Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia
By Sheila Fitzpatrick
Princeton University Press
332 Pages. $24.95

Worrying about the meaning of life is a luxury meant for quiet times. In the Soviet Union during the Stalin years, times were too tough for people to invest very much energy in such an enterprise. Besides, there was a more pressing activity that demanded their attention: worrying over the meaning of specific lives, both their own and other people's.

You, Comrade Plotnikova, are not the daughter of poor peasants, as you claim, but the daughter of kulaks. You do not come from a group we assume is friendly to Soviet power, but from a group we assume is violently hostile to it. So how can you pretend to be a loyal Soviet citizen and even a member of the Communist Party? This was the challenge issued in the mid-1930s to Anastasia Plotnikova, a high-ranking official in the Leningrad city administration, and it came from no less threatening a source than the security police. It was therefore a life-or-death matter for Plotnikova to give the proper spin to her biographical data. And, with a little help from some well-placed friends, she got a local soviet to issue a certificate that officially confirmed her "poor peasant" identity.

Plotnikova's story is one of the many fascinating vignettes of self-presentation that make up "Tear Off the Masks!", a collection of, for the most part, previously published articles by the prominent historian Sheila Fitzpatrick. Like a John Dos Passos novel, these isolated episodes from the lives of different people come together to paint a picture of a society in movement. Culled from assiduous trawling in newly opened archives, Fitzpatrick's snapshots focus on those moments when people found themselves compelled to invest their private lives with public meaning -- filling out the required avtobiografiya on official forms, requesting help on the basis of class origin and experience, denouncing fellow citizens for "masking" their true identity, passing themselves off as crippled war veterans to order to get largesse from Party bosses.

The workaday nature of these snapshots allows Fitzpatrick not only to reveal some of the biographical obsessions of Stalinist culture but to present a lot of life stories of rather ordinary citizens. Fitzpatrick's collective portrait runs the gamut of Soviet society, from a poor peasant who submitted his life story to a newspaper to Politburo members who liked to play the role of patron and (more to the point) protector of artists. Any reader will come away with a hands-on feel for the texture of these troubled decades.

Through the accumulation of these personal declarations, Fitzpatrick also presents a larger story of the rise and fall of a society-wide obsession with class origin. Prior to World War II, class trumped questions of personal morals in the flurry of mutual charge and countercharge. One is relieved to learn that in real life there were very few Pavlik Morozovs (the peasant lad who denounced his father) or wives disowning and condemning their arrested husbands -- even the authorities showed no real relish for this kind of betrayal.

Class-based stigmatization subsided on the eve of World War II. Yet, as Fitzpatrick demonstrates, denunciation and self-reinvention were too entrenched in Soviet society to simply slip away. Depositions against philandering husbands start to appear after the war and, with them, rather paternalistic attempts by the Party to keep the family together. In some ways these moral squabbles seem more familiar to us; in other ways (the Party's right to intervene), less so. Fitzpatrick also delves into another postwar substitute for class, namely, the strange episode of semi-official anti-Semitism of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Newspapers loved to tear the mask off various crooks by revealing the Jewish name behind the Russian alias.

All of these stories about identity and imposture beg the question: What, if anything, is particularly Soviet about this obsession with personal biography? Not much, according to Fitzpatrick, who argues that any successful revolution leads people to "reinvent themselves." This is a productive theme as far as it goes, which is a considerable distance. But the challenge issued by revolution to established identity is little more than a speeded-up version of the social changes that everywhere lead to an "impersonal," and therefore impersonating, society. Don't con men today often score spectacular success by pretending to be celebrities? Don't our affirmative-action programs make "identity politics" of our biographical origins?

There is something specifically Soviet about the kind of masking and unmasking portrayed in this book. Unfortunately, Fitzpatrick, who is so alive to historical flux in her own bailiwick of the Stalin years, takes a surprisingly unhistorical approach to the impact of Bolshevik ideology on the battle over identity. In an influential article republished here, Fitzpatrick argues that pre-revolutionary ideology proved utterly unable to handle post-revolutionary reality, forcing the Party to "reinvent" class as a basis for Soviet society after the end of the Civil War.

Yet Fitzpatrick's chosen theme of identity and imposture cannot be understood outside the context of prewar socialist programs and thought. The German Social Democratic Party to which the early Bolsheviks looked as a model developed a vast array of devices for instilling a sense of class identity, ranging from newspapers to singing clubs. Fitzpatrick is adept at showing how static class categories imposed by the state forced people to negotiate their own identities. She is less good (perhaps because archival documents reflect this sort of thing poorly) at bringing out the ubiquitous propagandizing of a grand narrative that turned these categories into something dynamic and thus meaningful.

In a lively new afterword on the post-Soviet period, Fitzpatrick describes what she sees as a basic similarity between the ways in which the revolutions of 1917 and 1991, otherwise so distinct, issued a challenge to personal and social identity. Here again, however, her failure to consider the 1917 Revolution in the context of the narrative inherited by the Bolsheviks leads her to overlook a crucial difference. The society that emerged after 1917 was based on a compact, confident story with a long past, one that was associated with a host of institutional practices and that was passionately promoted by energetic activists. After 1991, no such story was available, giving personal and social "reinvention" a febrile, sometimes desperate quality. As Fitzpatrick demonstrates, the perceived danger was no longer the old one of fitting oneself into a rigid narrative but rather of toppling over into a bottomless abyss of unmeaning imidzh (a typically cynical post-Soviet loan-word that stands in stark contrast to such earnest Soviet neologisms as "proletarian"). In the Soviet case we have what British writer Terry Pratchett once called the tyranny of narrative expectations, and in the post-Soviet case we have the nihilism of total narrative disarray.

My strictures on what is left out of the book do not detract from the riches included. Fitzpatrick's forte is the vivid case study that gives a sense of lived life while pointing to larger historical forces. Rather than examine the causes and effects of the great traumatic events of the 1930s and 1940s, she focuses on a ubiquitous feature of Stalinist society: the challenge of discovering and defending a usable identity. Bringing out this reality, one rarely captured by historians, is the enduring merit of "Tear Off the Masks!"