0DNLQJD6HOIIRUWKH7LPHV,PSHUVRQDWLRQDQG,PSRVWXUH

LQWK&HQWXU\5XVVLD
6KHLOD)LW]SDWULFN

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Volume 2, Number

3, Summer 2001 (New Series), pp. 469-487 (Article)
3XEOLVKHGE\6ODYLFD3XEOLVKHUV
DOI: 10.1353/kri.2008.0149

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/kri/summary/v002/2.3fitzpatrick.html

Access provided by University Of Southern California (11 Oct 2015 08:09 GMT)

Making a Self for the Times: Impersonation and Imposture in

20th-Century Russia
Sheila Fitzpatrick

Reinvention is what revolutions are all about. This has implications not only for
the nation (society, polity) but also for the individual. When revolutionaries assume the task of remaking their society, they also pledge to remake themselves
and their neighbors as citizens and patriots of the revolutionary state. In the case
of the Bolshevik Revolution, the stated aim was to produce a new Soviet man
(novyi sovetskii chelovek), often pictured as a citizen of the socialist future, free
from the crippling legacy of capitalism. But in addition to this generic new person of the future, there were millions of individual men and women who, in a
practical and immediate way, needed to reinvent themselves as a consequence of
the Revolution. The social hierarchy of the old regime had been discarded along
with its political institutions. Status, rank, and honor had been deconstructed.
The social personae of the old world were no longer appropriate in the new.
This essay is an exploration of the process of individual reinvention of self associated with the Russian Revolution (broadly understood as a process of political and social transformation beginning in 1917 and continuing through the
1920s and 1930s). My notion of reinvention involves both changes of selfpresentation and changes in self-understanding. Since self-understanding is an
extremely elusive target, however, I will focus primarily on self-presentation,
particularly the presentation of a social self identified in class terms. Class identification was all-important in the young Soviet state because of the Bolsheviks
conception of the Revolution as a class conflict (the proletariat triumphing over
the bourgeoisie) and their belief that class and political allegiance were inextricably linked. To make ones way in the new revolutionary world, it was necessary
both to reinvent oneself as a Soviet citizen and even more urgently to establish an acceptable class identity. Of the two tasks, the latter was by far the most
challenging for those the great majority who were not unambiguously proletarian. If impersonation, in the sense of assuming new personae, was the task of
virtually everyone touched by the Revolution, imposture, involving deception
about identity, was scarcely less prevalent. Among the sociopolitical consequences of this, I suggest, was the acute fear of concealed and disguised

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 2(3): 46987, Summer 2001.

470

S HEILA F ITZPATRICK

enemies impostors that was so marked a feature of Soviet politics and

society in the first two decades.
Definitions: Identity, Impersonation, and Imposture

Identity is a concept that has recently been much over-used, with a multiplicity
of meanings.1 I use it to mean a self-identification and/or self-understanding
constructed with reference to currently accepted categories of social being. There
is, of course, a difference between self-identification (a labeling process which
may carry only an instrumental purpose), and self-understanding (implying belief that the self is as one understands it). My definition intentionally elides this
distinction, since my assumption is that the self-understanding of subjects is accessible to historians only through practices like self-identification. In this essay,
identity is shorthand for the complex revisions of self-identification and selfunderstanding that were associated with the Russian Revolution.
In my definition, individuals always have multiple identities, i.e. selfidentifications that mark their location in the world and relationship to other
people. This is because identity can be construed in many different ways it
can be social, gender, ethnic/national, familial, confessional, political, and so on.
Assuming identities to be the classifications that a person accepts as applicable to
him/herself and expects the outside world to recognize in him/her, a single person may simultaneously embrace the identities of, for example, man, worker,
Communist, husband/father, Russian. In the early Soviet case, the axes of political (Communist or not) and social (class) identity had special significance (which
is not to deny the importance of gender or national identity).2 Social identity
was the most problematic.
While self-identifications are grounded in real-life phenomena such as native
language, parentage, and occupation, they are also fluid and subject to modification. Modification may be a product of circumstance: for example, when the
Soviet Union disappeared as a state at the beginning of the 1990s, Soviet suddenly ceased to be a viable identity. It may also be a product of a combination of
circumstance and personal choice, as in the case of noble (dvorianin), a disadvantageous and even disgraceful identity in Soviet times which made a comeback
in the 1990s after decades of non-viability. The real-life data upon which identities are constructed can yield very different results according to circumstance and
choice: consider, for example, the multiple possibilities of ethnic self1 For a recent critique, see Rogers Brubaker and Fred Cooper, Beyond Identity, Theory and
Society 29: 1 (2000), 147.
2 On national identity, see Terry Martin, An Affirmative Action Empire: Ethnicity and the Soviet
State, 19231939 (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1996).

