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

By Nanci Adler

How is it that some prisoners of the Soviet gulag—many of them falsely convicted—emerged from the camps maintaining their loyalty to the party that was responsible for their internment? In camp, they had struggled to survive. Afterward they struggled to reintegrate with society, reunite with their loved ones, and sometimes renew Party ties. Based on oral histories, archives, and unpublished memoirs, Keeping Faith with the Party chronicles the stories of returnees who professed enduring belief in the CPSU and the Communist project. Nanci Adler's probing investigation brings a deeper understanding of the dynamics of Soviet Communism and of how individuals survive within repressive regimes while the repressive regimes also survive within them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9780253005717

Book preview

KEEPING

FAITH

with the

PARTY

Communist Believers Return from the Gulag

---

NANCI ADLER

---

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Bloomington and Indianapolis

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

601 North Morton Street

Bloomington, Indiana

47404-3797 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

Telephone orders        800-842-6796

Fax orders                   812-855-7931

© 2012 by Nanci Adler

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Adler, Nanci.

Keeping faith with the Party : Communist believers return from the Gulag / Nanci Adler.

      p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-253-35722-9 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-22379-1 (paperback : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-00571-7 (electronic book) 1. Ex-convicts—Soviet Union. 2. Ex-convicts—Soviet Union—Attitudes. 3. Kommunisticheskaia partiia Sovetskogo Soiuza. 4. Allegiance—Soviet Union. 5. Political persecution—Soviet Union. 6. Labor camps—Soviet Union. 7. Communism—Soviet Union—Psychological aspects. I. Title.

DK268.A1A35 2012

364.80947—dc23

2011037563

1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12

For Zoë and Noah

Party official turned inmate: "When they chop down

the forest, the chips fly, but the Party truth remains

the truth and it is superior to my misfortune.…

I myself was one of those chips that flew when

the forest was cut down."

Fellow prisoner Ivan Grigoryevich's response:

"That's where the whole misfortune lies—in the

fact that they're cutting down the forest.

Why cut it down?"

Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing (1972)

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

PREFACE

Early on in this research, an interview I conducted with a Gulag survivor somewhat inadvertently proved to be an excellent illustration of precisely the kinds of issues I was aiming to address. It was a follow-up to a previous interview almost ten years earlier. Right after I got to Moscow in the spring of 2006, I called Zoria Serebriakova to talk to her about my new project. As it happened, she had just finished reading the Russian edition of my book on Gulag survivors, published by Memorial,¹ and she was eager to share her thoughts about it.

She picked me up outside a subway station on the outskirts of Moscow and we talked for the hour it took to drive to her dacha, which had been home to Old Bolshevik Leonid Serebriakov, then Andrei Vyshinskii, and then to Zoria and her mother again when they returned from exile. Zoria was so anxious to express her opinions that we skipped the small talk and started our discussion even as I was climbing into her car.

Zoria passionately expressed her outrage at the interaction between the ex-prisoners and the government when the survivors were released from the Gulag. Her outrage, however, was not directed at the unapologetic behavior of the government's representatives, but rather at the ingratitude of the returnees. Zoria was so affronted by their ingratitude that she incredulously asked, How could it be that they were not grateful to the government when they were released from camp? Underscoring her argument, she declared, Those times were full of opportunity.²

Yes, she acknowledged that I had accurately reported the bitterness expressed by many Gulag survivors, but she herself had been a prisoner, and she claimed that her embittered fellow prisoners were misguided. So the people whom I had described as victims and survivors were considered by one of their own as ingrates who had failed to appreciate the opportunities afforded them in the post-Stalin era. Zoria rightly claimed the authority of personal experience, but over-claimed the right to invalidate the experience of others who did not share her ideology. It was the self-evident quality of her convictions that I found so enlightening, because I realized that Zoria's justification for adherence to Communism was as self-evident to her as the justification for individual freedoms was self-evident to me. Although we seemed to be talking about the same Gulag and post-Gulag events, we were not, because our incompatible interpretive frames changed their meaning. Until I recognized this, Zoria's judgments seemed counterintuitive.

