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 and 1930s, but it turned out that the determination of a person's class was much more complicated than anyone expected. This in turn left considerable scope for individual creativity and manipulation. Outright imposters, both criminal and political, also make their appearance in this book. The final chapter describes how, after decades of struggle to construct good Soviet socialist personae, Russians had to struggle to make themselves fit for the new, post-Soviet world in the 1990s--by "de-Sovietizing" themselves. Engaging in style and replete with colorful detail and characters drawn from a wealth of sources, Tear Off the Masks! offers unique insight into the elusive forms of self-presentation, masking, and unmasking that made up Soviet citizenship and continue to resonate in the post-Soviet world.

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 and 1930s, but it turned out that the determination of a person's class was much more complicated than anyone expected. This in turn left considerable scope for individual creativity and manipulation. Outright imposters, both criminal and political, also make their appearance in this book. The final chapter describes how, after decades of struggle to construct good Soviet socialist personae, Russians had to struggle to make themselves fit for the new, post-Soviet world in the 1990s--by "de-Sovietizing" themselves. Engaging in style and replete with colorful detail and characters drawn from a wealth of sources, Tear Off the Masks! offers unique insight into the elusive forms of self-presentation, masking, and unmasking that made up Soviet citizenship and continue to resonate in the post-Soviet world.

Truly nutty ideas never die. They just lie in wait to come back when you least expect it. Exactly twenty years ago, those two wacky books of nasal disguises, Nose Masks I and Nose Masks II, appeared and America seemed to inhale them. There were nose mask parties, celebrities wearing nose masks, nose masks in parades. Today, like the Beetle, the yo-yo, and aviator shades, they're back. Return of the Nose Masks is wackiness for a whole new generation of grown-ups, children, and grown-ups with an inner child. Created by the original nose mask auteur, Rick Meyerowitz, here are 150 original costumes for the nose. Printed in four-color and perforated, there is the Fat Cat, Cooool Cat, and Cocktail Cat. Lawrence and Lenore of Arabia. The Velvet Frog. Nefertootsie and the Tut Mask. The three freedoms--Freedom to Sing, Freedom to Dance, Freedom to Shop. Holiday nose masks, underwater nose masks, career noses masks, modern art nose masks. There are little square nose masks and big vertical nose masks. Mustache nose masks, nose ring nose masks, and the Big Tongue page. Even the Buddha, for that mood of spiritual longing. The nose masks come with instructions for any-size nose on any-age face. The fit is snug, and the look is just right. Ships in time for Halloween.

A wearable board book with die-cut holes invites the reader to try out the six bearded masks.

Oral histories on life in the eastern German region annexed by Poland following World War II. Toward the end of the Second World War, Poland’s annexation of eastern German lands precipitated one of the largest demographic upheavals in European history. Edyta Materka travels to her native village in these “Recovered Territories,” where she listens carefully to rich oral histories told by original postwar Slavic settlers and remaining ethnic Germans who witnessed the metamorphosis of eastern Germany into western Poland. She discovers that peasants, workers, and elites adapted war-honed informal strategies they called “kombinacja” to preserve a modicum of local agency while surviving the vicissitudes of policy formulated elsewhere, from Stalinist collectivization to the shock doctrine of neoliberalism. Informality has taken many forms: as a way of life, a world view, an alternate historical text, a border memory, and a means of magical transformation during times of crisis. Materka ventures beyond conventional ethnography to trace the diverse historical, literary, and psychological dimensions of kombinacja. Grappling with the legacies of informality in her own transnational family, Materka searches for the “kombinator within” on the borderlands and shares her own memories of how the Polish diaspora found new uses for kombinacja in America. “Rare and exceptionally well-researched analysis of an invisible practice.” —Alena Ledeneva, University College London “Materka has produced an eloquently written, exciting, and meticulously analyzed ethnographic history that marks an alternative to the vast majority of strictly archival-based historical literature on the German-Polish borderlands. Within the field of Polish history, this book is also an important contribution as the first extensive work on the critical role of informality in the politics, society, and economy of People’s Poland.” —H-Poland “By concentrating on the local strategies of combination in the areas of uprootedness, Materka has made an interesting and valuable contribution to our knowledge of human behavior. References and the use of Polish words for important concepts are exemplary. . . . [H]er collection of narratives provides food for thought on the relation between formal regulation and human ingenuity.” —Baltic Worlds

Homesick and longing for the company of handsome Jonathan Walkingstick, former Atlanta D.A. Mary Crow returns to North Carolina to open her own practice and finds herself taking on the case of Ridge Standingdeer, a young Cherokee farmhand accused of killing the local prom queen. Reprint.