MAKING A SELF FOR THE TIMES

471

identification available to a Russian-speaker born in Russia with one Jewish and

one Ukrainian grandparent. Moreover, the comparative importance to an
individual of different types of self-identification (for example: wife, woman,
Communist, intelligentka, Jew) may change radically in different external
circumstances and stages of life.
There was no direct equivalent of the term identity, as used above, in Bolshevik discourse. But there was a familiar term in the usage of the 1920s and
early 1930s for the kind of identity the Bolsheviks were most interested in,
namely class identity: klassovoe litso, literally class face or aspect. The class face of
an individual was something that had to be made manifest (vyiavleno, defined in
Ushakovs Tolkovyi slovar as exposed, shown in its true colors).3 Discussion of
identity was closely linked with questions of disguise and concealment, since the
Revolution had made certain social and political identities dangerous handicaps
and thus fostered concealment. A disguised identity must be unmasked
(razoblacheno),4 a very common term in early Soviet discourse. Double identity
or duplicity (dvulichie, dvurushnichestvo), the latter defined as behavior of a person ostensibly belonging to one group but acting on behalf of the opposing side,
were regularly excoriated in the Soviet press.5
Impersonation and imposture are key terms in my argument. My definition
of impersonation combines the two meanings given by the Oxford English Dictionary for impersonate, namely 1) to assume the person or character of; to
play the part of and/or 2) to invest with an actual personality, to embody. I
am looking, in short, for a way of talking about role-playing (OED definition 1)
that is expansive enough to encompass the idea that self-fashioning or selfcreation (OED definition 2) may also be involved. In my usage, impersonation is
not necessarily pejorative. Imposture, on the other hand, is definitely pejorative:
the action or practice of imposing on others; wilful and fraudulent deception,
3 Vyiavit = (3) Razoblachit, pokazat v podlinnom vide: Dmitrii Nikolaevich Ushakov, ed.,
Tolkovyi slovar russkogo iazyka, 4 vols. (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 193540), vol. 1; and
see also Afanasii Matveevich Selishchev, Iazyk revoliutsionnoi epokhi: Iz nabliudenii nad russkim
iazykom poslednikh let (19171926) , 2nd ed. (Moscow: Rabotnik prosveshcheniia, 1928), 48. For a
useful discussion of terms associated with revelation of a true self, see Oleg Kharkhordin, The
Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1999), 17581. With regard to the word proiavit, it seems to me that Kharkhordin exaggerates the
frequency of its usage in the 1920s and 1930s. Ushakov characterized it in the late 1930s as
bookish (knizh.), in contrast to his description of vyiavit as new newspaper language; and the
examples he gives of revelation all involve positive qualities (Proiavit geroizm, khrabrost, etc.). In
the discourse of unmasking, vyiavit, not proiavit, plays the central role.
4 See definition in Tolkovyi slovar russkogo iazyka, vol. 3.
5 Tolkovyi slovar russkogo iazyka, vol. 1: Povedenie cheloveka, naruzhno prinadlezhashchego k odnoi
gruppe, no deistvuiushchego v polzu vrazhdebnoi ei storony (gaz. prezrit.).

472

S HEILA F ITZPATRICK

according to the OED. The distinction between the two might be expressed as
that between sincere and cynical performance6 but, as Erving Goffman has
suggested, that is a distinction of intentions that is very hard to pin down. We
are on safer ground if we understand the distinction in terms of reception: thus,
impersonation is a performance that is perceived by the beholder to be sincere
(not duplicitous); imposture is a performance perceived to be fraudulent.
The notion of performance was not wholly alien to early Soviet discourse: we
find, for example, a surprisingly rich array of performance-related terms in the
Aesopian official discussion of the 193233 famine (peasants staging a famine
and turning on a hunger strike; beggars passing themselves off as ruined
kolkhozniks, and so on).7 Nevertheless, performance was scarcely a central concept in Soviet Marxism, and the phenomenon that I call impersonation like
its language-focused cousin, Stephen Kotkins speaking Bolshevik8 was
usually subsumed under some broader Soviet category like learning.9 The most
interesting Russian word related to impersonation and imposture was samozvanets, which Ushakov in the mid-1930s defined first in general terms as a person
trying to pass himself off as someone else and only secondly in the more familiar
historical meaning as someone pretending to be the tsar.10 Since there were
many Soviet impostures of the type indicated in Ushakovs example (Okazalos,
chto on vovse ne inspektor iz tsentra, a samozvanets), the term was used relatively
often in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s; nevertheless, the flavor was
definitely of an essentially pre-Soviet word and practice that had quaintly survived to the present day.11
6 See Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959),
1719 and passim.
7 See Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalins Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after
Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 75.
8 Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995).
9 The word voploshchatsia is the closest Russian equivalent to impersonate: the example of usage
given in Tolkovyi slovar russkogo iazyka, vol. 1, is V partii voploshchaetsia volia mass. In the
context of theatrical performance, Stalin repeatedly used perevoploshchatsia in a 1947 conversation
with Sergei Eisenstein and the actor Cherkasov to signify the actors ability to become the
character he plays: Grigorii Mariamov, Kremlevskii tsenzor: Stalin smotrit kino (Moscow:
Kinotsentr, 1992), 87.
10 Tolkovyi slovar russkogo iazyka, vol. 4: 1. Chelovek, samovol no, nezakonno prisvoivshii sebe
chuzhoe imia, zvania, vydaiushchii sebia za drugogo. 2. Epitet cheloveka, prisvoivshego sebe imia tsaria
ili kogo-nibud iz chlenov tsarskogo doma v bor be za politicheskuiu vlast (istorich.).
11 On samozvanstvo, see Claudio Sergio Ingerflom, Les representations collectives du pouvoir et
limposture dans la Russia des XVIIIoeXXoe sicles, in La royaut sacre dans le monde chrtien,
ed. Alain Boureau and Ingerflom (Paris: Editions de lEHESS, 1992).

MAKING A SELF FOR THE TIMES

473

To sum up: in Soviet discourse, the notion of identity was most closely connected to class, on the one hand, and to the possibility of false identity claims
that needed to be unmasked, on the other. In cases of unmasking, the real
identity was usually that of a social alien12 or enemy (of the Revolution and
Soviet power).13
Impersonation and Class Labeling after the Bolshevik Revolution

Post-revolutionary impersonation had a number of aspects. These included the

universal task of learning to be a Soviet citizen (learning to speak Bolshevik, in
Kotkins terms); the special role-learning tasks of the upwardly mobile
(vydvizhentsy) and those who embraced new and specifically Soviet roles such as
aktivist, obshchestvennitsa, and stakhanovets; and the task of establishing an acceptable class identity, which bore most heavily on those of flawed (in Bolshevik
terms) social background. In this essay, my focus is on the last form of impersonation, one that was extremely important in the Soviet Union in the 1920s
and early 1930s because of the structures of legal and practical discrimination
that the Bolsheviks set in place shortly after the Revolution. The purpose of class
discrimination was to give proletarians and poor peasants (the Bolsheviks class
allies) priority of access to goods and opportunities, and to disadvantage the
bourgeoisie, former people (from the old upper classes), priests, kulaks, and
other class enemies.14 Class discrimination was practiced in a wide range of
situations allocation of rations and housing, status before the court, taxes, university admissions, admission to Komsomol and Communist Party, and suitability for employment in government bureaucracy.
The Bolsheviks created a whole discipline of social statistics in the 1920s to
determine class identities and their distribution in the population. But this was
in many respects a doomed enterprise because the society was in such a state of
flux. Millions of people had been separated from their traditional social, cultural,
and territorial moorings. Everybody was in the process of (re)constructing identity. Everybody, to use the language of socialist realism, was in the process of becoming, moving to a future identity different from that of the past. The collec
tive project of social construction (sotsialnoe stroitelstvo) necessarily in12 Sotsialno-chuzhoi, sotsial no-chuzhdyi element, or simply chuzhoi.
13 See Ushakovs sole example of usage of the word: Razoblachit vraga (Tolkovyi slovar russkogo

iazyka, vol. 3).