I knew that Zoria had been a privileged returnee under Khrushchev, and that she subscribed to the returnee as hero stance. I also knew that her mother, Galina, had spent twenty-one years in Siberia, and then went on to become a Party propagandist after release. So I was not too surprised by Zoria's unwavering loyalty to the Soviet regime. But I was unprepared for her inability to recognize the validity of the bitterness of so many of her fellow returnees. This group—and they were in the majority—described themselves as having been victimized by the state both during camp and after their release.

Although Zoria's allegiance to the Party, both during and after camp, was a minority view, she was not alone. There were others, like Lev Gavrilov, who entitled his memoirs z/k, which he defined as meaning zapasnoi kommunist (reserve Communist). In the camps, he had demonstrated his allegiance by extracting his own gold teeth and offering them to his interrogators in support of the war effort. Some prisoners sang patriotic songs while in camp, wrote poetry about the day they would be reinstated in the Party, and glorified the humanist principles of socialism and the heroic struggle to attain them. Although such responses did not represent the views held by the majority, they do represent something about the interaction of repressive regimes and their captive populations. The incorporation of such an interpretive frame would enable subjects of a total or totalitarian system to effortlessly avoid internal and external conflicts.

While I felt comfortable about disagreeing with Zoria's perspective, I felt uncomfortable because of my difficulty in making sense of her authentic feelings. A goal of this study is to explain how and why this minority point of view makes sense to people like Zoria. To accomplish this goal, I realized that it would be necessary to view such perspectives from within the experience of the loyalist Gulag prisoner or survivor.

I would like to gratefully acknowledge that this interview, along with my understanding of Zoria Leonidovna's opinions, benefited from a third encounter in 2009. At the first International Conference on Approaches to Stalinism (Moscow, December 2008), in a paper I presented to the Biography Section, I had recounted the conversation with Zoria described above. Zoria was not in the audience, but her friend was, and told Zoria that I had portrayed her as a Stalinist. Zoria contacted me a few weeks later to complain about this presumed portrayal of her as a Stalinist, and to assert that she reviled Stalin and held him personally responsible for mass murder. Zoria argued that if one does not emphasize how different things were after Stalin, then it is a justification of Stalin. I explained that the entire discussion centered on the post-Stalin, post-camp period. I had not portrayed her as a Stalinist, but in the course of reviewing the context of the reported conversation from which her friend drew this inference, I could see how some might mistakenly so label her. This mistake could occur if people failed to make the same sharp separation between the Stalin regime, which she disowned, and the post-Stalin Communist Party, which she supported. This separation was apparently more ideologically relevant for Zoria than for most of her fellow returnees, as illustrated by her response to their ingratitude to the post-Stalin Communist Party at the time of their release.

When Zoria and I revisited our previous conversation, she concurred that she had declared then, and affirms now, that the returnees’ bitterness was misguided. Rather than being angry with the Communist Party for imprisoning them, they should have been grateful to Khrushchev and the Party for releasing them. Most of Zoria's fellow returnees did not share Zoria's loyalty to the Party, did not absolve it of its behavior under or after Stalin, and, by and large, were not accorded the same favorable treatment as Zoria by the post-Stalin Party. (For Zoria's life story, see chapter 3.)

In the pages ahead, as I examine various attitudes toward the Party through the narratives of victims and survivors, the focus of this study is on those stances that might be considered by some to be counterintuitive. This points to the larger question of how a repressive regime becomes incorporated into the attitudes and behavior of the people it controls, with the consequence that its citizens behave in ways that place the polity above their own individual interests.

From the narratives gathered, I was able to discern at least four overlapping but distinguishable hypothetical explanations: Communism as a belief system akin to (secular) religion—and the related charismatic bond, functionalism, cognitive dissonance, and the traumatic bond. In combination, these hypothetical explanations accounted for many of the themes that informed the content of the narratives, under such topical headings as: faith-based beliefs, the victims’ perceptions of their guilt, Party identification, the renewed (and dashed) hopes of loyalists in the Gorbachev era, the experience of children of repressed believers, and the post-Soviet resurgence of Stalin's popularity.

