Khrushchev's Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin

Introduction

Cold Summer of ’53, a film of the perestroika era, opens in an isolated fishing hamlet. Under the boundless expanse of the northern skies, an unkempt man flirts with a pretty young girl washing the family laundry at the edge of a river.¹ Her mother, a mute, opposes the friendship between the two, at one point throwing a bucket of cold water over them both. Her reasons soon become clear: having served a prison sentence for treachery during the Second World War, the man lives in the hamlet as an exile and, although the villagers know him, he remains an outsider to the community.

The first few scenes of Cold Summer of ’53 have an elegiac feel, but the rural calm is soon violently disrupted. Viewed by one critic as the Russian answer to the American western, the film goes on to portray a brutal conflict in which bandits arriving from the outside world rip apart the harmony and security of the tiny rural settlement.² In the spirit of a traditional western, the film requires both heroes and villains. The latter come in the form of a group of armed bandits, released from the Gulag by the amnesty of 27 March 1953. Terrorizing the countryside as they make their way back across Russia from the camps, they are organized, violent, and merciless: the villagers are held hostage, the girl narrowly escapes rape but is later killed. The role of hero is taken not, as a Soviet audience might have expected, by a local party official or policeman, but by the shabby exile. Alongside an old comrade, also a former political prisoner, he courageously engages the brigands in a dangerous shoot-out. The risk pays off. The protagonist kills the bandits, and the village is saved. The villagers are forced to recognize that despite his status as exile, the protagonist has rescued them; and yet most still remain wary of him. Despite his heroics he is still not fully reintegrated into Soviet society: the last shot of the film sees the hero two years later wandering the streets of the capital carrying his suitcase—alone.

Aleksandr Proshkin’s 1988 film told the story of the first wave of Gulag releases following the death of I. V. Stalin on 5 March 1953. Long an outpost for those deemed unfit to remain within the Soviet family, the Gulag was dramatically downsized between 1953 and 1960. The population of the camps and colonies, which stood at almost 2.5 million on the eve of Stalin’s death, would shrink nearly five times over the course of these seven years.³ In addition to the prisoners in camps and colonies, almost three million people were enduring some form of banishment in 1953, and the majority of these saw their exile status revoked by the beginning of the 1960s.⁴ Although the regime tried to protect key cities and major industrial centers by placing restrictions on the movement of some returnees, in practice few points in the Soviet Union remained untouched as millions of Stalin’s outcasts began wending their way back from the most remote areas of the country.⁵

How were they regarded by society? Three decades later the filmmaker Proshkin suggested that ordinary people were suspicious of all returnees, regarding political exiles and criminal gangs alike with aversion. The film thus points to important questions: Would those who had been labeled zeks (an abbreviation of the Russian word for prisoners) ever lose their alien status in the eyes of the Soviet public? Did Soviet citizens come to distinguish among different categories of returnees? Could returnees hope to create a normal life?

The great exodus of prisoners from the camps marked a significant break with the Stalinist era: although amnesties had been decreed before, there had never been a period in which the size of the Gulag population was reduced so dramatically.⁶ A development of such proportion could not pass without some kind of official explanation. In Proshkin’s isolated fishing hamlet newspapers are in short supply and villagers rely on the local policeman to bring news from town, but even here they learn of the event that was splashed across the front pages of Pravda in July 1953: Lavrentii Beriia, head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), had been arrested. This was the first sign of a shift in what Susan Buck-Morss has called the political imaginary (or political landscape), within which stand three icons: the enemy, the political collective (in this case, Soviet citizenry), and the sovereign agency which wages war in its name (here the party-state).⁷ Although Beriia himself was unmasked as an enemy of the people, Soviet citizens were not asked to root out his accomplices and the press eschewed many of the more violent formulations common in the Stalinist era.⁸ This was just the start of a fundamental reevaluation of the status of the enemy which was set to become an important feature of the post-Stalin years.

