Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents accounts of how individual victims and the Soviet system survived after the Gulag. It focuses on belief in the Communist Party and the association between returnees and dissidents. This book examines the return of the returnee question in the eighties and nineties and reflect on the impact that these reemerging people and issues had on the failing Soviet system. The fiftieth anniversary of Stalin's death, March 5, 2003, marked a moment of reflection- and concern for many-on the legacy of Russia's Soviet past. Former prisoners can remember being woken to the tune of Stalin's national anthem in the Gulag. One of the specters of Russia's past that regularly appears to haunt its present is that of fallen Soviet idols, complete with their emblems and anthems.