The Soviet example is unique in that repression held sway in greater or lesser degrees for seven decades. This study of the firsthand accounts of how it affected people who lived through it may contribute to our understanding of some of the processes by which people survive within repressive regimes and repressive regimes survive within people. For the individual, incorporating the Party's interpretive frame promoted Party loyalty by precluding contradictory evidence. For the Party, it supported a long but (in retrospect) brittle tenure.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work would not have been possible without the deeply personal contributions of a number of extraordinary individuals, who took the time to talk, listen, and think about a difficult, sensitive, and even painful subject. For this, I gratefully acknowledge: Gerta Chuprun, Elena Karagaeva, Marlen Korallov, Mariia Kuznetsova, Tania Langerova, Roy Medvedev, Nataliia Rykova, Zoria Serebriakova, and Evgeniia Smirnova. With equal gratitude, I acknowledge the memoirists whom I did not have the privilege to meet, but whose experiences are recorded and analyzed in this book. These Gulag victims and survivors were instrumental in shaping my perceptions. Arsenii Roginskii, a longtime friend, has been invaluable to this research. He advised me, debated with me, sharpened my conceptualization of this complex topic, and, most challengingly perhaps, invited and encouraged me to reflect upon my conclusions with critical Russian audiences. Semen Vilenskii has guided my understanding of the Gulag by generously sharing his own experiences, his wealth of knowledge, and his contacts since the day we met in 1995; I am richer for knowing him. Vladlen Loginov took on my task as if it were his own, providing advice, introductions, criticism, and perspective. My thanks also go to Nikita Petrov, ever ready to help when I needed it.

I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge a number of institutions for supporting this project. In the first place, this research was most generously funded by an Innovative Grant from the Netherlands Scientific Council (NWO). Support was also provided by the University of Amsterdam, the department of East European Studies, and the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. The archives RGASPI, RGANI, and GARF, in particular Dina Nokhotivich and Galina Gorskaia, facilitated timely access to hundreds of documents, even accommodating my tight travel schedule on inventory days when the archive was closed. The organization Memorial, especially Alena Kozlova and Irina Ostrovskaia, provided valuable contacts, dossiers, and photos. The International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam was most helpful in arranging for me to work with their Memorial archive. Finally, I am grateful to the Russian State Humanitarian University (RGGU)—my home in Moscow—for graciously making my stays so comfortable.

In the course of this research, I had the privilege of being invited to present my work to several different forums of experts, who helped sharpen my observations and analyses. These venues included: the Harvard Conference on the History and Legacy of the Gulag, the Hebrew University Conference on Eyewitness Narratives, the Approaches to Stalinism conference in Moscow, and the Repressed Russian Provinces conference in Smolensk. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to lecture on this research at the HL-Senteret in Oslo, the Center for Women's Studies in Zagreb, the Netherlands Embassy in Moscow, King's College of Cambridge, the Hugo Valentin Center in Uppsala, the Forschungsstelle Osteuropa in Bremen, and Lund University. The students and colleagues who attended these events asked important questions, suggested literature I had not considered, and expanded my thinking about the meaning of my findings.

Several colleagues stayed the course of this project with me. My good friend Erik Van Ree scrupulously read and critically commented on every chapter. This book benefited considerably from his informed, insightful observations. Stephen Cohen—always there when I needed him—selflessly shared his voluminous returnee archive, dialogued with me, and offered indispensable advice, support, and friendship. I would also like to acknowledge the critical remarks of Leona Toker and Alexander Etkind, who greatly improved the focus of the manuscript. Hans Blom has helped facilitate my scholarly pursuits ever since I met him. My thanks also go to Jan Lucassen and Lex Heerma van Voss for believing in this undertaking. My colleagues in Amsterdam—especially Jolande Withuis, Karel Berkhoff, Barbara Boender, Wichert ten Have, Johannes Houwink ten Cate, Selma Leydesdorff, Peter Romijn, Marjan Schwegman, Siep Stuurman, and my Veni-Vidi group—were readily available to listen and comment, and provided valuable support throughout this project. Finally, my sincere gratitude goes to Janet Rabinowitch for her drive, enthusiasm, and expert input in shaping the manuscript. Peter Froehlich, Candace McNulty, and Marvin Keenan offered excellent editorial assistance.

