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24 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.”1 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.”2 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.”3 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.”4 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 LazCHAP TER 1 The Gulag Prisoner and the Bolshevik Soul The Gulag Prisoner and the Bolshevik Soul 25 arevna—a sincere Communist with a capital C.”5 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.6 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 7 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.”8 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.”9 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.”10 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...

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