Tear off the masks!is a slogan with only limited appeal in most societies, since they operate on the assumption that civilization requires a certain amount of masking. In revolutions, however, that assumption is suspended. Successful revolutions tear off masks: that is, they invalidate the conventions of self-presentation and social interaction that obtained in pre-revolutionary society. This happened in Russia after the October 1917 revolution which laid the foundations for the Soviet state. It happened again in 1991, when that state collapsed. In such upheavals, people have to reinvent themselves, to create or find within themselves personae that fit the...

The “imagined communities” for which revolutionaries fight are often nations.¹ But the Bolshevik revolutionaries who took power in Petrograd in October 1917 were exceptions to the rule. They did not at first “imagine” a new Russian or even Soviet nation. Instead, being Marxist internationalists, they imagined aclass—the international proletariat—whose revolution, begun in Russia, would soon sweep Europe. The international revolution failed to materialize, however, and the Bolsheviks were left with the unexpected task of building a previously unimagined socialist nation. Their commitment to the international proletariat became increasingly tenuous, finally disappearing, perhaps, with the formal dissolution of...

The 1920s were the great age of Marxist analysis of Soviet society. The statisticians collected data on the class composition of every conceivable social institution and organization, including the Commmunist Party. The peasantry was diligently analyzed to identify the breakdown into class categories of “poor peasant,” “middle peasant,” and “kulak.” The social origin of state officials and university students was repeatedly investigated and tabulated. The statistical department party’s Central Committee issued guidelines on occupations and class classification: gravediggers and chauffeurs, it turned out, were “proletarian,” but domestic servants, porters, and shop assistants belonged to the class of “junior service personnel”...

To ascribe, according to one of the definitions offered by theOED, means “to enroll, register, reckon in a class.” But there is no known process of enrollment inMarxistclasses. A class in the Marxist sense is something to which a person belongs by virtue of his socioeconomic position and relationship to the means of production (or, in some formulations, the class consciousness engendered by socioeconomic position). In this it differs fundamentally from the kind of class to which one might be ascribed: for example, a social estate (soslovie, Rus.;état, Fr.;Stand, Ger.), which is first and foremost...

Soviet citizens of the 1920s and 1930s were used to telling the story of their lives in public. Numerous interactions with the state required presentation of an autobiographical narrative—for example, seeking employment, applying for admission to higher education, or undergoing the periodic personnel checks of state employees and party members known as purges (chistki). The Life, an all-purpose Soviet identity card, was a work of art, polished to a high gloss. Naturally, it represented a selective, partial summary of biographical data, and its public presentation, though habitual, was not an inconsequential action. There was always the possibility that the...

Anastasia Plotnikova was a perfectly ordinary woman. Her life was not mysterious or especially dramatic, at least in the context of her times. Born in a village in the Leningrad region in 1893, she became a Communist in 1920. By the mid 1930s, she had held senior administrative positions in Leningrad for almost a decade. In 1936 she was president of a district soviet in Leningrad and a member of the Leningrad city soviet. Her husband, whom she had married just before the First World War, had a party job in a factory in the Vyborg district of the city;...

On 10 November 1938, Andrei Ivanovich Poluektov, a 52-year-old peasant from the Dzerzhinskii kolkhoz, Losevo raion, Voronezh oblast, sent off a letter to the editors ofKrest’ianskaia gazeta.¹ It belonged to the common genre of “abuse” letters,² detailing the misdeeds and incompetence of the kolkhoz chairman, but it was by no means a standard letter to come from a peasant. Its length alone set it apart: the copy of the letter typed out byKrest’ianskaia gazetaran to thirteen pages, at least four times as long as the average “abuse” letter to the newspaper. Equally striking were the individuality and...