Last but by no means least, I humbly express my heartfelt appreciation to my family. My father, Herbert Adler, a psychiatrist and Fellow of the American College of Psychiatrists, conscientiously read and commented on every chapter. Always thinking out of the box, his unconventional, erudite observations impelled me to broaden my horizons, and added nuance to this work. My husband, Rob, and my twins, Zoë and Noah, patiently endured my frequent absences, made sure I had time to work when I was at home, visited me in Moscow, and always remained engaged in what I was doing. To them I owe the greatest debt of gratitude—I thank them for being here, and there, and everywhere for me.

INTRODUCTION

Enduring Repression

One of the paradoxes of Soviet Communism was that a system of governance that enforced its ideology by executing, imprisoning, and exploiting the labor of groups or classes of undesirables, dissenters, alleged dissenters, and alleged associates of dissenters nevertheless retained the allegiance of some of its victims. It also maintained the conformity of the mass of its citizenry. While most secular repressive regimes do not last very long, the Soviet government did hold on to power for seventy years. Judged in terms of durability, the regime's domestic practices, including repression, could be considered to have been functional for the state. Using functionality as an informing guideline, we will assume that in some way and for some reasons the enduring allegiance of some survivors was likewise functional for them. We will look at why and how the functioning of the state and individual merged—and endured. There can be no single answer and no best perspective for understanding this complex question, but some insights may be gained by examining the individual and collective experiences of Gulag survivors. There may be similar explanations for both the regime's endurance and the steadfast loyalty of some of its victims.

The materials, including firsthand accounts, that have become available suggest a number of hypotheses regarding why some survivors remained advocates of a political system that had victimized them. The range of explanations includes the functioning of Communism/patriotism as a faith-based belief system or as a psychological defense mechanism; cognitive dissonance; functionalism; and the traumatic bond, also labeled Stockholm syndrome. What was uniform about the repression was that these psychological and social influences affected all the prisoners. What was unique was the particular combination of each influence on individual prisoners as well as the prisoner's response.

THE STUDY

We have only the sketchiest knowledge of Gulag prisoners’ attitudes toward the CPSU throughout the Soviet period and how their incarceration in the Soviet labor camp system affected their subsequent attitudes toward the Communist Party. These attitudes have hardly been explored as a separate issue in the literature. However, information about the subject has become retrievable through archives, memoirs of the returnees and those who perished,¹ and the rich but vanishing trove of information stored in the oral recollections of the survivors. An exploration of the individual experiences accessible from these sources may provide insight into the process by which individuals survived the repression and/or the repression survived in them. It may also shed light on the process by which repressive regimes maintain themselves in spite of / because of the terror they visit on their own people.²

The repression was always coercive, sometimes capricious, and usually beyond the power of prisoners to influence. Some prisoners maintained their opposition until the end of their lives and may indeed have paid for it with their lives. Others, as a consequence of various incentives, professed allegiance, and were still executed. Many of the millions of prisoners did not survive their five- to twenty-five-year terms, but some of those who did emerged from their ordeal maintaining or acquiring a belief in the ideology of their repressors. This in spite of the fact that a great number of prisoners were either victims or witnesses to convictions on trumped-up charges, and were exploited as expendable forced labor.

The repression cast a broad net and imprisoned people with a variety of political histories, arrested for different reasons ranging from actual crimes, to resistance to state policy, to having been denounced by neighbors seeking to obtain their rooms or apartments. Some prisoners had themselves played an active part in the repressive operations. Their distress at their own misfortune was sometimes tempered by the belief that, although the system had erred in their particular case, the system itself was justifiable because conspiracies did exist. Roy Medvedev noted that many such repressors-turned-repressed had never recognized or obeyed any kinds of law. They violated laws and enforced the repression by operationalizing Lenin's maxim: Bring order or implement terror.³ An implicit evaluative judgment in this ideology is that terror, or the threat of terror, is not only a justifiable way to bring order but sometimes even the preferred way. (This authoritarian, anti-democratic approach is still relevant to the calibrated use of repression in post–Soviet Russia's attempt to achieve a civil society.) So the repressors could claim that the laws they violated were superseded by a higher law—the ideology that sustained the Party.

