The Modernist Masquerade: Stylizing Life, Literature, and Costumes in Russia

Conclusion: The Early Soviet Masquerade

205 Con­ clu­ sion The Early So­ viet Mas­ que­ rade The ev­ o­ lu­ tion of mas­ que­ rade prac­ tices and im­ agery over the years that­ bridge the nine­ teenth and twen­ ti­ eth cen­ tu­ ries il­ lu­ mi­ nates the chang­ ing aes­ thetic pri­ or­ ities and the po­ lit­ i­ cal ten­ sions that de­ fined late Im­ pe­ rial Rus­ sia. In par­ tic­ u­ lar, the mas­ que­ rade motif in Rus­ sian mod­ ern­ ism­ points out how the de­ sta­ bil­ iza­ tion of es­ sen­ tial­ ist par­ a­ digms of so­ cial iden­ tity and the con­ se­ quent priv­ i­ leg­ ing of sub­ jec­ tiv­ ity ram­ ified in the lit­ er­ ary, vis­ ual, and per­ form­ ing arts, as well as in the emer­ gent field of fash­ ion de­ sign. It also fore­ grounds per­ for­ ma­ tive strat­ e­ gies for wield­ ing po­ lit­ i­ cal ­ agency that the mon­ ar­ chy and its chal­ leng­ ers used, such as wear­ ing na­ tional cos­ tume and ma­ nip­ u­ lat­ ing na­ tional iden­ tity. In the years after the Bolshe­ vik Rev­ o­ lu­ tion of 1917, the ­ leisure-time prac­ tice of at­ tend­ ing ­ masked and cos­ tume balls de­ clined. How­ ever, mod­ ern­ ist mas­ que­ rades had left a leg­ acy: les­ sons about the con­ tin­ gent na­ ture of per­ sonal iden­ tity and the po­ lit­ i­ cal power of ­ self-fashioning under­ girded early ­ Soviet-era anx­ ie­ ties about ­ betrayal at the hands of state en­ e­ mies who were im­ per­ so­ nat­ ing loyal cit­ i­ zens. In the years after the Civil War, when the state was eager to find and pun­ ish those who had ­ fought­ against the Bolshe­ viks, the rhet­ o­ ric of “un­ mask­ ing” (raz­ o­ blach­ e­ nie) en­ e­ mies be­ came a per­ va­ sive meta­ phor for ex­ pos­ ing pur­ ported trai­ tors. 206 Conclusion The early So­ viets under­ stood the con­ tin­ gency of so­ cial iden­ tity, which fa­ cil­ i­ tated their ­ re-conceptualization of so­ ci­ ety and the­ individual’s re­ la­ tion­ ship to it. His­ to­ rian ­ Sheila Fitz­ pa­ trick has ex­ plained that after the Bolshe­ vik Rev­ o­ lu­ tion al­ most all Rus­ sians were ­ forced to en­ gage in some form of im­ per­ so­ na­ tion so that they could fit into the new order: “Post-revolutionary im­ per­ so­ na­ tion [ . . . ] in­ cluded the uni­ ver­ sal task of learn­ ing to be a So­ viet cit­ i­ zen (learn­ ing to ‘speak Bolshe­ vik,’ in ­ Kotkin’s terms); the spe­ cial ­ role-learning tasks of the up­ wardly mo­ bile (vyd­ vi­ zhentsy) and those who em­ braced new and spe­ cif­i­ cally So­ viet roles such as ak­ ti­ vist, obsh­ chest­ ven­ nitsa and stak­ ha­ no­ vets; and the task of es­ tab­ lish­ ing an ac­ cept­ able class iden­ tity, which bore most heav­ ily on those of ­ flawed (in Bolshe­ vik terms) so­ cial back­ ground.”1 Fitz­ pa­ trick also ob­ serves that in the multi­ eth­ nic So­ viet Union, na­ tional iden­ tity­ played a less sig­ nif­i­ cant role in eval­ u­ at­ ing an ­ individual’s loy­ alty to the state than did his fam­ ily back­ ground. In the 1920s and 1930s, she notes, the main axis of so­ cial iden­ tity was class, and it was there­ fore along this axis that most im­ per­ so­ na­ tions oc­ curred. In­ di­ vid­ u­ als fre­ quently re­ vised their auto­ biog­ ra­ phies to elide in­ crim­ i­ nat­ ing facts about their so­ cial or­ i­ gin, such as pro­ fes­ sional or fa­ mil­ ial con­ nec­ tions to the bour­ geoi­ sie, the ­ clergy, ku­ laks, and mem­ bers of the tsar­ ist re­ gime.2 Fitz­ pa­ trick ­ points out that al­ though the So­ viets under­ stood iden­ tity to be a so­ cial con­ struct, there was one iden­ tity that no cit­ i­ zen could erase once it had been­ bestowed: enemy of the state.3 Her study con­ cluded that the de­ sta­ bil­ iza­ tion of so­ cial roles in the wake of po...