ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the Gulag, as an experience and as a threat, continued to influence and politicizes survivors, their families, and the larger society. It also explores the effect that repression had on the attitudes of former prisoners toward the Soviet system. The chapter examines how the returnees re-emerged in the eighties and nineties, eventually to become a powerful force in challenging the legitimacy of the Soviet system. It presents evidence of the system's dependence on and adaptation to repression. Moreover, the fact that the persecution of returnees continued even after the putative reforms of the XX Party Congress indicates that repression and the threat of repression were used by the Soviet regime as maintenance tools and as a prophylaxis. In considering the impact of the policy of repression on the political system it is relevant to examine the impact that the returning Stalinist-era zeks had on dissidents or the dissident movement.
