Studies admission records to Soviet Communist party cells in the 1920s for what they reveal about the politics of self-representation in Bolshevik political culture
In Red Autobiographies, Igal Halfin reads admission records of the Soviet Communist Party cells in the 1920s for what they reveal about the politics of self-representation in Bolshevik political culture. He identifies ways of speaking about oneself as a central arena of the Soviet revolution's drive for discovering, changing, and perfecting the self. The study is based on sources-many of which are no longer as freely accessible as they were during the heyday of the Soviet "archival bonanza" - in provincial party archives in Leningrad, Smolensk, and Tomsk. Its principal merit is Halfin's masterful handling and interpretation of those sources. The study also serves as a popular "short course" on Halfin's seminal contributions to the historiographies of Russia, communism, and modern subjectivity.
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". . . Halfin's first-rate readings of this material makes for very compelling reading."
" - Canadian Slavonic Papers
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"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."
" - The Russian Review
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". . . [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."
" - The NEP Era: Soviet Russia 1921-1928