In 1937 Stalin had argued that the regime’s adversaries only became more belligerent and more cunning as the Soviet people advanced toward the light of communism and the figure of the enemy—both the foreign foe and the homegrown traitor—became a central tenet of Soviet culture up until 1953.⁹ Three years after the dictator died, Nikita Khrushchev openly condemned the term enemy of the people (vrag naroda), deriding it as a formula invented by Stalin. In his famous Secret Speech, delivered at the end of the Twentieth Party Congress, Khrushchev challenged Stalin’s dark worldview and mocked Stalin for seeing enemies, double-dealers (dvurushniki), and spies everywhere.¹⁰ The rabid invective of the Stalinist press now subsided and the rituals of high politics became more moderate, with defeated opponents increasingly condemned for committing mistakes and errors rather than unmasked as enemies. Khrushchev’s vision was based on the belief that in the past the threat of opposition and subversion had been exaggerated and that the Soviet community was far more stable and trustworthy than his predecessor had allowed. If the enemy was a lesser threat than previously imagined, the sovereign agency (the party-state) need exert less violence. All this meant that the Gulag—and the practices of surveillance, purging, and imprisonment that had been such a feature of Stalinism—could be reduced.

Khrushchev’s Cold Summer explores the massive exodus of prisoners from the Gulag and the reworking of the political imaginary which accompanied it in the first decade after Stalin’s death. It also examines popular reactions to such changes. In Cold Summer of ’53, an elderly captain who acts as harbormaster is thrown into a state of deep shock by Beriia’s arrest and on learning that police officers had been ordered to burn portraits of him passionately denounces their boss as an enemy of the people. Proshkin’s depiction of reactions to de-Stalinization holds at least a grain of truth, and whereas for some people the political and social transformations occurring were liberating (in both literal and figurative senses), for others they represented the start of a painful and disorienting period. The diverse ways in which Soviet men and women—including party members, housewives, workers, children, teenagers, pensioners, and Gulag survivors themselves—responded to the process of de-Stalinization is an important theme in this book.

The Legacies of Terror

Proshkin’s film was not the only work of the mid-to late 1980s to meditate on the terror and its aftermath.¹¹ Indeed, as censorship eased under Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership, the atrocities of the Stalin era re-emerged as an important topic in public debate, suggesting that the scars left by the terror years of the 1930s had not healed even fifty years on.¹² This is not perhaps surprising. The experiences of other countries emerging from a period of mass violence and political terror show that recovery is almost always a lengthy and painful process. The task of creating commissions to establish the truth, deciding on the scope and nature of retributive justice, identifying the perpetrators, and designing appropriate rituals to remember the victims can take years, even decades.¹³ In Germany the recurring and explosive nature of Holocaust commemoration over several decades is a particularly striking example of the difficulty—perhaps impossibility—of coming to terms with a genocidal or violent past.¹⁴

Stalin’s successors saw the re-establishment of the rule of law as the first step to recovery. After Beriia’s arrest in 1953 the media enthusiastically embraced the concept of zakonnost′ (which translates as legality, or more literally lawfulness) and condemned arbitrary rule (proizvol). New principles developed over the course of the 1950s were meant to ensure that people could be sentenced only when they had broken a law—and not because an official (however powerful) chose to designate them an enemy of the people or a socially harmful element.¹⁵ The Soviet government also began rectifying past errors and, after the amnesty of 1953, a series of commissions were created to review individual cases, leading by 1960 to the rehabilitation of 715,120 victims (many of them no longer alive).¹⁶ Yet once the flaws of Stalinist justice had been acknowledged, however tacitly, difficult questions about blame and culpability emerged, and the party struggled to find answers.

In 1956 Khrushchev told delegates at the Twentieth Party Congress that Stalin himself was responsible for the atrocities, and he repeated such accusations more publicly five years later. Some western observers predicted that formal legislative proceedings against the deceased dictator would follow the first wave of accusations in 1956, but Stalin’s successors did not show much appetite for this kind of political ritual, and they certainly balked at the idea of more widespread retributive justice.¹⁷ Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, remembers his father telling him in the wake of Beriia’s arrest: "You see, the principal accomplices have been punished; some of them have been shot, others are in prison. But millions were caught up in this mincing machine [miasorubka]. Millions of victims and millions of executioners—investigators, informants, guards. If we want to start punishing everyone who had a hand in this, as much blood will be shed again. And perhaps even more."¹⁸