14 The following paragraphs summarize an argument put forward in my Ascribing Class: The

Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia, in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila
Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 2000), 2046 (orig. published Journal of Modern History 65: 4
[1993], 74570).

474

S HEILA F ITZPATRICK

corporated millions of individual projects of self-construction that process of

construction of a revolutionary/Soviet/proletarian self that I have called impersonation.15
The new rulers pursued ethnic/national identity with similar vigor, although
for somewhat different reasons. Individual nationality was not considered a
marker of political allegiance in the prewar period but rather a necessary aspect of
a citizens self-identification in an explicitly and programmatically multinational
state. In an age of natsionalnoe stroitelstvo (that is, building the multinational
state and its constituent national republics and regions), counting national
populations was an imperative of territorial boundary-marking.16 In principle,
the Bolsheviks were rather sophisticated about class and national identities, in
that they saw them (especially the latter) as socially and culturally constructed
attributes rather than primordial. Nevertheless, like many other people, they
were also inclined to lapse into primordialism with regard both to class and
national (ethnic) identity, i.e. to see these identities as innate.
The Bolsheviks generally treated class as an objective category: if the appropriate economic and occupational data were collected, one would know whether
somebody was a kulak, a poor peasant, a proletarian, an employee, or a bourgeois, and be able to predict their political allegiance accordingly. This turned
out to be complicated because of large-scale declassing and social mobility attendant upon the Revolution, as well as the fact that class identification was much
more ambiguous and contestable than the Bolsheviks expected.
If the objective approach to class had its problems, however, a subjective
approach was even more problematical. The idea that class might also be a subjective category implying that one could choose, or choose to change, class
identities was not totally alien: after all, many of the Old Bolsheviks themselves, born into the nobility or intelligentsia, had subsequently embraced the
cause of the proletariat. But the Bolsheviks could not go too far along this path
in the 1920s because of their commitment to class discrimination. 17 If you want
15 There is, of course, no word samostroitelstvo to describe this process, though note the interesting
coinage of the late 1920s to describe individuals liable to be labeled kulaks who reinvented
themselves by running away: samoraskulachivanie.
16 See Terry Martin, Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet
Primordialism, in Stalinism, ed. Fitzpatrick, 34867, and Yuri Slezkine, The Soviet Union as a
Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism, in ibid., 31347
(orig. published Slavic Review 53: 2 [1994], 41452).
17 The Chinese Communists, who had a similar problem, were somewhat more flexible in their
approach to class and quicker to move towards political-behavioral criteria. During the Cultural
Revolution, generally characterized by a temporary toughening of the class line, a group of young
radicals protested the whole notion of discrimination on grounds of class origin and called on the
children of bad social classes to rebel against their unfair treatment. This position was repudiated,

MAKING A SELF FOR THE TIMES

475

to reward proletarians and punish the bourgeoisie, there are problems in allowing
proletarian identity to be chosen in adult life by offspring of the bourgeoisie because it will be chosen for the wrong reasons, viz. material advantage. The logic
of class discrimination in practice tended to produce a kind of primordialist or,
as it was sometimes expressed, genealogical approach to class: once a proletarian, always a proletarian and a good guy; once a burzhui, always a burzhui and
not to be trusted.18
Class discrimination had another logic, namely that of modifying ones biography to give it the best class spin. The existence of such discriminatory structures meant that a persons official class identity became crucial to his prospects
in life. Hence the construction of a good social identity became a central preoccupation of many, especially those whose biographical data contained ambiguities or contradictions with regard to social status. A social identity was
ambiguous whenever an individual biography contained contradictory data, i.e.
data that could be used to construct different and incompatible social identities.
This was not an unusual situation in the 1920s and early 1930s but closer to a
normal one, especially for urbanites.
It was the norm, rather than the exception, for townspeople to have moved
through different occupations and social strata and/or to be in a different social
position than their parents had been. Certain common trajectories born a peasant, now a worker; born a worker, now a member of the new intelligentsia
were so familiar and (from a Soviet standpoint) admirable that they needed only
a minimum of explanation. By Soviet convention, the peasant-turned-worker
had a proletarian identity, while the worker-turned-administrator was a proletarian vydvizhenets. But other cases were more complex. What was the class identity of a noble who, deprived of his estates, worked as a clerk in an office? Or of a
woman, daughter of a priest and married to a worker, who worked as a schoolteacher?
Such ambiguous cases required conscious creation of a new social identity.
This might take the very concrete form of acting out the life you wanted to see
on your resum: for example, a child of a white-collar family going to work for a
year or two in the factory to acquire proletarian coloration; a woman marrying
but in 1968 Mao responded with an instruction that specifically distinguished children of bad
class origins from their parents and emphasized their educability. See Gordon White, The Politics of
Class and Class Origin: The Case of the Cultural Revolution (Canberra: Australian National
University, 1976), esp. 5161 and Appendix. Thanks to Emily Hantman, Chicago, for first
drawing this to my attention.
18 Oleg Kharkhordin (Collective, 16970) accepts the dominance of class criteria for the 1920s but
discerns an abrupt shift towards political-behavioral criteria (deeds alone, in Kharkhordins
phrase) in 1933; in my opinion this is somewhat exaggerated with respect to discourse and quite
misleading with respect to practice.

