Description
Book SynopsisStudies admission records to Soviet Communist party cells in the 1920s for what they reveal about the politics of self-representation in Bolshevik political culture
Trade Review". . . Halfin's first-rate readings of this material makes for very compelling reading."
-- Auri C. Berg * Canadian Slavonic Papers *
"Using as his main source autobiographies written by people who wanted to join the Bolshevik party during the initial postrevolutionary years, Halfin demonstrates how these Bosheviks-to-be learned to narrate their lives in the language of the new political regime."
-- Serguei Oushakine * The Russian Review *
". . . [Halfin] consistently provides analytically rich, theoretically challenging and inspiring works. To dismiss his penetrating and creative revisionism is to suffer from a more intellectually debilitating form of myopia."
-- Sean Guillory * The NEP Era: Soviet Russia 1921-1928 *
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1. Party Admissions in Paranoid Times
2. Workers Toward the Light
3. Peasant Enrollment
4. The Intelligentsia
Conclusion
Appendix: The Case of Fiodor Fiodorovich Raskol'nikov: Bolshevick Authobiographies Across the 1917 Divide