Rather than pursuing the perpetrators, Stalin’s successors attempted to build the country’s recovery on some kind of recognition of the victims’ ordeal, working on the premise (common to many postconflict regimes) that confronting the violence of the past would prevent it from recurring.¹⁹ By the early 1960s, the party invited certain purge victims to tell their stories and Khrushchev famously announced: We can and must explain all and tell the truth to the party and people. . . . This must be done so that nothing similar can ever be repeated.²⁰ The scope of this truth telling was, however, limited, for the party was interested only in the experiences of a highly select cohort among the millions of Stalin’s outcasts. In fact, throughout the first post-Stalin decade the task of defining who had the right to be called a victim proved just as difficult as identifying the perpetrators. Where ordinary criminal justice practices stopped and political terror began was an ongoing source of contestation. Political repressions were only part of Stalin’s legacy after all: inside the Gulag, terror victims represented a minority group, with only 22 percent of prisoners serving sentences for counter-revolutionary crimes at the time of the dictator’s death, meaning almost four out of five Gulag inmates counted as nonpolitical.²¹ Not only did Stalin’s successors face the consequences of the regime’s political repressions, therefore, they also had to deal with the results of an enormously severe criminal justice system and the bloated prison system it had generated.

The party’s repudiation of terror thus raised thorny issues: Who precisely were the victims? Everyone who had endured time in the Gulag, or only former political prisoners? And who was to blame? If crimes were no longer being blamed on the existence of enemies’ evil conspiracies and plots, how were they to be explained? The solutions the party leadership offered to these questions were never wholly satisfactory. The problem for Stalin’s successors was that they could not reject the past wholesale, for unlike many other countries embarking on the process of transitional justice theirs was not a new regime, but a continuation of the party-state system which had been responsible for the atrocities they now sought to rectify. All attempts to correct past injustices became part of a careful balancing act. Even as the new leaders sought to break with many of the practices developed under Stalin, they were constantly aware that sweeping condemnation of the past might undermine the legitimacy of communist rule.

A Revolutionary Agenda

Considering the potential threat the repudiation of terror and the emptying of the Gulag posed to the stability of the regime, it is perhaps surprising that the post-Stalin government embarked on such a path at all. Yet there were pressing reasons to do so. In the 1950s cold war rivalries put pressure on the Soviet system, and, fearful of falling further behind the United States, communist leaders were in a constant battle to drive economic expansion forward.²² Even before Stalin’s death some of his closest advisors, frustrated with existing policies, began developing plans for running the country more effectively.²³ The need to reform the Gulag was a particularly high priority, for it was clear that the country’s system of slave labor—far from being a mainstay of the economy—was in fact a huge economic burden. The cost of transporting prisoners and keeping them under armed guard, the harsh climates in which their work was carried out, and the poor physical state of many prisoners made this an expensive enterprise, and one that was far less productive than free labor (which after all, did not cost much in the Soviet Union).²⁴ Moreover, order in the camps was increasingly difficult to maintain with uprisings an increasingly regular feature of Gulag life from the late 1940s onward.²⁵

Material or pragmatic considerations were not the only factors, however. Bolshevik ideology was fundamentally based on the notion of progress, and since the late 1940s party theorists had their sights set on the next stage of the revolution: some had suggested that the fourth five-year plan should be seen not only as a chance to recover from the devastation of war but also to begin the transition to communism.²⁶ In this teleological vision of the world, Stalin’s death could be interpreted as a marker of change. Once Khrushchev emerged as undisputed leader by the late 1950s, a messianic spirit became increasingly strong. This former metal-worker who prided himself on his earthiness was also a dreamer, inspired by the notion that with him at the helm the nation could advance rapidly toward communist paradise.²⁷

In seeking to revive revolutionary momentum, Khrushchev paid renewed attention to the task of raising the new Soviet man and woman. He believed the path to the harmonious and productive communist era was through the inculcation of core Soviet values in all citizens, and under his aegis citizens’ moral behavior and the concept of byt became increasingly important.²⁸ A deluge of pamphlets and newspaper articles aimed to teach citizens how to behave at work, to conduct their personal lives, to dress, to arrange their living space, and to spend their leisure time. Susan Reid has argued that the party’s renewed intervention in seemingly mundane and intimate matters was part of a project to form the fully rounded, socially integrated, and selfdisciplined person, linked to the imminent advent of communism. She writes: Having internalized ‘communist morality,’ the future citizens of communism would voluntarily regulate themselves, at which point the state could wither away.²⁹ Although Soviet reality might still be far from this, it was the idyll to which the post-Stalinist leaders strove with renewed determination.