476

S HEILA F ITZPATRICK

to improve her social status (which in Soviet terms often meant marrying down
rather than up); or parents (priests, kulaks, etc.) seeking to spare their children
the stigma of their own social status and therefore sending them out to live with
relatives without the stigma.
More commonly, however, identity creation took the form of editing the
official and omnipresent resum (avtobiografiia) to put the best spin on ones
past. For example, a prosperous peasants child turned industrial worker might
play down the village background and emphasize the seven years spent in the
factory; an offspring of a poor peasant family who had moved to town and
worked first in the private trade sector and then in state trade was likely to emphasize origins and skip over the NEP period.
Those who had something to hide did not necessarily or perhaps even typically approach the task of editing their social identity with cynicism, or see themselves as involved in a fraud. I began to feel I was the man I had pretended to
be, wrote one former Komsomol member looking back on his Soviet life from
emigration.19 The diarist Stepan Podlubnyi did his best to conceal his dekulakized Ukrainian origins from the eyes of the world after he moved to Moscow,
but at the same time worked tirelessly to eliminate what he saw as a taint from
his innermost self, to remake his consciousness and reinvent himself.20
Imposture

As noted above, I have defined imposture wilful fraudulent deception, cynical performance as something whose difference from impersonation lies in the
eye of the beholder. In the discourse of the early Stalin period, we encounter two
strikingly different types of imposture. The first is imposture associated with notions of the enemy (class enemy in the 1920s, enemy of the people during
the Great Purges) and threat to the state, which I will call political imposture.
This type of imposture provoked horror and fear and was punished in the severest possible manner. The second type is imposture committed for gain (as in a
swindle perpetrated on fellow citizens), which I will call criminal imposture. This
was viewed with tolerance or even amusement in many contexts. The type of the

19 W. I. Hryshko, in Soviet Youth: Twelve Komsomol Histories, ed. Nikolai K. Novak-Deker

(Munich: Institut zur Erforschung der UdSSR, 1951), series 1, no. 51, 9899.
20 See Jochen Hellbeck, ed. Tagebuch aus Moskau 19311939 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch
Verlag, 1996) and Hellbeck, Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi,
193139, in Stalinism, ed. Fitzpatrick, 77116 (orig. published in Jahrbcher fr Geschichte
Osteuropas 44: 3 [1996], 34473).

MAKING A SELF FOR THE TIMES

477

criminal impostor or trickster was personified in literature by Ostap Bender, Il f

and Petrovs velikii kombinator.21
Political Imposture

A cartoon in Krokodil in the late 1930s showed a questionnaire22 filled in with

two sets of answers: the true answers that would get the author in trouble
(bourgeois origins, service with White Armies, and so on) over-written with
false answers that would help his self-advancement (worker, fought with the
Red Army in Civil War).23 As we have seen, the distinction between true and
false class identities was by no means so easily made. Undoubtedly many citizens with ambiguous social identities or black spots in their past had to do an
editing job on their ankety. In normal circumstances, this passed without challenge and can be considered as impersonation. However, the known prevalence
of ambiguity and the Bolsheviks highly developed suspicion of class enemies
made unmasking a practice almost as common as impersonation. When an impersonation was successfully unmasked, it became ipso facto an imposture.
Such challenges routinely took place in a variety of public fora, especially the
periodic purges (chistki) of government institutions and party organizations of
the 1920s and early 1930s, the explicit purpose of which was to get rid of social
aliens and impostors as well as other categories of undesirables like political
Oppositionists.24 Among the most frequent allegations made in such contexts
were concealment of clerical, bourgeois, or noble origins, misrepresentation of
behavior during the Civil War, and, in the case of recent migrants from countryside to town, misrepresentation of status in the village. Sometimes the unmasking of alien social origins and past Oppositionism went together, as in the case of
Bocharev, a Leningrad oblast education official:
Bocharevs father was a [tsarist] policeman (uriadnik). Bocharov keeps in
close touch with relatives who are deacons, priests, and kulaks. In 1929
he was expelled from the party as an alien element, but then for some
reason reinstated. As a student at Moscow University, Bocharov actively
21 Il ia Arnol dovich Il f and Evgenii Petrov, Dvenadtsat stul ev (1928) and Zolotoi telenok (1931).

For post-Soviet editions, see n. 53.

22 Anketa the standard form for autobiographical data, asking for social origin, social position,
participation in Civil War, party membership, etc.
23 Krokodil, no. 10 (1935), back page: captioned The Resum (anketa) and Life: How One
Should Sometimes Read the Resum.
24 The press carried many reports of unmaskings in the government purge in late 1929 and the
first half of 1930: see, for example, the account of class enemies unmasked in Gosbank in Nasha
gazeta, 9 May 1930, 3.

478

S HEILA F ITZPATRICK

participated in the Trotskyite-Zinovievite opposition. During the party

purge of 1930, he hid that until he was unmasked. Such is the class
identity (klassovoe litso) of the man who heads adult education in the
education department. 25
But on many occasions, class origin alone was reason for unmasking, as in the
case of kolkhoz chairman Mikhail Alekseev, who was found to have hidden his
origins as a kulaks son, or the many school directors and teachers in
Khvoininskii raion, Leningrad oblast, who had concealed the fact that their fathers had been landowners, policemen, and priests. 26
There were always serious consequences to an unmasking: depending on the
context, the victim was in danger of losing his/her job, status as a student, party
or Komsomol membership, etc. But at periods of high political tension, the possible consequences could be much graver: deportation (for peasants accused of
being kulaks during collectivization), arrest, GULAG sentences or even execution
during the Great Purges.
At such times, the unmaskers often lost sight of what in ordinary life they
knew perfectly well, namely that all sorts of comparatively harmless circumstances could lead people into impersonation/imposture (via editing of identities
and autobiographies). They came to see the impostor as something essentially
different from an ordinary wrongdoer, something scarcely human, extremely
sinister and threatening, innately and irredeemably evil. The impostor became a
witch in the power of Satan (in the terminology of early modern Europe), an
enemy of the people in the pay of foreign capitalists and Judas-Trotskii (in the
terminology of the Great Purges). This status as an enemy was not circumstantial
but essential. Conversion or redemption were not options.27
To see how an impersonation might be transformed rhetorically into an imposture we can look at the case of Stanislav Antonovich Rataichak, head of the
Soviet chemicals industry in the mid-1930s. Rataichak, evidently of
Polish/German origin, was a soldier in the Austrian army who was taken prisoner
by the Russians in World War I. As a POW, he apparently identified his nationality as Polish (though according to later claim, German would have been more
accurate) and continued this practice in his subsequent post-revolutionary life as
25 Krestianskaia pravda (Leningrad), 11 April 1935, 2.
26 Ibid., 8 April 1935, 3; 11 April 1935, 2. The provenance of these cases, and the one cited in the
previous note, is not clear, but they probably come from reports of local commissions conducting
the 1935 purge of party membership.
27 Note that this statement applies to political offenders only, not to criminals. On the remaking
of criminals and its importance in Soviet discourse of the 1930s, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday
Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 7579.

