We would like to thank various people whose excellent suggestions and criticisms have gready enriched this essay. They include the anonymous reviewers as well as Kate Brown, Deborah Field, Lisa Kirschenbaum, Alf Liidtke, Rennie Schoepflin, Mark D. Steinberg, Barbara Walker, and Scott Wells. We would also like to thankJie-Hyun Lim, who invited us to present a version of this essay at the fifth conference on Mass Dictatorships organized by the Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture at Hanyang Univerity in Seoul, Korea, June 2007. The comments of die participants at the conference were extremely helpful in reformulating the paper.

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4. We thank Deborah Field for emphasizing the role of agency in understanding the formation of the self.

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7. Thus Paperno, in her nuanced analyses of Soviet memoirs and dreams, is careful to present the idiosyncratic voices of her subjects along with her conclusion that there was “a sense of self derived from the experience of fear, repression, and deprivation imposed by the state; a self worthy to be submitted as historical material.” Paperno, “Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience,” Kritika 3, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 609; Irina Paperno, “Dreams of Terror: Dreams of Stalinist Russia as a Historical Source,” Kritika 7, no. 4 (Fall 2006): 793-824. Paperno makes a conscious attempt to sustain the multilayered subjectivity of her subjects and the distinctiveness of their inner lives within her larger generalizations about Soviet subjecthood.

8. Kaganovsky, Lilya, “How the Soviet Man Was (Un)Made,” Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 577-96CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a historical reading that is particularly sensitive to literary concerns, see Anna Krylova, “In Their Own Words? Soviet Women Writers and the Search for Self,” in Barker, Adele Marie and Gheith, jehanne M, eds., A History of Women's Writing in Russia (Cambridge, Eng., 2002), 243-63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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11. The most famous example from this corpus of European literature is of course Adolphe, the Marquis de Custine's classic 1839 text, Empire of the Czar: A Journey through Eternal Russia (New York, 1989); Gross, Irena Grudzinska, “The Tangled Tradition: Custine, Herberstein, Karamzin, and the Critique of Russia,” Slavic Review 50, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 989-98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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20. Ibid., 325.

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30. Ibid., 152.

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37. Igal Halfin andjochen Hellbeck have accused Kotkin of insufficiently theorizing Soviet subjectivity, but we believe that Kotkin facilitated Foucault's acceptance in our field. See their review, “Rethinking the Stalinist Subject: Stephen Kotkin's ‘Magnetic Mountain' and the State of Soviet Historical Studies,” Jahrbiicher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 44, no. 3 (1996): 456-63.

38. Works consulted by Foucault include, Madness and Civilization (New York, 1965); Discipline and Punish (New York, 1977); The History of Sexuality (New York, 1978). See also Rabinow and Rose, eds., The Essential Foucault; Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1982); See Jerrold Seigel's penetrating analysis of Foucault's writings on self in his Idea of the Self, 603-50; James Miller's biography, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York, 1993) is an excellent introduction to the life and thought of the philosopher.

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43. Halfin and Hellbeck show how individuals who enthusiastically supported the Bolshevik project actually constituted themselves through their engagement with revolutionary ideology. Halfin emphasizes that the communist biographies were essential tools for the molding of the self and the purification of the soul. To be absolutely pure, however, communists also had to see into the souls of others and assess their purity. Evaluation of self and surveillance of others were thus thoroughly intertwined. Halfin, Terror in My Soul, 7.

44. See Svetlana Boym's interesting comments on Hellbeck's construction of Soviet subjectivity. “Kak sdelana ‘sovetskaia sub'ektivnost““? Ab Imperio 3 (2002): 285-97.

45. Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, 3.

46. Ibid., 93-94.

47. Ibid., 114. See also Krylova, Anna, “The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies,“ Kritika 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 119-46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yanni Kotsonis, “'No Place to Go': Taxation and State Transformation in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia, Journal of Modern History 76, no. 3 (2004): 531-77.

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52. Quoted in Boym, Common Places, 34.

53. Dunham, Vera S., In Stalin's Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge, Eng., 1976).Google Scholar

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55. Boym, Common Places, 150.

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58. Yurchak, Alexei, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006)Google Scholar raises these possibilities in the post-Stalin era.

59. Beth Holmgren has also argued about the importance of the gendered domestic sphere in the framing and shaping of Soviet political dissidence. See Holmgren, Women's Works in Stalin's Time: On Lidiia Chukhovskaia and Nadezhda Mandelstam (Bloomington, 1993).

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