This rediscovered desire to perfect human nature led to the revival of earlier discourses on crime. Employing a metaphor that reflected the industrial spirit of the times, the Bolsheviks had spoken of perekovka (reforging) in the 1920s and the early 1930s. Imagining offenders as sick or ailing, criminologists believed that a spell of hard labor could bring them back to full health, or reforge them. At first, this did not necessarily involve imprisonment; indeed during the first years of the New Economic Policy (NEP), noncustodial sentences were far more common.³⁰ Soon, however, doubts as to the wisdom of allowing offenders to remain at loose within Soviet society emerged; and by the early 1930s the Soviet regime encouraged more extensive use of custodial sentences. Confidence in the labor camps’ capacity to reform these inmates soon ebbed, however. Increasingly the authorities came to doubt whether offenders could ever really be corrected, worrying that inherited traits were perhaps too strong, the legacy of their class background too great to shed.³¹ By 1936 G. G. Iagoda, then head of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), came to the view that repeat offenders were incorrigible and launched a crackdown on recidivist criminals and social marginals.³² From the mid-1930s onward, the term perekovka was dropped and mentions of the Gulag, once extolled as a site of reforging, largely disappeared from the pages of the Soviet press. Inside the camps the story was a little different: in the political education materials produced for use with prisoners, the tropes of correction and redemption were not stamped out. Prisoners were still offered the promise of social reintegration if they could prove themselves worthy.³³ Thus, although the term perekovka was largely absent from the mainstream press from the mid-1930s until Stalin’s death, the promise to remake, or reforge, wrongdoers had not entirely disappeared from Soviet thinking. Reincarnated as perevospitanie (reeducation), the principle was revived in the 1950s and become a key concept in the Khrushchev era. It seemed to offer useful alternatives to the brutalities of the Stalinist system.

Although the new leadership hoped that, once reformed, the Gulag could once more become a site for re-educating offenders, this was not their favored solution to crime and deviant behavior, and in the mid to late 1950s the party returned to ideas of correction within society. In keeping with the view that as society progressed, citizens became more politically conscious and socially engaged, the party hoped that the community would help re-educate offenders. Articles and books informed citizens of their duty not only to pay attention to their own byt but also to monitor others’ moral transgressions. New communal policing measures gave volunteers responsibility for the moral and spiritual re-education of those whose behavior was deemed un-Soviet. Under Khrushchev the party was thus still committed to building a new world and still determined to transform human nature.

Yet this revolutionary project did not necessarily run smoothly. First, Khrushchev’s vision contained internal contradictions. In the wake of Stalin’s death the party had insisted on the importance of zakonnost′, but while commitment to the rule of law seems to imply a predictable and stable system of government, Khrushchev’s own instincts and the implications of the revolutionary ethos he revived favored a society that was constantly evolving and in flux.³⁴ Second, his campaigns required the participation of enthusiastic and committed volunteers. Ordinary people were told they had a civic duty to assist in the regime’s quest to remodel every individual into a citizen of the future. Where once the regime had urged its subjects to participate in the unmasking of enemies, it now mobilized them to assist in the reforging of every erring individual. As this book shows, citizens did not always embrace these new roles in quite the spirit the party-state had hoped.

Popular Opinion under Khrushchev

Embarking on such a radical program, the new leaders were anxious to gauge its success. Their desire to survey popular reactions to the changes being introduced resulted in a wealth of material that survives in the archives: reports on party and workplace meetings, newspaper editors’ summaries of letters received, and the letters themselves—including not only letters to the editor but also letters to party leaders, correspondence with party and state institutions, and petitions.

Although disenfranchised, the Gulag population was far from silent. Desperate for release—and upon release for housing, employment, and freedom of movement—zeks were required to craft the perfect petition, to effectively explain their life, their errors, and their commitment to the Soviet future. These autobiographies, composed by small-time thieves and victims of political repression alike, have been conserved by the different state and party organizations to which they were addressed. They provide insight into the way the returnees viewed their experience, and how they imagined their tales of exclusion and alienation could be reworked into successful stories of rehabilitation and redemption.