Among the survivors and victims were the dogmatists who did not lose faith in the Party but lost faith in particular leaders. They switched their devotion from Stalin to Lenin, blaming the terror on Stalinism. A memoir by Nina Gagen Torn, who spent eight years in the Gulag, described such campmates as hardcore Leninists. They ardently clung to Leninist ideals, a faith that allowed them to live without breaking. They argued that the Party's tactics under Stalin discredited him, but not Communism. Hundreds of Kolyma-bound prisoners endorsed this ideology. Gagen-Torn recalled how, even as they were marched under armed guard, they sang, You fell victim in the struggle because of fateful, selfless love for the people. ⁴ They sang in spite of being butted with rifles, and even when they were thrown into the hulls of the death ships from Vladivostok to Kolyma they continued to sing. Many were later shot, but according to this returnee, they maintained faith in their vision of Communism to the end of their life.

Nataliia Rykova (see chapter 3), the daughter of the Old Bolshevik Aleksei Rykov, who was executed in 1938, spent several years⁵ in labor camps and exile because she was a family member of an enemy of the people. Following her release (after Stalin's death) she campaigned to secure her father's Party rehabilitation. In our 2005 interview, when I asked her—at the age of ninety—about her attitude toward the Party, she replied with a derisive question and answer: Which Party? That wasn't the Party we knew [and created]. ⁶ Nevertheless, it was important for her to strive for her father's reinstatement—even in the existing Party—for the sake of justice. He was reinstated under Gorbachev.

The belief that the Party of Lenin would not have countenanced the repression that had become a defining characteristic of Soviet life was sometimes expressed in a prayerful way. Some prisoners sent their letters of complaint and appeals for justice to (the dead) Lenin, addressing them to the mausoleum, to those who were in charge of the body of Lenin.⁷ They were both spurning the current regime and reaffirming their faith in Communism.

The post-Soviet opening of the archives revisited the debate regarding how many victims were repressed in what period and under which article of the Soviet Criminal Code. The range of estimates is wide because the victims include those who were incarcerated in labor camps, starved by the man-made famine, subjected to de-kulakization, deported, and killed outright. Additionally, their nonincarcerated family members effectively lived in prisons without walls. Those born in special settlements (exile) are not included in the category of victims of political repression, nor are those citizens who were incarcerated and sent to the Gulag on nonpolitical articles or charges such as those covered by the draconian 1941 labor laws. According to Memorial chairman Arsenii Roginskii, a review of the cases in these excluded categories would no less than double the number of political prisoners calculated in the Gulag statistics.⁸ The accuracy of figures regarding arrest, incarceration, and release is further confounded by the fact that the statistics include rearrests and cases of moribund victims who were sometimes released only so that their death would take place outside the camp.⁹ The estimates range from a few million to well over twenty million victims. There is relative consensus that in the years 1930–1956, seventeen to eighteen million were sentenced to detention in prisons, colonies, and camps.¹⁰

With regard to the number of returnees, there are few calculations.¹¹ However, using a rough approximation based on release figures in the aftermath of Stalin's death and Khrushchev's Secret Speech, it can be assumed that well over five million victims survived to return to Soviet society in the 1950s.¹² This estimate includes the former exiles and deportees. Those who did not survive the camps and did not have descendants did not, as a rule, receive posthumous rehabilitation because there were no relatives to apply for it, so there are also gaps in the rehabilitation statistics. The proportion of these ex-prisoners who requested reinstatement in the Communist Party has not yet been calculated, but available archives should allow us to investigate this question and arrive at some estimates.