MAKING A SELF FOR THE TIMES

479

a Soviet citizen. He also allegedly exaggerated his role in pre-revolutionary strikes

and back-dated his participation in the revolutionary movement. In April 1936
the party Central Committees personnel department found out about these inaccuracies and told Rataichak to correct them in his official anketa, which he
did.28 Still probably a more or less innocent impersonator in the Central Committees eyes, Rataichak was nevertheless on the verge of being pushed into the
impostor category because of scandals in the chemicals industry, the fact that his
boss (former-Oppositionist Piatakov) was on the brink of disgrace, and the
approach of the Great Purges.
By 1937, when both Rataichak and Piatakov appeared as defendants in the
second of the big Moscow show trials, Rataichak had been fully transformed into
an impostor. As Prosecutor Vyshinskii explained, inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the self-identifications offered in Rataichaks official autobiographies were
a clear give-away of his enemy status:
Whether [Rataichak] is a German or a Polish spy is not clear, but that he
is a spy there cannot be any doubt; and as is appropriate to his profession, a liar, a swindler and a rascal. A man who, on his own confession, has
an old autobiography and a new autobiography. A man who, according to
circumstances, forges and re-shuffles these autobiographies.29
To be sure, for the audience at the 1937 show trial, Rataichaks attempt to
edit his resum was only one of his many alleged sins. In other Great Purge contexts, however, the act of unmasking an enemy of the people carried great emotional charge, focused specifically on the shocking revelation that someone close
and trusted was not what he or she seemed. We can catch a glimpse in the horrifying comment of Elena Bonners young brother after his fathers arrest (Look
what those enemies of the people are like. Some of them even pretend to be
fathers30) or in Iuliia Piatnitskaias agonized musings about whether her husband Piatnitskii was really the man she had always thought him or a totally alien
person, an enemy, in whose face she would spit.31 Occasionally, a stenographic
report uncovered in the archives catches something of the process, as when the
28 Information from cross-examination of Rataichak in Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of

the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre, Heard before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the
U.S.S.R. Moscow, January 2330, 1937 (Moscow: Peoples Commissariat of Justice of the USSR,
1937), 410.
29 Report, 474. Emphasis added.
30 Elena Bonner, Mothers and Daughters, trans. Antonina Bouis (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1993),
317.
31 Iuliia Piatnitskaia, Dnevnik zheny bol shevika (Benson, VT: Chalidze Publications, 1987), 39,
4748, 5354.

480

S HEILA F ITZPATRICK

dry proceedings of a trade union congress caught fire in January 1938, stripping
a victim of her persona as a loyal Soviet citizen and leaving her on the verge of
unmasking as an enemy of the people and Romanian spy.32
Criminal Imposture

If we turn now to the second category of impostors, tricksters, the atmospheric

difference is startling. Impostors of the second type were swindlers who practiced
deception as a way of making a living. The literary archetype of the Soviet conman, Ostap Bender, is representative of a major social phenomenon of the
period; and stylistically his treatment by Il f and Petrov is also typical of journalistic coverage of egregious confidence tricksters in newspaper feuilletons and
court reports of the 1920s and 1930s. Bender is the typical trickster (plut) whose
exploits, outrageous but not really threatening to society, are described with humor and appreciation in folklores the world over. To cite a Central Committee
condemnation authored by Shepilov in the late 1940s (a time when, despite Il f
and Petrovs enormous popularity, publication of their works was temporarily
halted because of their lack of respect for Soviet institutions),
The con-man Ostap Bender is the chief protagonist of both novels and
is represented in the brightest colors. He is in his own way bold, resourceful, witty, and quick-witted; while all the people he meets along
the way, leaders and employees of Soviet institutions, inhabitants of city
and village, are shown as stupid people, primitive and ridiculous
philistines. The scoundrel Bender easily and without punishment succeeds in deceiving and making fools of everyone around. Despite all his
crimes and swindles, he remains undiscredited (nerazoblachennyi) to the
end. 33
Judging by journalistic, literary, and judicial accounts, such con-men were
very prevalent in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. The provinces were
alive with latter-day Gogolesque revizory con-men who arrived in town, successfully passed themselves off as important officials, were wined and dined and

32 This story is told in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Lives under Fire: Autobiographical Narratives and Their
Challenges in Stalins Russia, in De Russie et dailleurs: Feux croiss sur lhistoire, ed. Martine Godet
et al. (Paris: Institut dtudes slaves, 1995), 23532.
33 Poshlye romany Ilfa i Petrova ne izdavat, Istochnik, no. 5 (1997), 92. Publication of Sergei
Atapin. Memo of D. Shepilov of the Central Committee Agitprop department to Malenkov, 14
December 1948.

