Autobiographies—like the confessions from the Great Purges scrutinized in Halfin’s previous study—provide the historian with yet another angle to explore “a unique, richly elaborated system of meanings” that was the Bolshevik self. This dictates the overall structure of the book. The three main chapters outline (somewhat) different paths from darkness to light—“the Bolshevik conversion”—that were available to and were eventually mustered by the representatives of three respective groups (workers, peasants, and the intelligentsia). In each case, admission to the party was a lesson of learning “a set of stratagems for describing and classifying people.”