Women’s autobiographies (so recent scholarship tells us)¹ tend to focus on private rather than public matters, favor confession over testimony, show the authors in relation to a significant male Other such as a husband, and even question their right to tell an independent life story. But the life stories told by twentieth-century Russian women scarcely fit this mold. The typical autobiography by a Russian woman in the interwar period (1917–41) belongs to the genre of testimony—bearing witness to the times—not confession; it deals more with public matters than private, familial ones.² If there is a preoccupying Other...

“Which one of us had never written letters to the supreme powers … If they are preserved, these mountains of letters will be a veritable treasure trove for historians.”¹ So wrote that sharp-eyed anthropologist of Soviet everyday life, Nadezhda Mandelstam, and as usual she was right. The letters lay heaped in the archives waiting to be discovered by historians in the 1990s (ironically, given their generally nonpolitical content, they were usually filed in the archives’ secret sections).² Writing to the authorities, it turns out, was a major pastime in the 1930s. People usually wrote as individuals, since multiply signed letters...

Patronage relations were ubiquitous in the Soviet elite. The phenomenon is perhaps most familiar in the political sphere, where local and central leaders cultivated and promoted their own client networks (the often-criticized “family circles” [semeistva]).² But it was not only rising politicians who needed patrons. Lacking an adequate legal system, Russians relied on patronage alliances to protect “personal security, goods, career and status, freedom of expression and other material interests.”³ These words, written by David Ransel about Russian elites in the time of Catherine the Great, apply equally well to Stalinist society. Like blat connections, patronage relations were part of...

Denunciation—the voluntary reporting of wrongdoing by other citizens to the authorities—is a highly ambiguous practice. In some contexts, a denunciation may be read as an exemplary act of civic virtue, motivated by altruistic concern for the public good. More often, however, denunciations are construed as acts of betrayal, motivated by venality or malice. Language reflects these ambiguities and complexities. Two different terms for the practice may exist simultaneously, one neutral or positive (French,dénonciation; Stalinist-period Russian,signal) and the other pejorative (French,délation; Russian,donos). Euphemisms abound, like the contemporary American “whistle-blowing.” The related and almost universally despised...

In the 1930s, party committees do not seem to have concerned themselves overmuch with the private lives and sexual morality of Party members. This was not because of any ideological position protecting privacy: on the contrary, the Party had always stated its right in principle to be interested in the private lives of citizens, especially Party members, and indeed regularly exercised that right with regard to such specific matters as religious observance on the part of Communists and their families. But in practice in the prewar period the Party did not want to hear about people’s sex lives (or, by...

The trickster has a long history in real life and literature. He is a personage in folklore all over the world.¹ The prime characteristic of a trickster is to play tricks, deceive, and cheat; nevertheless, he is generally a sympathetic figure in folklore, and his tricks are often performed in a spirit of fun, not for personal gain. Folkloric tricksters may be pranksters like Till Eulenspiegel; they may have the ability to turn into animals; they are often subverters of authority and social conventions; they arebricoleurs, capable of ingeniously using whatever materials are at hand to get out of...

In the reports of Soviet con men that abounded in the newspapers of the 1930s, ethnicity was not an issue. Sometimes a particular con man had a Russian or Ukrainian name, sometimes a Jewish or Georgian one, but the reports rarely made a point of nationality, and never (in my reading) when the con man’s nationality (or recognized ethnicity) was Jewish.¹ However, we cannot assume on this basis that Russian readers made no connection between “conmanship” and Jewishness. A literary tradition of writing about Jewish con men (mainly by Jewish writers) existed from the 1920s. Kaverin’s fictional con man, Baraban,...

If speaking Bolshevik was something that had to be learned in the revolutionary era, after 1991 it had to be rapidly unlearned. Soviet identities were cast off, new post-Soviet identities invented. This was a self-conscious process—the obverse of learning to speak “Bolshevik” in the 1920s and ’30s—in which individuals struggled to empty their consciousness of Soviet morality, purge their language of Sovietisms, and thus fit themselves to be citizens of the new post-Soviet world. As in the earlier Soviet case, the remaking of self was experienced as liberating but also laborious and sometimes painful. It was likely to...