MAKING A SELF FOR THE TIMES

481

perhaps given advances on their salaries, and then disappeared.34 A personal favorite of mine (encountered accidentally years ago in the minutes of a Kazakh
party conference) was the con-man who arrived in Kazakhstan in 1927 and managed to defraud regional party organizations of 9,000 rubles and (a rare prize) a
new typewriter by posing successively as an operative of the Cheka, a German
general, and, of all things, a party Oppositionist sent out from the Opposition
Central Committee in Moscow.35
An intriguing sub-category of impostors consisted of individuals passing
themselves off as relatives of the famous, on the lines of the sons of Lieutenant
Schmidt immortalized in Ilf and Petrovs Zolotoi telenok. Sons of Lieutenant
Schmidt (a hero of the 1905 Revolution much celebrated in the early Soviet
years) may have been a creation of literary imagination, but there were numerous
real-life brothers of Lunacharskii, descendants of Prince Kropotkin, and
grandsons of Karl Marx traveling round the provinces and swindling local officials in the 1920s. In 1926, a swindler claiming to be Faizull Khodzhaev (head of
the government of the Uzbek Republic) toured southern cities including Yalta
and Poltava collecting money from credulous city-soviet officials.36
The capitals, too, had more than their share of con-men, often entrenched in
bureaucratic offices, who conducted elaborate swindles by using official stamps
and letterhead. At a more mundane level, all over the country, as Arch Getty
noted in Origins of the Great Purges, people were obtaining and using forged
party cards and other forms of false identification.37 After passports were introduced in 1933, a brisk black market trade grew up in them too.
Imposture of the con-man type is a notable phenomenon in any society in
flux, with geographical space available where people are free to reinvent themselves: think, for example, of the prominence of con-men in 19th-century
American literature.38 The essence of an impostor-friendly situation is one where
34 For examples, see my unpublished paper to the AAASS annual meeting in Seattle, November
1997, The World of Ostap Bender: Soviet Confidence Men in the 1920s and 1930s. See also
Golfo Alexopoulos, Portrait of a Con Artist as a Soviet Man, Slavic Review 57: 4 (1998), 77490.
35 Shestaia Vsekazakskaia konferentsiia VKP(b) 1523 noiabria 1927 goda: Stenograficheskii otchet
(Kzyl-Orda: Izdatelstvo Kazakskogo Kraevogo Komiteta VKP(b), 1927), 5758.
36 Iu. K. Shcheglov, Kommentarii k romanu Zolotoi telenok in Ilia Ilf and Evgenii Petrov,
Zolotoi telenok: Roman (Moscow: Panorama, 1995), 352, citing story in Pravda by L. Sosnovskii.
See also the feuilleton by Mikhail Bulgakov, Lzhedmitrii Lunacharskii, in his Ranniaia
nesobrannaia proza (Munich: O. Sagner, 1978), 15153.
37 J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 19331938
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 3234, 55, 61.
38 See Gary H. Lindberg, The Confidence Man in American Literature (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1982). A notable example is Herman Melvilles The Confidence Man: His
Masquerade (1857).

482

S HEILA F ITZPATRICK

checking up on credentials is a difficult and time-consuming business, or perhaps

an impossible one. One cannot be an impostor in a village where everyone knows
everyone else, and it is at least a difficult business in a society whose elites are
long established and interconnected (unless you are claiming to be a foreigner). A
far-flung country with poor communications, traditional hierarchies upset, and a
new elite recently recruited and without long-established ties is one of the perfect
settings.
Given that Soviet society met these specifications so well in the 1920s and
1930s, it is no surprise that con-men should have flourished there, or that Soviet
writers and readers, like those in the United States a century earlier, should have
been drawn to the phenomenon. In his late 1940s unmasking of Il f and
Petrov,39 Shepilov suggested that their work had a basically anti-Soviet appeal.
That may be, but there is another way of looking at their popularity, namely as a
primer for Soviet impersonation, a handbook on how to speak Bolshevik.
Bender is at home in the corridors and practices of Soviet offices. He knows all
the official Soviet locutions and euphemisms and rebukes his comrades-in-crime
when they use uncultured language. Not only a virtuoso speaker of Bolshevik, he
is also a dedicated teacher of the language and readers, perhaps, were among his
students.
The two discourses on imposture of the 1930s have vastly different emotional timbres. The discourse on criminal imposture is almost light-hearted, in
the manner of the anekdot, and only formally judgmental, while that on political
imposture (enemies of the people) is fraught with fear and horror at the presence of essential evil. How are we to explain their coexistence? Explanations
couched in terms of party ideology may be helpful in understanding the discourse on political imposture, but it would be a considerable stretch to try to
explain the discourse on con-men in this way. Surely in the latter case (and, I
would argue, to a large extent in the former also) we are dealing with a discourse
shaped by the preoccupations of a society rather than those of a political elite. If,
as I have suggested in this essay, Soviet urban society in the 1920s and 1930s had
some resemblance to a company of impersonators still learning their roles, it is
not surprising to find imposture in its various guises prominent among these
preoccupations. It is also not surprising to find what appear to be contradictory
discourses about impersonation/imposture, since the meaning of these phenomena changes radically according to the angle of vision (identification with the
impostor produces one meaning, identification with those he imposes on another). In a society of impersonators, both angles of vision are familiar to most
individuals and both carry a lot of strong emotional charge. If I myself am an
impersonator, that gives me a fellow-feeling for those whose impersonation has
39 See above, n. 33.

MAKING A SELF FOR THE TIMES

483

been exposed as imposture: hence, the relatively benign discourse about conmen. At the same time, the fact that I suspect that many of those around me are
also impersonators is potentially a cause for great anxiety and uncertainty. I think
I know who I really am, but I dont know who they really are: hence, the fearful
discourse about enemies.
Reflections on Reinvention of Self in the Post-Soviet Era

If speaking Bolshevik was something that had to be learned in the revolutionary

era, since 1991 it has had to be as rapidly unlearned. Soviet identities have been
cast off, new post-Soviet identities invented. This is a self-conscious process, often quite comparable to Podlubnyis epopeia at an earlier period, in which individuals struggle to empty their consciousness of Soviet morality, purge their
language of Sovietisms, and thus fit themselves as citizens of the new post-Soviet
world. As in the Soviet-revolutionary case, the remaking of self is often represented as a liberating process, but a laborious one. It may involve denying the
existence of the past (74 years of Soviet power disappearing into a black hole of
memory) and of ones own past identity as a loyal, or more or less loyal, Soviet
citizen.
In looking back on their pasts in the post-Soviet era, Russians sometimes invoke the idea of imposture of having been forced by the straitjacket of Soviet
culture to assume a persona that they now perceive as inauthentic. I feel as if I
have lived someone elses life, one elderly Russian women told interviewers in
the 1990s. 40 Biographies and antecedents have had to be reinvented to meet the
demands of the new age. For example, in his autobiographies of the postrevolutionary period, the Soviet poet Demian Bednyi (born Efim Pridvorov) was
at pains to stress his humble origins (brought up in poor peasant milieu, by an
abusive mother) though discreditable rumors circulated that he was the illegitimate son of a Grand Duke. In his grandsons version of the 1990s, the aristocratic lineage is now at center stage, replacing not only Bednyis claimed humble
origins but also the familys earlier claim to status in Soviet times, namely membership in the top Soviet elite.41
40 Anna Akimovna Dubova interview, in Barbara Alpern Engel and Anastasia Posadskaya-

Vanderbeck, A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History (Boulder, CO: Westview
Press, 1998), 46.
41 For short autobiographies by Demian Bednyi from 1921 and 1942, see Demian Bednyi,
Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 8 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1965), 25355; for an
unsourced report that he was the illegitimate son of a Grand Duke, see Roberta Reeder, Anna
Akhmatova: Poet and Prophet (New York: St. Martins Press, 1994), 187. Thanks to Robert
Horvath, Melbourne, for drawing this case to my attention and providing the information about
the current generation.