We know that in 1956, the year of Khrushchev's Secret Speech, some former political prisoners who had been excluded from the Party on unfounded political accusations petitioned the Party Control Commission for reinstatement. We do not know the actual number of appeals for that year, but 55.5 percent were honored with reinstatement.¹³ Furthermore, according to a report of the Party Control Commission, between 1956 and 1961, 30,954 Communists were reinstated, many posthumously. The report does not state how many had applied during that period.¹⁴ Their Party and judicial rehabilitation notwithstanding, the return of these former adversaries had little impact on the Soviet system. The causes of this imperturbability of the Soviet system may be looked for both within the system and within its returning victims.

SCOPE, METHODOLOGY, AND LIMITATIONS

A number of overlapping and interacting determinants will be examined in this study. The changing political climate will also be considered as it influenced both the prisoners’ entrance into and exit from the system. Outcomes and attitudes were in turn influenced by the prisoners’ legal history, political history,¹⁵ family history, survival history, and reinstatement history. The Gulag was populated with millions of prisoners—peasants and workers, segments of the population who were arrested by quota in 1937 and 1938, and hard-core and petty criminals incarcerated for violating labor laws. The repression targeted classes, ethnicities, minor social insubordination, deviance, and potential deviance.¹⁶ This study reflects on the experience and attitudes of Stalin-era political prisoners, or their surviving family members, who remained loyal to the Party during and after the Gulag. The materials were chosen on the basis of this criterion. Returnees and prisoners who had no affinity to the Party were largely excluded because their sentiments require less complex explanation. The sample, or rather selection set, ranges from respondents who were the children of well-known executed Bolsheviks to lesser known returnees, and is limited to the archives, memoirs, victim accounts, and witnesses that were accessible.

Chronicling the stories of Gulag survivors may illuminate how Party loyalty was shaped and maintained, but the limitations of generalizing from a selected sample of writings and oral accounts and the selection factor of survival should be recognized. There are also the limitations of the specific group that generated their accounts—people who were educated, who may have been prominent, and who were members of the intelligentsia. They were strongly affected by a specific historical period: many of the Party faithful memoirists, even later in life, reflected the perspectives of the Thaw generation. Moreover, although we can also draw very limited inferences from interrogation protocols¹⁷ and the publicly declared, perhaps scripted parting words of better known victims, much of what we know comes from survivors or their surviving witnesses. Gulag victims numbered in the millions, but we only have some thousands of memoir accounts. Thus, most of the testimony died with the witnesses, as it did with the Holocaust victims, but with this difference: the Holocaust was designed to eliminate survivors, not to have a political effect on those who managed to survive. And this difference provides a continuing record of the survival value of a political orientation—both for the individual and the system. Despite the fact that the selection set is limited and not representative of society in general, sufficient collective features have emerged from the portal of these individual accounts to suggest a commonality in the experience.

With varying motivations, some prisoners requested and received Party reinstatement upon return. Some were denied this status until the Gorbachev era. Other returnees, like longtime prisoner Lev Razgon, requested and received Party rehabilitation under Khrushchev and then left the Party under Gorbachev.¹⁸ Still others, like Memorial member Olga Shireeva, rejoined the Party only under Gorbachev in 1988, and turned in their Party cards shortly thereafter.¹⁹

Two investigative approaches—a quantitative sociological survey, and a qualitative psychohistorical case study analysis—were considered. The sociological survey was impractical because of the difficulty of gathering a sample that was sufficiently large and representative to permit generalizations. Instead, the generation of hypotheses was sought by looking for common trends in a variety of individual experiences. This approach rests on the assumption that every individual experience represents a class of experiences. Thus, generalizations regarding that class can be inferred if we can accurately place the specific experience within its appropriate context.

Memory

When conducting this type of research, it is imperative to recognize that memory is malleable, and sometimes poor, inaccurate, and subject to self-censure. Personal narratives add the visceral immediacy of lived experience to the scholarly discourse of history. Because these experiences only become history as they are gleaned, contextualized, and disseminated, the history they become should be informed by their cultural, social, and historical provenance, along with their credibility, and a consideration of how they may have been changed by the gleaning