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 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? 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

My extensive experience of book reviewing says that there are resonant topics, there are those that most leave indifferent, but if this is a nonfiction about the late Soviet period, then there will be a response. Both supporters of the Union and its haters will scold the author of the review along with the author of the book. People don't read books, but anyone who lived in those days sees himself as an expert on them. Therefore, I will explain: I have read the work of Alexey Yurchak and am telling about it not in search of dubious popularity, but out of the need to understand today's day Alexei Vladimirovich Yurchak ( Russian: Алексей Владимирович Юрчак) is a Russian-born American anthropologist and professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. [1] His research concerns the history of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet transformations in Russia and the post-Soviet states.

I saw this title recommended on a piece I was reading about Hypernormalization and the US. This work also lent to the Adam Curtis documentary also called Hypernormalization, published 2016 (haven't watched it, seems far more out there than this scholarly work). 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?

Harris, Brandon (3 November 2016). "Adam Curtis's Essential Counterhistories". The New Yorker . Retrieved 3 November 2016. The strength of Yurchak's study is in its methodological-analytical grasp of the seemingly contradictory nature of everyday existence. . . . Yurchak provides an elegant methodological tool to explore the complex, intersecting and often paradoxical nature of social change. ---Luahona Ganguly, International Journal of Communication 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. Jace Lasek - Guitar on “Entropy: Acquiescence”, “Imaginary Pasts”, “Number Stations”, EBow Guitar on “Entropy: The Wild Sea”

Project MUSE Mission

Yurchak was born on 21 July 1960 [2] and raised in Leningrad (present-day Saint Petersburg), Soviet Union. [1] He was trained as a physicist and managed a local musical group, AVIA. [3] He then moved to the United States, where he received his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Duke University in 1997. [4] "Hypernormalization" [ edit ]

Suspending the Political: Late Soviet artistic experiments on the margins of the state,” Poetics Today, 4 (29), 2008. 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. 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 CausesYurchak 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 ] If you want to listen to babble about “metadiscourse,” in the service of pretending that Communism had a lot of good things to recommend it, go for it. Yes, the West hasn’t been any better for the Russians, nor for us. But that doesn’t mean Communism was other than it was.

This book was a bit hard to get into at first. The linguistic and philosophical foundation of the analysis was not familiar and it was hard getting through the first two chapters as a non-expert reader. The rest of the book, built on those initial foundations, however, was really good. The history of the collapse of the Soviet Union as detailed by the power of and use of words was really fascinating. Winner of the 2007 AAASS Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies Esmerine now shares Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More, its seventh full-length album and first in five years. The band surprise-dropped the full album digitally on 06 May 2022, with the CD and Deluxe 180gram LP editions hitting stores on official release date 26 August 2022. With thanks to Magda, Osha, Marty, Jane, Erin, Jericho, Ila, Reuben, Jace & Oggy, Don & Ian, Cyril, Gijs, James & Aylin, Le Château Monthelon, Lost River, Geoffrey Boulangé, Rodney Frost, Soren Venema, Teilhard, Sam, Jamie. Since 2003, six stately and filmic instrumental albums have inscribed compositional landscapes through epigrammatic miniatures, longform multi-movement chronicles, and all manner of evocative musical prosody between. Marked by an inimitably turbid yet tempered pastoralism, alternately lit by dappled dawn and disquieted dusk, Esmerine’s musical narratives balance asceticism and romanticism, melancholy and hope, stillness and wanderlust.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. Post-Post-Soviet Sincerity: Young pioneers, Cosmonauts and other Soviet heroes born today,” in What is Soviet Now?Thomas Lahusen and Peter Solomon, eds. LIT Verlag, 2008.