Tear Off the Masks!: Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia Paperback - 2005

"What makes Tear off the Masks! so appealing and why the pieces work so well together is that they cover a broad range of experiences associated with what it meant to be a Soviet citizen. Certainly, it will be a boon to the field to have the book available for courses. Tear off the Masks! is so appealingly written, full of wit and occasional humor, that it could serve as a model of the historian's craft. What we get is a phenomenal, nearly unparalleled depth of research combined with a transparency about research methods that invites the reader into this particular(ly skilled) historian's laboratory."--Lewis Siegelbaum, Michigan State University, author of Stalinism as a Way of Life

"Tear off the Masks! will be indispensable to students of Soviet history and valuable to scholars as well. Not only does it make available to the reader pioneering writings on important subjects such as defining class in the Soviet era and the institutional operations of Soviet patronage, alongside new work, but it is held together by focus on one important theme: 'the pragmatics of Soviet identity, ' as it might be called. Fitzpatrick gives a vivid, sympathetic, and often entertaining picture of Soviet citizens surviving (barely) the class war (or, conversely, clawing their way up the ladder when circumstances allowed), and engaged in battles for existence of a different kind in the 1930s and 1940s."--Catriona Kelly, University of Oxford, author of Refining Russia