Keeping Faith with the Party: Communist Believers Return from the Gulag

Adler’s insightful analyses of the views and attitudes of Communist camp survivors not just demonstrate, but help to understand the profound effects of Soviet ideology on those who had adopted it. They underscore that a central source of the Soviet system’s power, stability, and tenacity lay in the immaterial promise inherent in this ideology – the promise of answers to individuals’ quest for meaning and purpose.

― H-Soz-u-Kult

In sum, this is a beautifully written book that should be read by all serious scholars of the post-Stalin Soviet Union.

― Slavic Review

Through her own interviews with survivors, as well as an examination of published and unpublished memoirs, Adler astutely argues that these experiences are important for understanding how and why the memory of Stalin’s Terrror and the Gulag remains ambivalent today. . . . Recommended.

― Choice

Nanci Adler continues her impressive research into life after the Gulag in her latest monograph, Keeping Faith with the Party. . . . In the burgeoning field of Gulag studies, Adler’s book is a welcomed reminder that we still have much to learn from the memoirs themselves, even as we continue to mine the archives for useful information.

― The Russian Review

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.

― European History Quarterly

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.

― Gulag Studies

Nanci Adler’s fascinating and impressive new book on Gulag returnees focuses on the question of how a substantial number of communists punished by the Stalinist regime – often brutally and at length – could continue to maintain loyalty to the party and state while interned and even after release. The individual stories she tells to illustrate her answer are crucial for understanding the essence of the Soviet belief system.

— Norman M. Naimark