Night Dances With the Angel of History: Critical Cultural Studies of Postsocialism,” in Cultural Studies. Aleksandr Etkind, ed. St. Petersburg: European University Press, 2006. The issue is that Yurchak then begins fetishising these cultural acts, creating a strange aura of mysticism around the cultural practices of the late soviet era that seem to suggest that the Soviet Union led to an entirely unique and completely unrecognisable human experience with power. There’s a version of this argument I could see working, but this isn’t it. So, what does the author write about? The author's main message is that the basis of ideology was laid by Stalin, and only he made amendments and interpretations. In the Soviet Union, only Stalin could make significant changes to the ideological component of the Soviet Union, not the parliament, deputies, or the bureaucracy. Due to the repressions of 1937, no one could even think of suggesting any changes to the ideological component. In essence, it became an unwritten law, a taboo. As a consequence, the ideology in the USSR began to gradually harden, i.e., ideology became not flexible, as any society requires, based on changing circumstances (for example, politics should become greener or more social, as was the case in the West), but frozen. But even after Stalin's death, no one dared to make any significant changes to the ideological component of the Soviet Union. All citizens of the USSR did and wrote what had been written by Lenin and Stalin, regardless of changed circumstances. As we know from the example of any organization, no one likes to make organizational changes, and initiative is often punished. Therefore, organizations often work as they have done since the founder's time. Reforms are always dangerous because they threaten to bring down the whole structure. Perhaps this is why no one wanted to change the Soviet ideological component or tried to change any of its many floors (as the author writes, a teacher criticized a child's drawing because the child had drawn Lenin, departing from the canons of his (Lenin's) image). As numerous copies of Lenin's statue, it was repeated from generation to generation, remaining unchanged. What did the author think this was leading to? Yurchak starts from a brilliant premise: Stalin played a fundamental role in transforming the way that the Soviet state conveyed authority and truth, and his death created a strange discursive paradox, a vacuum where the overall socialist ideal was contradicted by the strange and mundane things going on in day-to-day soviet experiences. This led to a series of developing practices in the post-Stalin era where people negotiated simultaneously ridiculing, critiquing and supporting the state in seemingly contradictory acts, using irony and disinterest as ways of expressing both distrust in the state and support of the ideal at once. Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category—things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book—it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union—it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." —Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes

Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation написал и опубликовал в 2005. Русский вариант не совсем та книга, которую писал первоначально, "Это было навсегда, пока не кончилось. Последнее советское поколение" - авторский, в значительной мере отредактированный перевод, который вышел в 2015. This book is nearly unreadable tripe (although to be fair I gave up halfway through). It’s not the dense prose; that would be acceptable. But I knew I was in trouble when in the first, introductory, chapter there were endless praising references to clowns such as Deleuze, Foucault, and Judith Butler. Then Yurchak starts telling us how by using the tools offered by these clowns, we could see how people really thought in the late Soviet Union, which apparently was that socialism had many good aspects, not to be found elsewhere, such as “humane values, ethics, friendships, and creative possibilities.” Yeah, no.The book is interesting and debatable, however, it was incredibly difficult to read. The author, for some reason that I don't understand, has chosen a very complicated way of conveying his ideas to the readers. Alexei Yurchak brilliantly debunks several widely held misconceptions about the lived experience of late socialism in Soviet Russia, and does so through a compelling dossier of materials, all creatively conceived, organized, and analyzed. The writing is fluid, accessible, interesting, and beautifully structured and styled."—Nancy Ries, Colgate University, author of Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika

