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When revolutions happen, they change the rules of everyday life--both the codified rules concerning the social and legal classifications of citizens and the unwritten rules about how individuals present themselves to others. This occurred in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which laid the foundations of the Soviet state, and again in 1991, when that state collapsed.Tear Off the Masks!is about the remaking of identities in these times of upheaval. Sheila Fitzpatrick here brings together in a single volume years of distinguished work on how individuals literally constructed their autobiographies, defended them under challenge, attempted to edit the \"file-selves\" created by bureaucratic identity documentation, and denounced others for \"masking\" their true social identities. Marxist class-identity labels--\"worker,\" \"peasant,\" \"intelligentsia,\" \"bourgeois\"--were of crucial importance to the Soviet state in the 1920s and 1930s, but it turned out that the determination of a person's class was much more complicated than anyone expected. This in turn left considerable scope for individual creativity and manipulation. Outright imposters, both criminal and political, also make their appearance in this book. The final chapter describes how, after decades of struggle to construct good Soviet socialist personae, Russians had to struggle to make themselves fit for the new, post-Soviet world in the 1990s--by \"de-Sovietizing\" themselves. Engaging in style and replete with colorful detail and characters drawn from a wealth of sources,Tear Off the Masks!offers unique insight into the elusive forms of self-presentation, masking, and unmasking that made up Soviet citizenship and continue to resonate in the post-Soviet world.

InMaking Sense of War,Amir Weiner reconceptualizes the entire historical experience of the Soviet Union from a new perspective, that of World War II. Breaking with the conventional interpretation that views World War II as a post-revolutionary addendum, Weiner situates this event at the crux of the development of the Soviet--not just the Stalinist--system. Through a richly detailed look at Soviet society as a whole, and at one Ukrainian region in particular, the author shows how World War II came to define the ways in which members of the political elite as well as ordinary citizens viewed the world and acted upon their beliefs and ideologies. The book explores the creation of the myth of the war against the historiography of modern schemes for social engineering, the Holocaust, ethnic deportations, collaboration, and postwar settlements. For communist true believers, World War II was the purgatory of the revolution, the final cleansing of Soviet society of the remaining elusive \"human weeds\" who intruded upon socialist harmony, and it brought the polity to the brink of communism. Those ridden with doubts turned to the war as a redemption for past wrongs of the regime, while others hoped it would be the death blow to an evil enterprise. For all, it was the Armageddon of the Bolshevik Revolution. The result of Weiner's inquiry is a bold, compelling new picture of a Soviet Union both reinforced and enfeebled by the experience of total war.

This chapter focuses on memories of collectivization's brutality and destruction in the dispossession of the larger landowners, known in Soviet history as dekulakization. The making of quloqs, to use the Uzbek term, was both the force that drove frightened dehqons to collectivize and the economic transfer that provided newly formed collective farms with substantial land. Oral history respondents talked about the arrest, exile, or disappearance of the rural wealthy. They spoke as participants in making quloqs, as quloqs, and as mystified or fearful bystanders. Dehqons who were “made into quloqs” told of exclusion from their communities and of exile to land reclamation sites. Liberated somewhat from Stalinist-era fears both by the passage of decades and by Uzbekistan's independence, respondents told of quloq making in ways that echoed and contested state discourses from the 1930s and that revealed the lasting social impact of quloq making on identities and on the structure of rural communities.

Kathleen Parth offers the first comprehensive examination of the controversial literary movement Russian Village Prose. From the 1950s to the decline of the movement in the 1970s, Valentin Rasputin, Fedor Abramov, and other writers drew on \"luminous\" memories of their rural childhoods to evoke a thousand-year-old pattern of life that was disappearing as they wrote. In their lyrical descriptions of a vanishing world, they expressed nostalgia for Russia's past and fears for the nation's future; they opposed collectivized agriculture, and fought to preserve traditional art and architecture and to protect the environment. Assessing the place of Village Prose in the newly revised canon of twentieth-century Russian literature, Parth maintains that these writers consciously ignored and undermined Socialist Realism, and created the most aesthetically coherent and ideologically important body of published writings to appear in the Soviet Union between Stalin's death and Gorbachev's ascendancy. In the 1970s, Village Prose was seen as moderately nationalist and conservative in spirit. After 1985, however, statements by several of its practitioners caused the movement to be reread as a possible stimulus for chauvinistic, anti-Semitic groups like Pamyat. This important development is treated here with a thorough discussion of all the political implications of these rural narratives. Nevertheless, the center of Parth's work remains her exploration of the parameters that constitute a \"code of reading\" for works of Village Prose. The appendixes contain a translation and analysis of a particularly fine example of Russian Village Prose--Aleksei Leonov's \"Kondyr.\"

IN PREVIOUS CHAPTERS, we examined how a power-maximizing dictator aka Stalin selected and organized his Chekists and identified political enemies. In the last chapter, we used the selectorate model to frame Stalin’s purge of the party and state elite. We studied how Stalin eliminated potential rivals from the bodies charged with selecting the nation’s leadership—the Politburo and the Central Committee. In this chapter, we study how Stalin “eliminated” large numbers of citizens, presumably to solidify his power. This chapter examines the planning and execution of three major terror campaigns: dekulakization (1930–1932), mass operations (1937–1938), and national operations