At the other end of the social spectrum stood the seven million party members. The leadership made particular effort to record how this key group reacted to the changing course of Soviet politics. Secretaries at each level reported on their party meetings, particularly when they proved turbulent, and passed the information up the chain to the higher levels of the party hierarchy.

Between these extremes of social experience stood the ordinary Soviet citizen, and the authorities were no less interested in charting the mood of this broader public, encouraging citizens to write letters to party leaders and newspapers.³⁵ At first sight, these unpublished letters preserved in the state archives appear to be a treasure trove for historians of the Soviet Union who wish to know more of what ordinary men and women thought of the regime under which they lived.³⁶ Yet such sources are not unproblematic.³⁷ Even when a bulging file of letters seems to give a rich picture of citizens’ views on a topic, it still allows us only to glimpse into the minds of a handful of more than two hundred million Soviet citizens. Citizens who were sufficiently engaged in the country’s political life to send a letter about current affairs were not necessarily typical.³⁸ On occasion, though, the letters’ commonalities suggest they are providing us with access to something more than a single author’s worldview. In coming to their position, individual authors used the mental tools provided by the culture in which they lived.³⁹ The recurrence of certain ideas and motifs in letters written in far-flung corners of the country suggest the existence of a set of shared beliefs and values that were part of a common oral culture, influenced but not dictated by official media and discourse. The letters can thus tell us something not only about the author but also about the world he or she inhabited.

In using these sources as a means to reflect on popular opinion, a second difficulty presents itself: the question of their candor. Some letter writers did simply speak their mind, but in addressing state functionaries or powerful readers in the party leadership many would formulate their views extremely carefully. Arguing that citizens realized they must learn to play the game, Stephen Kotkin suggests that in the 1930s ordinary people learned the rules of speaking Bolshevik.⁴⁰ This concept has been highly productive in furthering discussion of how surviving texts—letters in particular—can develop our understanding of Soviet mentalities. Yet, as Igal Halfin and Jochen Hellbeck have argued, if the writing of a text is viewed as a performance or game, it leaves the author’s inner mental world unprobed, still hidden from the historian’s grasp.⁴¹ The approach taken in this book is a little different and is based on the premise that citizens’ ability to speak Bolshevik was rarely perfect, and their performance did not always go without a glitch. Even if we recognize citizens’ letters as artifacts purposefully created and intended for a specific audience, they nonetheless offer insight into the author’s worldview. First, we get a sense of these letter writers’ understanding of the discursive boundaries of the system in which they operated: we have a record of what ordinary people thought was an acceptable interpretation or commentary on their lives and on contemporary political events; at the very least we learn what they considered to be successful Bolshevik-speak. Second, we can, with careful attention, get a sense of how their own ideas and beliefs departed from the official script. In seeking to adopt the Bolshevik-speak they found in the newspapers, citizens often went wrong; and these transgressions, permutations, and reworkings of the authoritative text allow us important insight into their worldviews.⁴²

However much citizens tried to conform, they did not become identical fonts of party rhetoric. Soviet discourse was far from being stable or monologic in itself, and citizens’ diverse attempts to reproduce this Bolshevikspeak in part reflect its fluid, multivocal nature. They also reflect the fact that the Bolshevik vision, thrust onto the Soviet landscape during long years of revolutionary upheaval, had not been taken up uniformly in every corner and milieu of the USSR’s vast territory. Existing values and beliefs—religious, political, moral, and sentimental—shaped the way individuals, families, and communities understood the new worldview they encountered. This diversity goes beyond mere acceptance or rejection of Soviet values. Although in the context of the cold war western commentators often searched for signs of liberated disbelief and active resistance, these are not readily found in the extant texts.⁴³ The most brazen attacks on party leaders, many anonymous, still remain broadly within the Soviet ethos: the millenarian struggle at the heart of Bolshevik thinking reverberates through many of the surviving texts, however defiant. And even those who thought themselves the most loyal of citizens did not always express themselves in ways that the party leaders would have recognized as correct Bolshevik-speak.

