Volume 54, Number 7 · April 26, 2007
Why They Believed in Stalin
By Aileen Kelly
Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia
by Sheila Fitzpatrick
Princeton University Press, 332 pp., $24.95 (paper)
Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin
by Jochen Hellbeck
Harvard University Press, 436 pp., $29.95
In a work published after he was expelled from the Soviet Union, the dissident writer Alexander Zinoviev depicted a new type of human being: Homo sovieticus, a 'fairly disgusting creature' who was the end product of the Soviet regime's efforts to transform the population into embodiments of the values of communism.[1] In recent years the term has acquired a more neutral sense, as material emerging from the archives of the former Soviet Union—confessions, petitions and letters to the authorities, personal files, and diaries—has given scholars new insights into the ways Russians responded to the demand to refashion themselves into model Communists.
Review, 5327 words
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