Keeping Faith with the Party Communist Believers Return from the Gulag [Paperback]

How is it that some prisoners of the Soviet gulagmany of them falsely convictedemerged from the camps maintaining their loyalty to the party that was responsible for their internment? In camp, they had struggled to survive. Afterward they struggled to reintegrate with society, reunite with their loved ones, and sometimes renew Party ties. Based on oral histories, archives, and unpublished memoirs, Keeping Faith with the Party chronicles the stories of returnees who professed enduring belief in the CPSU and the Communist project. Nanci Adler's probing investigation brings a deeper understanding of the dynamics of Soviet Communism and of how individuals survive within repressive regimes while the repressive regimes also survive within them.

With a deft and sympathetic touch, Adler paints vivid portraits of survivors who made sense of their own fate by clinging to a belief in the worthiness of the Communist cause and the virtue of the Soviet Communist Party.

Nanci Adler is Associate Professor at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the University of Amsterdam. She is author of The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System, Victims of Soviet Terror: The Story of the Memorial Movement, and numerous scholarly articles on the gulag, political rehabilitations, and the consequences of Stalinism.

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.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 Communistló.