The motif of secret or mistaken identities is crucial to the novel’s exploration of truth in a totalitarian regime; survival often depends on concealment in a world where personal history is a liability and official narratives are paramount. Leo’s entire psychological journey hinges on recovering his suppressed identity as Pavel, a past so traumatic he explains that he had to forget it in order to survive: “I spent my whole life trying to forget the past. I grew up afraid to confront my new parents. I was afraid to remind them of the past because I was afraid to remind them of the time when they wanted to kill me” (420). As a child, Leo can’t grasp why his life was spared, nor can he cope with the memories of what he himself did to survive, so constructing a fabricated identity becomes a form of self-protection that is as much psychological as anything else.

That characters deceive others as well as themselves illuminates the theme of The Perversion of Love and Trust in a Police State. Raisa lies about her name when she meets Leo—“I gave you a false name because I was worried you’d track me down. What you took for seduction, I took for surveillance” (197)—reveals that their marriage was built on a falsehood. Raisa’s lie is defensive, but others are predatory: Ivan’s identity as a trusted intellectual friend is a facade for his role as a state operative. Still others are a combination of both. Andrei, for instance, maintains a veneer of respectability that allows him to kill without risking reprisal. Identity is fluid and multilayered, the novel suggests, because the truth itself is ever shifting in an authoritarian state.