With the party leadership’s intervention in the discursive regime in the 1950s—the repudiation of some Stalinist terms, the reintroduction of other, half-forgotten concepts—some people felt compelled to defend their own understanding of the Soviet canon. The Gulag releases and the political shifts of the 1950s thus resulted in a complex, sometimes troubled, dialogue about key terms within the Soviet lexicon, and—by extension—about identity, politics, belief, and community in the post-Stalin world.

Three key points of contestation emerge. First, people had to negotiate the party’s reappraisal of Stalinist history, and this could have important implications for their own life-stories. For outcasts this rewriting of the past might be a welcome one, for it meant they could try to reinvent themselves, if not as victims then at least as sinners who had atoned for their mistakes. For others this revisionism radically changed the meaning of their lives in less pleasant ways. One MVD worker who was dismissed from his post and expelled from the party, though not arrested, for his role in the Ezhovshchina ⁴⁴ was full of self-pity about this turn of fate: I don’t have my health—I lost it fighting the enemies of my Motherland. I’m going blind, and I’m an invalid of the third category. At the end of the day, there’s just nothing for me to live for. Everybody steers clear of me, as if I had the plague.⁴⁵ More common perhaps was the experience of men and women who, having suffered during the brutal industrialization of the 1930s or the Second World War, had been encouraged to regard their hardships in terms of service to Stalin; his now ambiguous status inevitably changed the meaning of such sacrifices.

Second, consumers of the Soviet media had to come to grips with the idea that enemies of the people were no longer considered such a deadly threat to Soviet society. In the 1930s the enemy had become a ubiquitous figure: poster art had developed horrifying images of the vrag; films told of the cunning and deceit of enemies hidden within the party; show trials of real-life enemies were filmed in Moscow and screened across the Soviet Union.⁴⁶ As letters of denunciation preserved in the Soviet archives demonstrate, some citizens learnt to participate in the practices of denunciation, employing the vitriolic language deployed in official texts.⁴⁷ The enemy remained a stalwart in Soviet culture until the 1950s when its validity was suddenly called into question, and for many this reworking of the established political imaginary was unnerving.

Third, vying groups competed over the ascription of honor, with various parties laying claim to the terms chest′ (honor), chestnost′ (honesty or integrity), and the adjective chestnyi (which translates as honest, honorable, upstanding, or respectable). From 1953 onward a growing number of letter writers expressed concern that their well-being as chestnye citizens was under threat from the unsavory, violent, and subversive subculture that returnees allegedly imported from the camps. In part, this usage of chestnost′ testifies to the success of the civilizing mission the Stalinist state had launched in the wake of collectivization as it attempted to transform the flood of rural newcomers arriving in the cities into the well-behaved, cultured, new Soviet men and women it desired.⁴⁸ Whatever the realities of behavior in the 1950s many people believed they were upstanding, or chestnye, citizens deserving of respect and the state’s protection. Yet Stalin’s outcasts also believed themselves to be worthy members of society: in these years purge victims often claimed their right to have their honor (chest′) restored untarnished; and although some zeks ascribed to a separate thieves’ code of honor, many nonpolitical prisoners were not members of the camps’ criminal subculture and desperately hoped they, too, might be recognized as honorable or respectable (chestnyi).⁴⁹

Overview

This book explores one of the most important aspects of de-Stalinization—the Gulag releases—from a number of perspectives. De-Stalinization was the result of decisions made by party leaders; and I examine the beliefs and ambitions of those in power, focusing on Khrushchev’s political vision, which although full of optimism was riddled with complexities and ambiguities. The reforms Khrushchev and his colleagues introduced had an enormous impact on the lives of ordinary people, and I trace their perceptions of de-Stalinization from 1953 to the early 1960s. Citizens had to respond to both the changing contours of political life and the consequences of the Gulag releases, which some at least came to regard with aversion, fearing that returnees brought with them the culture of an underworld seething with deviance and dissent. I also consider the returnees’ experiences of life in the postcamp world.

My book is part of an emerging body of research on the Khrushchev era that uses archival material to explore broad social and cultural changes in the post-Stalin era.⁵⁰ This approach departs from earlier scholarship, most of which came from political scientists and literary scholars and depended on published materials.⁵¹ My work questions two basic assumptions of most earlier writing on the period. In the late 1970s Stephen Cohen built on the conflict model central to much early Kremlinology in arguing that after Stalin’s death Soviet political life coalesced around the two poles of reformism and conservatism.⁵² I challenge this binary conception. In the fastchanging world of the 1950s few—including political leaders—maintained an unambivalent attitude toward Stalinism, itself a complex and ill-defined entity: people might be enthusiastic about some changes but resentful of others.

