The Gulag Survivor

Beyond the Soviet System

Nanci Adler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780765805850
• eBook ISBN: 9781351481717
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Even before its dissolution in 1991, the Soviet Union was engaged in an ambivalent struggle to come to terms with its violent and repressive history. Following the death of Stalin in 1953, entrenched officials attempted to distance themselves from the late dictator without questioning the underlying legitimacy of the Soviet system. At the same time, the Gulag victims to society opened questions about the nature, reality, and mentality of the system that remain contentious to this day.The Gulag Survivor is the first book to examine at length and in-depth the post-camp experience of Stalin's victims and their fate in post-Soviet Russia. As such, it is an essential companion to the classic work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Based on extensive interviews, memoirs, official records, and recently opened archives, The Gulag Survivor describes what survivors experienced when they returned to society, how officials helped or hindered them, and how issues surrounding the existence of the returnees evolved from the fifties up to the present.Adler establishes the social and historical context of the first wave of returnees who were ""liberated"" into exile in Stalin's time. She reviews diverse aspects of return including camp culture, family reunion, and the psychological consequences of the Gulag. Adler then focuses on the enduring belief in the Communist Party among some survivors and the association between returnees and the growing dissident movement. She concludes by examining how issues surrounding the survivors reemerged in the eighties and nineties and the impact they had on the failing Soviet system. Written and researched while Russian archives were most available and while there were still survivors to tell their stories, The Gulag Survivor is a groundbreaking and essential work in modern Russian history. It will be read by historians, political scientists, Slavic scholars, and sociologists.

1

Defining the Parameters

The last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, signified the second period of official de-Stalinization at the seventieth anniversary of the October revolution in 1987. On this occasion he reopened a discussion that had long been officially closed when he publicly declared that “thousands” of Party members and other Soviet citizens had been repressed under Stalin. This understatement reflected political, rather than historical reality. After all, there had been Khrushchev thirty years earlier, whose Secret Speech referred to “massive” crimes, presumably well over “thousands.” But when Khrushchev’s term of office ended, so, too, did the selected efforts at truth-telling. The Khrushchev era was followed by nearly twenty-five years of official amnesia.

A year after Gorbachev’s public admission on crimes under Stalin, the General Secretary seemed to recognize its implications, that is, the implications of coming to terms with his nation’s past. The realization was revealed at a 1988 Politburo session, where the agenda item “Memorial” was up for discussion. “Memorial” had commenced functioning in 1987 as a tiny organization—an eleven-person initiative group—which was conducting a campaign aimed at gathering signatures to support the creation of a monument to victims of Stalin’s repressions. But by the time of the 1988 Politburo session, its scope had expanded to encompass the establishment of a scientific and public research center in Moscow with an archive, a museum, a reception room, and a library containing information and data on victims of Soviet repression. Among others, Memorial’s efforts immediately cast doubt on the suggestion that a mere “thousands” had been victimized under Stalin. Once the discussion became public, there existed a grave threat to the Soviet system itself.

Apprehensive about the political potential of Memorial, Gorbachev suggested the path of caution: he opted for retaining the investigation of the Soviet past in the hands of the Party, by limiting Memorial to the regional level under Party supervision.¹ What did Gorbachev have to fear from Memorial’s mandate? After all, other states (but not regimes) had dealt with, and are still dealing with, the contentious issue of officially acknowledging national responsibility and guilt. The appropriate commemoration of the fiftieth anniversaries of the liberation of Auschwitz and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with all the history they evoked, are two current examples.

However, the problems associated with confronting their history were different for Gorbachev’s Soviet Union than for either Germany or Japan. Neither Nazi Germany nor Imperial Japan had in fact ever confronted their history nor attempted to make an evolutionary change toward a more open society. These political systems perished, defeated by force of arms, and it was only the subsequent democratic political system that took up the struggle to confront the onerous past. Soviet state terrorism, on the other hand, experienced a much slower death, long outlasting the demise of the dictator. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) remained ruthless, had a rigid hierarchy with only top-down accountability, and had no feedback mechanism for responding to the needs of the populace. In contrast to postwar Germany and Japan, in the Soviet system, many of the same people who committed the political crimes were still in political office and were not about to cede power to those who would challenge them.

The death of Josef Stalin in 1953 and the subsequent trickle of prisoners that began to be released from the Gulag system constituted the beginning of the Soviet process of coming to terms with the Stalinist past. These ordinary, for the most part non-political, innocent citizens had been arrested for “counter-revolutionary” activities and dispatched to the barely habitable regions of the north and far east to mine nickel, chop wood, excavate gold, or build railroads leading nowhere,² but mostly just to waste away through hard labor and hunger under horrendous conditions. Those who, against all odds, had survived the Gulag were, by virtue of their status alone, a political statement, awakening a social conscience that had to be reckoned with. They and the ghosts of the millions of victims who had died in the camps were evidence and damning testimony to a deranged system. The reappearance of innocent victims of a criminal system now compelled society and the state to confront its past. But the process was neither smooth nor uninterrupted, and virtually came to a halt by the time of Brezhnev. When it resumed, under Gorbachev, the “unbearable shock” generated by the agonizing examination of Soviet history produced political tremors. In Lenin’s Tomb, David Remnick observes, “[u]nder this avalanche of remembering, people protested weariness, even boredom, after a while. But, really, it was the pain of remembering, the shock of recognition, that persecuted them.”³ The philosopher Grigory Pomerants describes it thus: “imagine being an adult and nearly all the truth you know about the world around you...has to be absorbed in a matter of a year or two or three.”⁴ He considered the predicament of the country as a condition of “mass disorientation.” But it was more than the condition of being politically lost. It was the shock of finding out and being found out. Moreover, revelations on the past further wounded the pride of an already economically failing nation.⁵ Society and the state suddenly had to deal with feelings of guilt, shame, and disgrace as well as the dismaying culture shock of learning a dreadful political truth.

