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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 …