Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More

The Last Soviet Generation

Alexei Yurchak

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780691121178
  9780691121161
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400849109
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: Social Sciences

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.


Focusing on the major transformation of the 1950s at the level of discourse, ideology, language, and ritual, Alexei Yurchak traces the emergence of multiple unanticipated meanings, communities, relations, ideals, and pursuits that this transformation subsequently enabled. His historical, anthropological, and linguistic analysis draws on rich ethnographic material from Late Socialism and the post-Soviet period.


The model of Soviet socialism that emerges provides an alternative to binary accounts that describe that system as a dichotomy of official culture and unofficial culture, the state and the people, public self and private self, truth and lie--and ignore the crucial fact that, for many Soviet citizens, the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialism were genuinely important, although they routinely transgressed and reinterpreted the norms and rules of the socialist state.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Late Socialism: An Eternal State
• Chapter 2 Hegemony of Form: Stalin’s Uncanny Paradigm Shift
• Chapter 3 Ideology Inside Out: Ethics and Poetics
• Chapter 4 Living “Vnye”: Deterritorialized Milieus
• Chapter 5 Imaginary West: The Elsewhere of Late Socialism
• Chapter 6 True Colors of Communism: King Crimson, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd
• Chapter 7 Dead Irony: Necroaesthetics, “Stiob,” and the Anekdot
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index