What is the cultural and socialable purpose of Russian masks?

Please return answer by today. Very important (school project work)! Thanks people.What is the cultural and socialable purpose of Russian masks?
The following is a qoute from Tear Off the Masks!:


Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia


by Sheila Fitzpatrick (dont plagiarize it or you may fail the project)








';Successful revolutions tear off masks: that is, they invalidate the conventions of self-presentation and social interaction that obtained in pre-revolutionary society. This happened in Russia after the October 1917 revolution which laid the foundations for the Soviet state. It happened again in 1991, when that state collapsed. In such upheavals, people have to reinvent themselves, to create or find within themselves personae that fit the new postrevolutionary society. The process of reinvention is at once a process of reconfiguration (a new arrangement of data about oneself) and one of discovery (a new interpretation of their significance). It always involves strategic decisions (how should I present myself in this new world?) and may also prompt ontological reflection (who am I really?). Those who are engaged in self-reinvention generally prefer not to discuss what they are doing, claiming instead that in their hearts they were always the new Soviet (post-Soviet) persons that they are now trying to become.





Yet in revolution, even as the millions of people that comprise the society are necessarily engaged in self-reinvention, the revolutionary militants tend to be obsessed with authenticity and transparency. They hunt for ';double-dealers'; who are trying to hide their true identity, for ';careerists'; and ';accomodators'; who have assumed a revolutionary persona for purposes of gain, in order to ';unmask'; them. In the first two decades after 1917, ';vigilance'; in identifying and exposing such enemies of the revolutionary was one of the cardinal virtues of a Communist. Purges (chistki) periodically conducted in the Communist Party and government and educational institutions served the same purpose of rooting out hidden enemies in the 1920s and '30s. Half a century later, post-Soviet Russia eschewed the path of purging and loyalty checks. Yet, as political scientist Michael Urban observed, the first phase of the transition in post-Soviet Russia--when almost everyone in politics had formerly been a Communist-was riven by constant accusations that some politician or other was still ';really'; a Communist, or unreconstructed Soviet man at heart. Urban interpreted this as a way for the accusers to give credibility to their own new personae as post-Soviet democrats,1 which, mutatis mutandis, may have some validity for the earlier revolutionary period as well. ';