a means of self-protection, of legitimating complaints, or of explaining away their problems is anyone's guess. This happened so quickly because the Bolshevik discourse of class was superimposed on an already existing sense of 'them' and 'us'. At the same time, it is clear that peasant perceptions of rural society continued to be at odds with those of the communists. Poor peasants, the cynosure of the party leadership, were often considered 'idlers' and 'spongers' by fellow villagers, whereas kulaks might be praised for their industriousness or castigated as 'commune eaters' and 'parasites on the mir'. Nevertheless, the deployment of class distinctions as the basis of official policy, such as in granting tax exemptions or in encouraging poor peasants to form separate organizations after 1926, did much to focus social identities around them. By extension, the millions of peasants who petitioned the authorities orwrote to the press wrote themselves into the new order in
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the very act of writing, their little text forming a fragment of the Big Text written by the state. In other words, notwithstanding the widespread resistance to the repression and social engineering of the party-state, Bolshevik ideology provided a basis on which millions in this highly fluid society could fashion an identity, however fragile.
So far as workers were concerned, class in some respects weakened as a social identity, which may help explain why the level of collective protest declined in the 1920s. In its propaganda the party-state constantly hammered away at the notion that the proletariat was the ruling class, and in spite of poor living and working conditions, workers did enjoy certain privileges relative to other social groups. The state had become the powerful exponent of the discourse of class, with power to determine its strategic uses through the mass media, organs of censorship, schools and the like. So the language that had been used by workers since 1905 to articulate grievances lost much of its oppositional force. Workers could still use it - especially to contrast rhetoric with reality - but through use of such categories as 'conscious' and 'backward' workers, through the idea of disaffection as an expression of 'petty-bourgeois' consciousness, the state did much to emasculate a language that in 1917 had served to knit togetherthe disparate elements of the workforce into a self-conscious political force.
The transformation of social identities took place along many other dimensions than that of class. The category of 'woman' acquired a new salience after 1917, but never to the point that it challenged the implicitly masculine construction of the revolutionary script. And for every 'new woman', there were a thousand whose lack of response to the drama of revolution appeared to reinforce a view of the female sex as 'backward'. Similarly, for those in their 20s and younger, 'youth' became a category through which a very empowering identity could be constructed, aligning them with the forces of culture and socialism, legitimizing their rebellion against 'backward' parents. Yet the high-minded construction of youth inherent in official ideology strained
22. Red Square caricatures
At a philosophical level, the revolution raised profound questions about how justice, equality, and freedom can be reconciled that are still relevant today, even if the answers the Bolsheviks gave to those questions were fat ally flawed. We live in a world where it has become hard to think critically about the principles on which society is organized. Everything conspires to make us acquiesce in the world as it is, to discourage the belief that it can be radically reordered on more just and equal lines. Yet that is precisely what the Bolsheviks undertook to achieve. I write at a time when there has been a rise in 'anti-capitalist' protests, motivated by revulsion at the staggering inequalities that characterize our world. As the 21st century dawns, it seems safe to conclude that there will be elements in the Russian Revolution that continue to inspire, even as there are many that will stand as a dreadful warning.