484

S HEILA F ITZPATRICK

But in the new era, no less than the old, impersonation and surely also
imposture has been widely practiced. Former Soviet citizens may now reinvent
themselves as menedzhery, brokery, and biznesmeny (f: biznes-ledi, biznesmenki,
biznesmenshi); practitioners of konsalting or pablik-rileishnz; rieltory and reketiry;
programmisty and khakery; seks-bomby and iappi; gei and biseksualy identities
whose novelty is conveyed by the exoticness of the newly-borrowed terms. The
path is open for self-transformation into a mer, if the elektorat so wills; a guru or
an ekstrasens; or, from the new science of ufologiia, a kontakter (f. kontaktrsha:
one who enters into contact with representatives of non-Earth civilizations, receives information from the Cosmos). 42 New identities require new forms of
behavior, dress, work habits, time habits, interpersonal relations habits, ways of
handling money, and so on, all of which have to be rapidly mastered and conspicuously displayed ipoteki for the purchase of kottedzhy, if there are not
enough baksy; akupunktura and pitstsa; repudiation of seksizm and mastery of the
internet; interest in shou-biznes and reitingi; bodies to be subjected to sheiping by
a trener, bioritmy to be observed; the new hobby of shopping to be acquired. Even
in the absence of shokovaia terapiia as government economic strategy, shok has
been a condition of life and shokovyi the indispensable adjective.
A whole series of newly-published handbooks provide post-Soviet man with
the tools for survival in the new world: dictionaries of marketing, banking, the
stock exchange, entrepreneurship, international tourism (as important for the
post-Soviet lifestyle as shopping), intellectual property, political parties and associations, civil society, and political science; guides to kto est kto (the very phrase a
slap in the face of the Soviet kulturnyi chelovek) in government, business, and
the scientific elite; and even biznes-sleng dlia novykh russkikh. 43
42 Words and definitions from Tolkovyi slovar russkogo iazyka kontsa XX v.: Iazykovye izmeneniia
(St. Petersburg: Folio-Press, 1998) and L. P. Krysin, Tolkovyi slovar inoiazychnykh slov (Moscow:

Russkii iazyk, 1998).

43 See, for example, O. V. Amarzhuev, ed., Slovar delovogo cheloveka (Moscow: Ekonomika,
1992); Delovoi mir Karelii: Spravochnik biznesmena (Petrozavodsk: TOO SK, 1992); Marketing:
Tolkovyi terminologicheskii slovar-spravochnik (Moscow: Infokont, 1991); Moskovskii bankir:
Spravochnik (Moscow: Biznes i banki, 1994); Tolkovyi birzhevoi slovar (Moscow: Ekspeditor
RUSSO, 1996); Tolkovyi slovar predprinimatelia (Moscow: Finansy i statistika, 1993); D. K,
Ismaev, ed., Kratkii slovar tekhnologicheskikh terminov mezhdunarodnogo turizma (Moscow:
Vysshaia shkola po turizmu i gostinomu khoziaistvu, 1994); V. N. Berezovskii et al., Rossiia: Partii,
assotsiatsii, soiuzy, kluby. Spravochnik (Moscow: Izdatelstvo RAU-Press, 1991); Intellektualnaia
sobstvennost : Slovar-spravochnik (Moscow: INFRA-M, 1995); L. M. Romanenko, Grazhdanskoe
obshchestvo: Sotsiologicheskii slovar-spravochnik (Moscow: Sotsioinzhenernaia assotsiatsiia Delovoe
sodeistvie, 1995); Viacheslav Filippovich Khalipov, ed., Politologicheskii slovar (Moscow: Vysshaia
shkola, 1995); Kto est kto v Rossii (Moscow: Eksmo-Press, 1998); Liubov Nikolaevna Alisova, Kto
est kto v politicheskoi nauke Rossii: Spravochnik (Moscow: Mysl, 1996); Nauchnaia elita: Kto est kto
v Rossiiskoi akademii nauk (Moscow: Mysl , 1993); V. T. Ponomarev, Biznes-sleng dlia novykh

