was unprepared for her inability to recognize the validity of the bitterness of so many of her fellow returnees. This group—and they were in the majority—described themselves as having been victimized by the state both during camp and after their release. Although Zoria’s allegiance to the Party, both during and after camp, was a minority view, she was not alone. There were others, like Lev Gavrilov, who entitled his memoirs “z/k,” which he defined as meaning zapasnoi kommunist (reserve Communist). In the camps, he had demonstrated his allegiance by extracting his own gold teeth and offering them to his interrogators in support of the war effort. Some prisoners sang patriotic songs while in camp, wrote poetry about the day they would be reinstated in the Party, and glorified the “humanist principles” of socialism and the heroic struggle to attain them. Although such responses did not represent the views held by the majority, they do represent something about the interaction of repressive regimes and their captive populations. The incorporation of such an interpretive frame would enable subjects of a total or totalitarian system to effortlessly avoid internal and external conflicts. While I felt comfortable about disagreeing with Zoria’s perspective, I felt uncomfortable because of my difficulty in making sense of her authentic feelings. A goal of this study is to explain how and why this minority point of view makes sense to people like Zoria. To accomplish this goal, I realized that it would be necessary to view such...

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