Historiography, Literature

Considering the paucity of knowledge regarding the readaptation of the victims of Soviet terror, little scholarly literature has been devoted to this problem. However, a number of works that deal with similar problems can help constitute a framework for a better understanding of this issue. Of particular interest are the works The Survivor and Die Schuldfrage, which will be discussed below in the context of this study. In The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan,⁶ Ian Buruma describes how these two states have come to terms with their totalitarian pasts. He specifically refers to Japanese shame and German guilt.⁷ This work is useful in providing perspective for the Russian process of coming to terms with an ignominious past. While there is a proliferation of scientific literature written in post-totalitarian states dealing specifically with victims of political repression under the previous regime, particularly those of Nazi Germany (Holocaust), Cambodia (Khmer Rouge), and Latin America,⁸ most of what we know about the experience of victims of the Soviet era thus far is unsystematized. Our knowledge comes from camp memoirs, unofficial and unsystematic reports, testimonials, defector and emigré anecdotes, dissident literature (including samizdat), and a limited number of substantiated studies.⁹

This short survey of the literature relevant to our theme will not address the multitude of works that deal primarily with the terror and the camps, since our present focus is on the aftermath of Soviet repression.¹⁰ Given that the Soviet authoritarian structure has crumbled only relatively recently, there has been little opportunity to systematically study the effects and political implications of its victimizations. Access to official archives was prohibited or limited, and only since 1988 have victims begun to openly discuss their history of repression on a broad scale. There are, however, a few Western, Soviet, and post-Soviet works or parts of works that do specifically address the issue of the victims’ return to society. Among them are Stephen Cohen’s 1985 Rethinking the Soviet Experience, in particular his chapter on “The Stalin Question Since Stalin.” In his discussion of victims’ requirements regarding housing, jobs, medical care, and so on, Cohen evaluates the political impact of this group of survivors. His assessment that “these demands of the surviving victims had enormous political implications, if only because exoneration and restitution were official admissions of colossal official crimes”¹¹ proved to be prescient, as the experience under Gorbachev’s de-Stalinization was to illustrate.¹²

In Remembering Stalin’s Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR, Kathleen E. Smith compares transitions from totalitarianism or authoritarianism to democracy, specifically with reference to Khrushchev’s and Gorbachev’s respective reigns of power. She traces the history of each of their de-Stalinization campaigns, their efforts at truth-telling, and their search for accountability. The author notes that the complicated and unpublicized rehabilitation procedures “reinforced social atomization” and hindered the mourning process.¹³ Implicitly, the very process of rehabilitation laid bare the state’s ambivalence about exoneration of those who were labelled “enemies of the people.” With regard to the victim, she asserts that in 1956, “rapid release ... did not generally translate into rapid reintegration of returnees into society.”¹⁴ Smith does not pursue this key issue in any depth.¹⁵

In his 1994 The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin,¹⁶ Adam Hochschild provides some insight into survivors’ memories of their time in the Gulag. He even includes former henchmen in his selection of interviewees. But with the exception of a few isolated references to their post-camp fate, he focuses on the ex-prisoners’ vision of the Stalinist epoch and of the present. Hochschild’s work does not devote particular attention to the status of the returnee in society.

Jane Shapiro’s unpublished 1967 dissertation, Rehabilitation Policy and Political Conflict in the Soviet Union 1953-1964,¹⁷ is one of the earliest studies on this issue. It emphasizes the rehabilitation process of Party and military leaders who were victims of the ‘36-’38 Purge. Shapiro also discusses changes in the MVD’s jurisdiction of the camps after Stalin’s death. However, with its focus on the rehabilitation of prominent Party members and understandably limited information on former victims, this study provides little about the fate of ordinary citizens.

Albert van Goudoever published a unique study on the rehabilitation of former Communist Party members, entitled The Limits of Destalinization in the Soviet Union: Political Rehabilitations since Stalin, Though it is a detailed examination of the process and meaning of rehabilitation, the period during which it was written did not permit access to certain types of materials on social rehabilitation. Moreover, the victims themselves were not yet able to openly discuss their experiences, so oral history was not a readily available means of supplementing the written, official history. Van Goudoever himself asserts, “[f]rom a social point of view, the rehabilitation of the victims of Stalin presents one of the most pressing and, at the same time, least accessible issues in the history of Soviet society.”¹⁸ In his criticism of the Medvedev brothers’ contention that victims were fully accommodated, he pointed out (in 1986), “[t]he material is too deficient to justify any conclusion on the way in which reintegration into social life was realised.”¹⁹ Fortunately, the material is no longer too deficient for such inquiries.

Much of the historiographical literature on Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization focuses on changes in the political and cultural arena, the rehabilitation of prominent Party members, and the elimination of the “cult of personality.” With regard to returnees, it generally limits itself to the description of administrative measures. The actual effect that these measures had on the victim was not a subject of extensive inquiry. Answers had to be sought in the memoirs and fiction of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Defining the Parameters
• 2. The First Return: Between Liberation and Liberalization, 1947-1953
• 3. The System’s Adaptation to Repression, 1953-55
• 4. The Impact of Repression on Readaptation
• 5. The Politics of Readaptation and Resocialization Procedures: Policy and Practice before and after the XX Party Congress
• 6. The Effect of Repression and Readaptation on Both the Returnees and the Political System
• 7. The Victims Strike Again: The Reemergence of Returnees in the Eighties and Nineties
• 8. Bibliography
• 9. Index