My second challenge is to the concept of the thaw, a term coined by the writer Il′ia Erenburg in 1954 and used as a shorthand for the period in western scholarship ever since.⁵³ The metaphor defines the period as one of respite and reprieve—not necessarily the experience for all—and implies the existence of a Stalinist winter. In fact, the nature of the Stalinist past was just one of the issues being debated in the 1950s. Khrushchev himself did not embrace the word ottepel′ (thaw), even though he believed he was doing something different from his predecessor.⁵⁴ Official texts show no appetite for this metaphor taken from nature, with its implication that the seasons might impose their own cyclical patterns onto the Soviet project: in the revolutionary ethos humans transform the natural world, not the other way around. I thus see the period as forward-looking, ambitious, and full of hope on the one hand, but disorienting and potentially unsettling on the other.

Throughout the book I draw on studies that address the procedures and consequences of camp releases. The first monograph devoted to the topic, Nanci Adler’s The Gulag Survivor, focused on the experience of political prisoners returning from the camps and described the social marginality many of them experienced. Despite its powerful description of the ongoing ordeal experienced by many purge victims, Adler’s work misses some of the broader social and political tensions created by de-Stalinization and the release of prisoners, the majority of whom were nonpoliticals.⁵⁵ In contrast, Marc Elie’s doctoral thesis on the Gulag liberations offers a wealth of detail on the release mechanisms; while Amir Weiner describes the problems generated in the Baltic republics, Moldavia, Belarus, and western Ukraine by returning prisoners, many of whom were former nationalist activists.⁵⁶ Like Weiner, I see the Gulag releases as an event that affected not only returnees and their families but the whole of society.

This work is divided into three parts, the first of which explores the transitional period 1953–1956. Chapter 1 focuses exclusively on 1953 and suggests that the momentous events of that year—which included Stalin’s death, a massive amnesty, and the first campaigns for the restoration of zakonnost′—already pointed to many of the difficulties that lay ahead, including problems maintaining law and order and expressions of moral panic from members of the Soviet public. Chapter 2 turns to Stalin’s outcasts and uses their petition letters to explore their mindset as the release began. While some letters—particularly ones composed by young men—suggested their authors were alienated by their experiences within the Gulag, those written by purge victims declared their ongoing faith in the communist cause. In 1956, when Khrushchev chose to address to the topic of the terror, he seemed to draw on these self-depictions, using the survival of repressed communists as a sign that the party could survive his bloody revelations. The Secret Speech and its impact are the topic of chapter 3.

Part II examines the impact of the Gulag returns over the course of the 1950s and the government’s evolving attitude toward the problem of criminality. Chapter 4 explores the songs, poems, and tattoos that prisoners brought back from the camps and traces the development of a cult of criminality among some young people. Faced with a rising crime rate and concerned about Soviet youth, the Soviet government tried various solutions. In the late 1950s, inspired by Khrushchev at his most utopian, it introduced a range of measures for noncustodial sentencing, which were meant to encourage rehabilitation within the community and eradicate the Gulag almost entirely. The development of these new practices and the rhetoric surrounding them are the focus of chapter 5; chapter 6 examines their failure.

Focusing on the final three years of Khrushchev’s rule, Part III suggests that although the early 1960s appear to be the high point of de-Stalinization, many important reforms were already being undone. Chapter 7 concentrates on 1961: Stalin was publicly condemned for the first time and purge victims were exonerated, but at the same time the government introduced policies that encouraged intolerance toward all kinds of small-time offenders and the Gulag began to expand once more. Chapter 8 explores the polemics surrounding the works of two writers (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Iosif Brodskii) and shows that the debate about social boundaries begun in 1953 was still going strong a decade later.

1 Kholodnoe leto 53, directed by Aleksandr Proshkin, 1988, USSR.

2 For comparisons with The Magnificent Seven and The Seven Samurai, see Anna Lawton, Kinoglasnost: Soviet Cinema in Our Time (Cambridge, 1992), 150–151.

3 In April 1953 the number