Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Enduring Repression
1. The Gulag Prisoner and the Bolshevik Soul
2. Reconciling the Self with the System
3. Beyond Belief: Party Identification and the "Bright Future"
4. Striving for a "Happy Ending": Attempts to Rehabilitate Socialism
5. The Legacies of the Repression
Epilogue: The "Bright Past," or Whose (Hi)Story?
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Promotional Information

Why some gulag survivors remained loyal to Communism

About the Author

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.

Reviews

"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 Communist beliefs. For anyone interested in the Soviet Stalinist experience but also crimes against humanity elsewhere, this is an essential book." Stephen F. Cohen, author of Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War "This valuable book contains an enormous amount of information about a group of gulag survivors who retained their love of Communism and its Soviet proponents even after many years of torture at their hands. The theme... has never been subjected to a study even close to Adler's in detail and rigor." Alexander Etkind, author of Eros of the Impossible: The History Of Psychoanalysis in Russia "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." Leona Toker, author of Return from the Gulag: Narratives of Gulag Survivors (IUP, 2000) "...Adler's book is bustling with creativity and ideas. It is a welcome addition to the excellent scholarship on this period for anyone with an interest in trauma, memory and the search for a useable past." - Mark Vincent, European History Quarterly, 2014 Vol. 44(2)