On Chapter 4, the author further illustrated this kind of deterritorialization by picturing the style of living “Vnye”, which is a kind of “normal life” in everyday socialism a life that had become invested with creative forms of living that the system enabled but did not fully determine. People are invested in the literary club, the archaeological club, the theoretical physicist circle. The boiler rooms would be a great example. The jobs of boiler room technicians are extremely popular and became difficult to find a vacancy in such a job, because such occupations allowed the person to pursue various interests and amateur careers. Although the salaries for boiler room jobs were lower than for most other occupations, one could easily survive because meeting one’s basic needs in the Soviet Union was inexpensive. In this remarkable book, Alexei Yurchak asks: How can we account for the paradox that Soviet people both experienced their system as immutable and yet were unsurprised by its end? In answering this question, he develops a brilliant, entirely novel theory of the nature of Soviet socialism and the reasons for its collapse. The book is must reading for anyone interested in this most momentous change of contemporary history, as well as in the place of language in social transformation. A tour de force!"—Katherine M. Verdery, author of What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Kent", и это было очень круто в моём личном понимании. А как я доставала родителей, чтобы мне покупали "брендовую" одежду, чтобы отличаться от сверстников, одевавшихся в одинаковую одежду, завезённую партией на рынки города из Китая и Турции. Когда-то это было чем-то обыденным, а теперь про это пишут книги, серьёзно рассматривая наши нелепости как историческое явление, требующее не менее тщательного изучения, чем великие географические открытия или крестовые походы.

Project MUSE Mission

Yurchak rewrote the book in Russian, expanding and revising it considerably. It was published in 2014 by Moscow's New Literary Observer and won the 2015 Enlightener Prize in the Humanities category. [7] Books [ edit ] Harris, Brandon (3 November 2016). "Adam Curtis's Essential Counterhistories". The New Yorker . Retrieved 3 November 2016. As the author writes, it was quite common for a Soviet citizen's room to have a bust of Lenin and a picture (or poster) of The Beatles on the same shelf. A Soviet person could be crazy about Western music, wear American jeans, and still sincerely believe in the truth of communism. In other words, people accepted (sort of) part of the communist ideology, could defend it, and maybe even argue that the Western world was wrong about something but did everything they could to get Western goods. Isn't this what we are witnessing in today's Russia, when people simultaneously talk about patriotism, the greatness of Russia, and the invisible war against Russia waged by the West, but at the same time do everything possible to continue enjoying goods created in the West? People continue to drive European and American cars, buy Western equipment and Western medicines, and even prefer to have holidays not in the vicinity of the Chinese mountains but in the same West. They also buy property there. At the same time, they continue to see the West not as an ally but as an enemy. Such schizophrenia seems surprising, but as the author of this book shows, such schizophrenia in society did not appear today - it appeared in the times of the USSR. This is despite the fact that people were well aware of the senselessness of incessant demonstrations (on May 1, for example), party meetings, organizations like the Komsomol and the Pioneers, uniform articles in Pravda, and so on. It turns out that the idea is good, but it is implemented by pests and bureaucrats interested only in their own good.

Privatize Your Name: Symbolic Work in a Post-Soviet Linguistic Market” - Journal of Sociolinguistics, 3 (4), 2000. Male Economy. Business and Gender in post-Soviet Russia,” in On (Fe)Maleness. Oushakine, Sergei, ed. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2001.

Books

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation. a b "Alexei Yurchak | Anthropology". anthropology.berkeley.edu. University of California, Berkeley . Retrieved 9 July 2023. This ambitious book admirably combines a new theoretical approach with detailed ethnographic materials. Written in a clear and engaging style, it is both thorough and precise, and provides a new and convincing insight that will definitely be central to all serious discussions of Soviet-type systems for years to come—namely, that the shift in Soviet life from a semantic to a pragmatic model of ideological discourse served to undermine the ideological system."—Caroline Humphrey, University of Cambridge, author of The Unmaking of Soviet Life Yurchak claims that he’s trying to solve a supposed paradox, that everyone in the Soviet Union thought it was permanent, until suddenly it wasn’t. That’s not a paradox; that’s the path of every empire ever. Moreover, many, probably most, who lived under Communism knew perfectly well that, because it denied reality, it wouldn’t last forever. They just didn’t when it would end, and they had to live in the meantime. Which, for most, meant living a lie all the time—again, on which one should read Havel or Solzhenitsyn.