MAKING A SELF FOR THE TIMES

485

There are older roles and mental worlds to be recovered as well. For those interested in reinventing themselves as Russians of noble birth, information on
genealogy and history is essential.44 Those (re-)embracing Orthodoxy need help,
too, since few urban Soviet citizens knew much about Christianity, Orthodox
ritual, church hierarchy and organization, or Old Church Slavonic.45 Even the
world of popular spirituality has generated handbooks,46 not to mention the peculiar science of the recovered Russian soul and spiritual mission that goes under
the name of kulturologiia.47 At least one Soviet military psychiatrist has been
reborn as a Freudian psychoanalyst with a New Russian clientele and Yeltsins
patronage.48
With the old Soviet life retreating into the past, the term khomo sovetikus has
entered popular speech, used ironically. 49 Homo Sovieticus is, almost by definition, somebody other than the speaker, for few will now admit having been sincere in their sometime impersonations of New Soviet Man. In the 1990s, it
russkikh: Slovar-spravochnik (Donetsk: Stalker, 1996). Thanks to June Farris, Slavic bibliographer
at the University of Chicago, for the very useful Select Lists of New Reference Titles: East Central
and Southeastern Europe and Countries of the Former Soviet Union that she has been circulating
to Slavicists at the University since 1991, on which I have drawn extensively in this section.
44 See, for example, Rodnaia starina: Slova, terminy, obrazy (Moscow: Ostozhe, 1995); K. A.
Averianov, ed., Dvorianstvo rossiiskoi imperii: Spravochnik (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN,
1995); E. A. Kniazev, Dvorianskii kalendar: Spravochnaia rodoslovnaia kniga rossiiskogo dvorianstva
(St. Petersburg: VIRD, 1996).
45 Recent guides include Lev Nikolaevich Mitrokhin, ed., Khristianstvo: Slovar (Moscow:
Izdatelstvo Respublika, 1994), Dmitrii Pokrovskii, Slovar tserkovnykh terminov (Moscow:
RIPOL, 1995); Sergei Igorevich Ivanenko et al., eds., Religioznye obedineniia Rossiiskoi Federatsii:
Spravochnik (Moscow: Izdatelstvo Respublika, 1996); Utrachennye sviatyni Iaroslavlia:
Spravochnik-putevoditel (Iaroslavl: Niuans, 1999); Pravoslavie: Bibliograficheskii ukazatel knig na
russkom i tserkovnoslavianskom iazykakh za 19181993 gg. (Moscow: Izdatelstvo Pravoslavnogo
Sviato-Tikhonovskogo Bogoslovskogo Instituta, 1999); and T. S. Oleinikova, Slovar tserkovnoslavianskikh slov (Moscow: Izdatelstvo ATVA, 1997).
46 Elena Grushko and Iurii Medvedev, Slovar russkikh sueverii, zaklinanii, primet i poverii (Nizhnii
Novgorod: Russkii kupets and Bratia slaviane, 1995); T. A. Novichkova, ed., Russkii
demonologicheskii slovar (St. Petersburg: Peterburgskii pisatel, 1995).
47 Kulturologiia: Kratkii slovar, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg: Petropolis, 1995).
48 On the Director of the new East European Institute for Psychoanalysis in St. Petersburg Dr.
or Professor or, perhaps, Colonel Mikhail Reshetnikov (his title seemed to be contextdependent) see David Bennett, Guilt as Capital: Psychoanalysis, Russia and the Mafia,
forthcoming in Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society. According to Bennett, Yeltsin
issued a Presidential decree no. 1044 (July 1996) entitled On the Revival and Development of
Philosophical, Clinical, and Applied Psychoanalysis.
49 From Tolkovyi slovar russkogo iazyka kontsa XX v. Note that in Aleksandr Zinovevs original use
of the term, it was rendered gomo sovetikus (see A. Zinoviev, Gomo sovetikus [Lausanne: Age
dhomme, 1982]).

486

S HEILA F ITZPATRICK

became important to purge ones speech of Sovietisms, just as it was to master

them in the 1920s, and there is now a handy dictionary the Tolkovyi slovar
Sovdepii to help identify give-away terms and usages.50 At the same time, there
is surely nostalgia in this dictionary of Soviet language, comparable to that fuelling the popularity of the long-running television show Staraia kvartira, a celebration of artifacts of Soviet material and popular culture, in the mid-1990s.
Appropriately, the authors of the dictionary have drawn their information on
Soviet usage not only from Soviet newspapers but also from Soviet satirists
working in the tradition of Ilf and Petrov.51 Ostap Bender and his descendants
appear again in their historic role as a teacher of Bolshevik.
There can be little doubt that Russians in the post-Soviet world have serious
tasks of impersonation learning new roles, embodying new ideas before
them. To state only the most obvious of these, they all have to learn to be
Russians (or Buriats, Mari, and so on) in a new national context.52 Whether the
widespread necessity of impersonation in the post-Soviet context will generate
widespread suspicion of imposture and doubts about the genuineness of the self,
as in the earlier Soviet case, remains to be seen. But Ilf and Petrovs satirical classics have had several post-Soviet re-publications, including a remarkable
massively-annotated edition by Iu. K. Shcheglov that is a treasure trove for
Soviet-nostalgia buffs (as well as social historians).53
A striking indicator of current identity malaise in Russia is Viktor Pelevins
black comedy Generation P, the runaway bestseller of 1999.54 Pelevins hero
(whose very name is subject to post-Soviet renegotiation) reinvents himself as an
advertising kopiraiter and krieitor in a post-Soviet world where identity is a false
50 Valerii Mikhailovich Mokienko and T. G. Nikitina, Tolkovyi slovar iazyka Sovdepii (St.
Petersburg: Folio-Press, 1998), and see also N. A. Kupina, Totalitarnyi iazyk: Slovar i rechevye
reaktsii (Ekaterinburg and Perm, 1995), and Tolkovyi slovar russkogo iazyka kontsa XX v. It is
interesting to compare these projects, the work of professional sociolinguists, with the analyses of
post-revolutionary changes in the Russian language that appeared in the 1920s, e.g. Selishchev,
Iazyk revolutsionnoi epokhi. This time round, the linguists attention focuses not only on the new
language (Tolkovyi slovar russkogo iazyka kontsa XX v.) but also on the old one (Mokienko and
Nikitina; Kupina).
51 Mokienko and Nikitina, Tolkovyi slovar iazyka Sovdepii, 9 (Vmesto predisloviia), 68392
(Spisok istochnikov).
52 Thanks to Alan Barenberg for pointing this out.
53 Il f and Petrov, Dvenadtsat stul ev: Roman, with commentary by Iu. K. Shcheglov (Moscow:
Panorama, 1995) and idem., Zolotoi telenok: Roman, with commentary by Iu. K. Shcheglov
(Moscow: Panorama, 1995).
54 Viktor Pelevin, Generation P (Moscow: Vagrius, 2000). On its impact on the younger
generation after its sensational publication in the summer of 1999, see James Cowley, Gogol A
Go-Go, New York Times Magazine, 23 January 2000, 2023.

MAKING A SELF FOR THE TIMES

487

I, and that says it all. 55 New Post-Soviet Man, Pelevin suggests, can identify
himself only as the sum of the products he consumes, each of which carries its
own marketing associations with particular character traits and types, the sum of
which is capable of producing the impression of a real personality (lichnost).56
Imidzh is all: even an apparent anti-Semite turns out to be without any special
hostility to Jews, just doing his best to impersonate a patriot.57 If Pelevin really
does speak for a generation, post-Soviet reinvention of self could be an even
more traumatic affair than its Soviet precursor.

Dept. of History
University of Chicago
1126 E. 59th St.
Chicago, IL 60637 USA
sf13@midway.uchicago.edu

55 Pelevin, Generation, 114. Identity eto falshivoe ego, i etim vse skazano.
56 Ibid., 113.
57 Ibid., 122.